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Project Mogul (sometimes referred to as Operation Mogul) was a top secret project by the US Army Air Forces involving microphones flown on high-altitude balloons, whose primary purpose was long-distance detection of generated by Soviet Union nuclear testing.
While successful, the balloon method was soon superseded by seismic detectors. In popular culture, the legacy of Project Mogul has been the Roswell incident, in which a crashed Mogul balloon was mistaken for an extraterrestrial spacecraft, giving rise to a persistent UFO legend.
Project Mogul was conceived by Maurice Ewing who had earlier researched the deep sound channel in the oceans and theorized that a similar sound channel existed in the upper atmosphere: a certain height where the air pressure and temperature result in minimal speed of sound, so that sound waves would propagate and stay in that channel due to refraction. The project involved arrays of balloons carrying disc microphones and radio transmitters to relay the signals to the ground. It was supervised by James Peoples, who was assisted by Albert P. Crary.
One of the requirements of the balloons was that they maintain a relatively aerostat over a prolonged period of time. Thus instrumentation had to be developed to maintain such constant altitudes, such as pressure sensors controlling the release of ballast.
The early Mogul balloons consisted of large clusters of rubber Weather balloon, however, these were quickly replaced by enormous balloons made of polyethylene plastic. These were more durable, leaked less helium, and also were better at maintaining a constant altitude than the early rubber balloons. Constant-altitude-control and polyethylene balloons were the two major innovations of Project Mogul.
Further development of nuclear detonation detection systems was extensive for decades afterward, culminating in worldwide systems by various countries to keep eyes and ears on detecting and verifying the others' nuclear weapon developments.
There would also be fixed-wing United States aerial reconnaissance of the Soviet Union during the 1950s. Overflights would end in 1960 once an aircraft had been shot down by SAMs. Reconnaissance would for decades afterward be handled mostly by reconnaissance satellites and to some extent by aircraft, such as the A-12 OXCART and SR-71 Blackbird (photography and radar) and RC-135U and similar aircraft (SIGINT including ELINT and COMINT).
Unlike a weather balloon, the Project Mogul paraphernalia were massive and contained unusual types of materials, according to research conducted by The New York Times: "...squadrons of big balloons ... It was like having an elephant in your backyard and hoping that no one would notice it. ... To the untrained eye, the reflectors looked extremely odd, a geometrical hash of lightweight sticks and sharp angles made of metal foil. .. photographs of it, taken in 1947 and published in newspapers, show bits and pieces of what are obviously collapsed balloons and radar reflectors."
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