Talos: A Roswell connection?
Copyright 2018, InterAmerica, Inc.
The first chapter of the remarkable book I noted the other
day, God and Robots, by Adrienne
Mayor, tells the mythical tale of Talos, the bronze automaton created to
protest Crete, in antiquity.
Ms. Mayor’s astute compilation of the Talos mythos also
incorporated material about the U.S. missile system, using the Talos sobriquet,
and tested initially, by the Navy, out of White Sands, New Mexico, in 1947.
That intrigued me, so I Googled Talos and gathered some
information about the missile and its associated “comrades.”
Here’s some of that:
As test vehicles became larger and flew to greater distances
the flight program was moved from New Jersey to a more remote area at Camp
Davis North Carolina. As ranges increased further the program was moved to the
Naval Ordnance Test Station at Inyokern California (China Lake). Further tests
of long range intercepts were conducted at White Sands New Mexico.
Initial plans were for Talos to use beamriding for midcourse
guidance after it separated from the booster rocket. It was thought that the
missile could ride the target tracking radar beam to the target. However, as
range increased the diameter of the guidance beam became greater, allowing the
missile to wander farther from the beam center. This meant that the distance
from the target at intercept became greater with increasing range, and at distances
of more than 10 miles kill probability was unacceptably low.
Another 18-inch diameter burner test vehicle with warhead
and guidance equipment similar to the RTV was produced in 1947. It was a scaled
up Cobra that used kerosene fuel and cruised at Mach 2.4 at 30,000 feet
altitude. It demonstrated throttleability, ability to accelerate after boost
(from Mach 2.0 to 2.4), and had a cruise range of 10 miles.8 This was called
the PTV-4 or PTV-N-4 Burner Test Vehicle (BTV) and it was used for additional
tests of the ramjet engine.
The design for a larger Experimental Prototype Missile (XPM)
was started in late 1946.
This was the beginning of the "Bumblebee" program,
the development of the technology necessary to build a supersonic surface-to-air guided missile. The key
problems were the development of a ramjet engine, supersonic maneuvering, a
guidance system that directed the missile to the vicinity of the target, and a
warhead that would explode at the appropriate instant.
That test missiles were being tested in and around Roswell,
in 1947, by the Navy, allows speculation like this:
Did a test missile (not necessarily the Talos missile
itself…see graphic above) accidentally hit a “flying disc” reconnoitering
around the Roswell military facility in July 1947?
Did a test missile hit an Earth-made airplane or some other
military construct in the Roswell vicinity in July 1947?
Did the U.S. Navy, which I’ve often proposed as more
significant in the UFO story than the U.S. Army or Air Force, control the
information about a (speculated) missile hit of something over the Roswell area
in July 1947?
Did a Navy test missile accidentally “crash” on or near the
Mac Brazel farm, leaving a residue of strange, to Brazel, material?
Has anyone every really checked into the test firings of
Talos and other missiles in the Roswell time-frame?
RR
posted by RRRGroup at
Monday, December 03, 2018
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