The entry says that the Air Force dropped dummies for six years before it dropped a man, and that the dummies spun. This is the record of those drops, from the two reports the laboratory wrote on them, and of what became of the dummies afterwards.

Task 71719

The work began in March 1953 as Task 71719, “Altitude Escape Studies”, under Project 7218, “Biophysics of Escape”, at the Aero Medical Laboratory at Wright Field, and the task was known as High Dive. Eleven months later dummies began going out of C-97 transports at 30,000 feet over Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, twenty-eight of them in two months. In June 1954 the first went up under a balloon. The Air Force’s own count, made in 1997 from the test records, is forty-three balloon flights carrying sixty-seven dummies between June 1954 and February 1959, with thirty more dropped from aircraft over White Sands in 1953 and 150 over Wright-Patterson in 1959. The wind decided where they came down. Most landed outside the military ranges, in the Tularosa Valley and in the country round Roswell.

The dummies were the laboratory’s standard anthropomorphic men, most of them from Alderson Laboratories, dressed in the clothing and equipment of an Air Force pilot. Each carried a seat-style instrument kit with eleven accelerometers and a camera, and later a second camera on the shoulder; the balloon carried a rack that held two dummies, a camera box and a radio-commanded cutter, so that the men on the ground could choose the moment of release. The reports are by a lieutenant named Raymond A. Madson, who became project officer for the drops in the spring of 1956, and the method by which he turned film into numbers is worth recording. “Since the cameras were modified to run eight frames per second, it was only necessary to record the number of frames required for the dummy to make one revolution and divide by eight. Multiplying the results by 60 gave the rpm at any given point. Each individual revolution was recorded on a graph and the end result was a chart showing the complete rpm history on the drop.”

The unstabilised drops

The first report, in 1957, covered the dummies that fell with nothing to steady them. The charts show rotations of 92 revolutions a minute held for twelve seconds, 102 for nine, 135, 167; on one flight the first dummy peaked at 120 revolutions a minute and the second “had a peak of approximately 200 rpm”. The report concluded that “continued research was necessary to develop a means of stabilizing a man falling from altitudes above 20,000 feet.” In 1958 Otto Walchner of the laboratory worked the problem on paper and showed that a man falling prone from 83,000 feet could in theory reach 465 revolutions a minute. Madson wrote that the study “added technical knowledge and incentive”.

Three series and a fix

The stabilised drops began at the end of 1955, in parallel with the last of the unstabilised ones, and they did not go well. Of Series I, Madson wrote: “Little usable data was collected.” Drop 051, on 26 November 1955, went to 88,000 feet with two dummies and ran into weather; the first was recovered damaged, with data showing a spin of at least 81 revolutions a minute and a parachute that “had malfunctioned”, and the second was not found until 1958, “in a severely weather-beaten and damaged condition”. On drops 056 and 057, in May 1956, the stabilised dummy “became tangled in the risers during first stage deployment and free-fell to the ground.”

Series II, in 1957, used a six-foot stabilising chute pulled out by a static line from a standard pack. Of ten drops from up to 88,000 feet, “7 dummies were recovered and 3 free-fell to earth due to malfunctions”, and “the main difficulty encountered was the tendency of the dummies to snag or tangle in the stabilization chute risers before the first stage could fully inflate.” The rack cameras, Madson wrote, recorded “the sloppy characteristics inherent in using a static-line deployed stabilization chute”. A dummy that was released by the cutter and hung vertically, rather than thrown out diagonally into a tumble, did better: on drop 062, 11 June 1957, one fell stabilised at 26 revolutions a minute. But a parachute that only worked when the release was gentle was not a parachute for a pilot leaving a wrecked aircraft. “To be completely reliable, a parachute had to operate equally well under adverse and optimum deployment conditions.” In September and October 1957 two dummies hitch-hiked on test flights of the gondolas being built for the live jumps, from 96,000 and 57,000 feet; both stabilising chutes opened, and both release mechanisms failed, and the dummies “rode the stabilization chutes to the ground”.

Between Series II and Series III, “the entire project took on a new look.” The final parachute, the one the entry describes, looked like an ordinary pack and used two automatic timers, armed as the dummy left the balloon; the first fired the stabilising chute and three-quarters of the main canopy, whose folds served as the drogue’s lines, and the second, at 17,000 feet, let the rest of the main canopy out. Series III ran from January to February 1959 over the Holloman range, with the range’s own tracking instruments on every flight and a technician responsible for every part of the system. The cameras in the kits were kept from freezing with “plastic bottles containing water at ground-level temperature”, the same trick that nine months later froze Kittinger into his seat at 76,000 feet. Three combinations of drogue and main canopy were tried; the six-foot drogue with the 28-foot main did best. Eighteen drops were made. “The stabilization chute deployed cleanly and effectively on every test.” The opening shock never exceeded 3 g. The greatest rotation recorded was 30 revolutions a minute, which Madson set against the spins of figure skaters, “in excess of 120 rpm”. The first-stage disconnect failed twice in the eighteen. The conclusion: “live jumps could be made safely from high altitude with the parachute developed during this program.”

Picking them up

What the reports do not describe is the recovery, which Kittinger did in a sworn statement in 1995. The dummies came down wherever the wind put them, and the Balloon Branch and the project team went after them “in an assortment of Air Force vehicles”: “trucks, communications vans, converted field ambulances, cranes, and trailers”, with helicopters, C-47 transports and light observation aircraft overhead. “We often attracted a crowd due to the odd appearance of the balloon payloads and dummies and also the aircraft that circled overhead or landed on nearby roads.” When a balloon and its payload broke up over a wide area the crews collected the pieces by “fanning out” across a field, and they were careful about the plastic, “because cattle would ingest the material and the ranchers would file claims against the government.” There were reward notices offering twenty-five dollars for the return of equipment. The dummies themselves, he said, “were not as pronounced as a human. The ears and noses did not protrude… Some of the dummies were not complete; they sometimes did not have arms or legs. To someone not associated with the project or who viewed the dummies from a distance, they could appear to be human or with some imagination a space ‘alien.’”

One of the Wright-Patterson drops of 1959 came down near the house of the commander of the Air Research and Development Command, General Rawlings, whose wife was entertaining the officers’ wives that afternoon, when “one of our dummy’s parachute failed to deploy and impacted the ground in full view of the ladies”. Kittinger drove to the spot, threw the dummy into the back of a pickup and left. Later that day Stapp telephoned to tell him that some of the women had believed the dummy was a man “and they were appalled to see the careless nature in which the obviously dead or injured ‘parachutist’ was hauled away.”

Aliens

The dummies’ second life began in the 1990s, when the Air Force was asked to account for the stories of a crashed flying saucer and small bodies near Roswell in 1947. The report it published in 1997, The Roswell Report: Case Closed, went through the balloon operations at Holloman and concluded that the bodies the witnesses remembered, with their smooth faces and missing limbs, being loaded into trucks by men in uniform, were most probably the dummies of High Dive and Excelsior, recovered in the way Kittinger described, with the dates in the witnesses’ memories moved back by a decade. It printed the test records, a map of the launch and landing sites, the photographs, and the statements of Kittinger and Madson. Madson, by then a retired lieutenant colonel working as an environmental specialist for the State of New Mexico, confirmed that he had written the two reports and that both kinds of dummy appeared in them. The Air Force’s historians were careful to say what they could not prove. The dummies had been dropped, recovered and written up in two technical reports in the open literature; whether anyone had seen one and remembered a spaceman was not a question a technical report could settle.

Sources

• Raymond A. Madson, High Altitude Balloon Dummy Drops, Part I: The Unstabilized Dummy Drops, WADC Technical Report 57-477 (Wright Air Development Center, 1957), and High Altitude Balloon Dummy Drops, II: The Stabilized Dummy Drops, WADC Technical Report 57-477 (II) (Aerospace Medical Laboratory, Aeronautical Systems Division, August 1961). The dummies, the instrument kits and cameras, the method of reading rotation from film, the rotation peaks of the unstabilised drops, Walchner’s figure, the three series with their drop numbers and results, the final parachute, and the conclusions. From the Defense Technical Information Center copies (ADA323780 and AD0270880), mirrored on archive.org. Part I, Part II
• James McAndrew, The Roswell Report: Case Closed (Headquarters United States Air Force, 1997), section 1.2, “High Altitude Balloon Dummy Drops”, Appendix A (the launch and landing sites) and Appendix B, the signed statements of Joseph W. Kittinger Jr. (24 June 1995) and Raymond A. Madson. The counts of flights and dummies, the project numbers, the recoveries, General Rawlings’s garden, and the report’s conclusion. archive.org
• Joseph W. Kittinger, Jr., statement of witness, Altamonte Springs, Florida, 24 June 1995, in the Roswell Report source files, Records of Headquarters US Air Force (Record Group 341), National Archives Catalog 40989237. catalog.archives.gov
• Gregory P. Kennedy, “Joseph W. Kittinger and the Highest Step in the World”, StratoCat, 2010: the task and project numbers and names, the C-97 drops of 1954, and the 200-revolution dummy of 8 February 1956. stratocat.com.ar