Documents / Report
This is a July 28, 1995 report from the General Accounting Office to Representative Steven H. Schiff on its search for government records about the July 1947 crash near Roswell, New Mexico. The GAO found only two records from 1947: a July 1947 history of the 509th Bomb Group and Roswell Army Air Field, and a July 8 FBI teletype. Both describe the object as a radar-tracking or weather balloon. The report also says some Roswell Army Air Field administrative records and outgoing messages were destroyed without any recorded authority.
Central Intelligence Agency Agency Comments Scope and Methodology B-262046 happened near Roswell in July 1947 and that all available official materials indicated the most likely source of the wreckage recovered was one of the project MOGUL balloon trains. At the time of the Roswell crash, project MOGUL was a highly classified U.S. effort to determine the state of Soviet nuclear weapons research using balloons that earned radar reflectors and acoustic sensors. (A copy of DOD's response appears in app. VII.) In March 1995, the CIA's Executive Director responded to our letter of inquiry by stating that earlier searches by the CIA for records on unidentified flying objects produced no information pertaining to the Roswell crash. The Executive Director added, however, that it was unclear whether the CL.\. had ever conducted a search for records specifically relating to Roswell. In the absence of such assurance, the Executive Director instructed CIA personnel to conduct a comprehensive records search for information relating to Roswell. On May 30, 1995, the CIA's Executive Director inforrned us that a search against the term "Roswell, New Mexico," in all CL.\. databases produced no CIA documents related to the crash. (A copy of CL.\.'s response appears in app. VIII.) A draft of this report was provided to DOD for comment. DOD offered no comments or suggested changes to the report. The Chief Archivist, National Personnel Records Center offered several comments clarifying matters dealing with records management. These comments have been incorporated into the final report where appropriate. The Ct.\., the Department of Energy, the FBI, the National Security Council, and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy also received excerpts from the report discussing the activities of their respective agencies. They had no substantive comments and made no suggested changes to the report. To determine the requirements for reporting air accidents in 1947, we interviewed military sen.ice records management officials, reviewed military record-keeping regulations in effect during this time period, and examined Army Air Forces and Navy air accident reports. We also sought to identify any government records related to the Roswell crash. In this regard, we visited and reviewed records at the locations listed in table 1. Page 6 GAOn-;sIAD-95-lSi Go,.·ernxnent Records
Report, from the nsa collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 21 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.