Cowflop Quarterly

History

Robert G. Todd launched the Cowflop Quarterly on Friday, 5 May 1995, distributing it free of charge. The subtitle declared its purpose: "Reporting on Ufological Frauds and Fantasies." Todd was a FOIA researcher who had spent years filing document requests with the Air Force, National Archives, and other agencies, and his newsletter existed to publish the findings that no other UFO periodical would print. The first issue opened with material that Jerome Clark's International UFO Reporter had declined to publish: Todd's full rebuttal to the CUFOS Roswell investigation.

The newsletter's primary target was the Roswell mythology as promoted by Kevin Randle, Donald Schmitt, and Stanton Friedman. Todd had independently researched the radar targets used in Project Mogul balloon flights and contacted Professor Charles B. Moore, who had headed the NYU balloon team in New Mexico in 1947. Todd's analysis of the Roswell photographs, his correspondence with Moore about neoprene degradation rates and reinforcing tape with pinkish-purplish symbols, and his documentation of inconsistencies in Randle and Schmitt's published claims formed the core of the first issue. The argument was technical and evidence-based: radar targets were not standard meteorological equipment, almost nobody at Roswell or Fort Worth would have recognised one, and the photographic evidence was consistent with genuine Mogul debris rather than a hastily arranged substitution.

A Special Edition appeared on 22 September 1995, documenting the public falling-out between Randle and Schmitt after Randle issued a letter distancing himself from Schmitt's "numerous lies." Todd used the split to demonstrate that the Roswell investigation had been built on fabricated credentials and unchecked claims from the start.

Todd's method was consistent across all issues: obtain primary documents through FOIA, compare them against published claims, identify discrepancies, and document the gap between what the evidence showed and what Roswell promoters told the public. He tracked down Air Weather Service records, traced the provenance of classification markings on alleged MJ-12 documents, and corresponded directly with military personnel who had handled the equipment in question. When he caught Friedman misrepresenting classification markings on authentic government documents to validate the spurious Cutler-Twining memo, Todd published his findings in the MUFON Journal before starting his own newsletter.