Franklin E. Roach

Roach was involved in high explosives physics research connected with the Manhattan Project and later with NICAP and the Condon Committee as part of ufology.

Roach was born in Jamestown (now known as Jamestown Charter Township), Ottawa County, Michigan, fifteen miles southwest of Grand Rapids to his optometrist father Richard Franklin Roach[2] (1878-1939)[4] and his mother, a housewife, Ingeborg "Belle" Mathilde[5] Torgerson[2] (1878-1957).

This was followed by his final two years with graduation in 1923 from Benjamin Franklin High School in Los Angeles, California while residing in the Highland Park region of that city from 1921-1923.

Franklin Roach spent a year in Paris in 1951-2 on a Fulbright Fellowship investigating night-sky research.

On the general front, he would write the chapter "Aurora and Airglow" in the Scientific American book The Planet Earth for the popular audience.

While still associated with "Rutgers, The State University" in Newark, New Jersey and the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, Hawaii Roach served as the principal author, along with co-author Janet L. Gordon (then working for and associated with the Bernice P. Bishop Museum in Honolulu),[3] in a successful book which served as an important early volume in the series Geophysics and Astrophysics Monographs.

It gave scientific presentations with a fundamental overview of the atmospheric processes and interstellar physics involved, especially on Earth's nightside.

Topics discussed included the dark adaptation of the eye, star counts and the distribution of starlight over the sky, the polarization of the "Zodiacal Light", and the study of "The Gegenschein".

Becoming a world authority in auroral studies and airglow, Franklin travelled to Washington, D.C. in early 1961 to be honored as the recipient of the Gold Medal of the U.S. Department of Commerce for his "outstanding contribution to upper atmosphere physics by means of studies of optical emission from the night sky".

[10] The award was bestowed to him by Luther H. Hodges,[11] the 15th United States Secretary of Commerce who had just completed his second term as Governor of North Carolina.