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 sound waves generated by Soviet atomic bomb tests.
While successful, the balloon method was soon superseded by seismic detectors.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.