Documents / FOIA release

roswell

Office of the Secretary of Defense · 993 pages · text from the file's own layer

The Roswell Report: Fact versus Fiction in the New Mexico Desert was published in 1995 by Headquarters United States Air Force. It was written in response to Representative Steven H. Schiff's request and a General Accounting Office audit, and it contains Col. Richard L. Weaver's report and 1st Lt. James McAndrew's synopsis, along with attachments, appendices and photographs. The report says researchers found no evidence of an extraterrestrial craft or crew. It concludes that the 1947 debris came from a Project MOGUL balloon train.

  • p. 17 …of alien beings and elusive vehicles which never quite seem to manifest themselves. Regardless of one…
  • p. 31 …Conversely, there has never been any previous documentary evidence produced by those who would debunk the…
  • p. 32 …This had never been officially done before, although most of the persons contacted reported that they…
  • p. 40 …Lt Col Cavitt also stated that he had never taken any oath or signed any agreement…
  • p. 77 …Because this conclusion is based on the absence of documentation, the issue can never be definitively…
  • p. 99 …H written, there is good evidence through accessioning and microfilming records that the Agency never received…
  • p. 101 …histories and supporting documents, and it has never routinely received the kind of records which might…
  • p. 159 …I have never been sworn to any form of secrecy by anyone concerning this matter and…
  • p. 165 …It never crossed my mind that it could be anything but a radio sonde. RW: How…
  • p. 168 …as far as I knew, I never heard anyone say, "Don't talk about this and…
  • p. 169 …I never met LaPaz personally, but I knew what he was. RW: Did Rickett go with…
  • p. 170 …I forget since I was there in the Washington area for awhile but I never did…
  • p. 172 …To the best of my recollection, I never met the rancher, Brazel. RW: O.K., because…
  • p. 173 …rve never seen a Geiger counter myseU: but I didn't know if you knew what…
  • p. 174 …ordered Marcel to accompany the rancher back to Corona, •· You said you never saw... and then…
  • p. 175 …I never had any idea that it was anything with the V-2. They told us…
  • p. 177 …You and I never saw this. You don't see any military people or military vehicles…
  • p. 178 …said in a facetious way: "Lets make out like it never existed, because we're wasting…
  • p. 179 …to him the crash and recovery had never happened. There was no investigation on the Foster…
  • p. 182 …No, I never saw this. SC: I don't know what that is from. RW: "But…
  • p. 183 …So, some of there records were TS and still are.) That is because they have never…
  • p. 185 …Cav never told me anything. He said nl never tell you anything then you won't…
  • p. 189 …I am quite sure that we never gave it a thought until that book.
  • p. 190 …Now, we have never found the ftight records to substantiate that, so I don't know…
  • p. 202 …related to this inquicy and I have never been threatened by US Government persons concerning not…
  • p. 207 …related to this inquiry and I have never been threatened by US Government persons concerning refraining…
  • p. 213 …We never considered a ..planneq cover story; we were concerned with security. I was the project…
  • p. 214 …I never obsCJVed any of the balloon "trains" but I did see some of the early…
  • p. 225 …and subsequent models were brand new, had never flown anything like that in this area. A…
  • p. 228 …I'd never heard the name Mogul -- the classification was that high. I knew what we…
  • p. 240 …I just wanted to see if there had been anything stated to you never to discuss…
  • p. 242 …but I never knew Marcel. in my mind, and there are Yeah, I knew that guy…
  • p. 243 …I've never seen a Japanese balloon that I know of, I've never seen the…
  • p. 246 …No, I've never seen this. Trakowski argued that even the name Mogul was classified, and…
  • p. 249 …Out PM with several NYU men by weapons carrier, but we never located it. Rocket postponed…
  • p. 264 …As far as I know we just never interfaced with the military. Q: Where were you…
  • p. 266 …We never saw anybody in security. There was certainly nobody keeping us secure. If anything, we…
  • p. 273 …who was writing a story, and I never quite could determine whether he was on the…
  • p. 274 …I have never seen such a document nor have I ever heard of any effort to…
  • p. 277 …radar reflectors for tracking purposes-but it never comes out talking about MOGUL and the instrumentation…
  • p. 278 …I never met Richard Robert Crane. I knew him only by the path of debris he…
  • p. 282 …They never said it, but I know they did because they left me free to do…
  • p. 318 …Before now, however, a larger portion of the story was never told. Recent research indicates that…
  • p. 320 …and Project MOGUL as first conceived was never put into operational 1use. However, MOGUL did serve…
  • p. 321 …Moore, NYU Constant-Level Balloon Project Engineer, stated that they were never informed of the classified…
  • p. 567 …and this flight 11as never recovered. Pre- sumably the marked easterly flow then observed above 60…
  • p. 591 …ficienoy since on-ot.f' operation was never per- mitted. The temperature data of' these flights…
  • p. 740 …The theodolite lost the balloon in clouds earlier and the airplane observer never succeeded in seeing…
  • p. 815 …Out pm with several NYU by weapon carrier but we never located it. Rocket postponed until…
SC: Please, do.
RW: We did this, as investigators would. logically. We figured, "where would this stuff be"? So
we went to all the different records. Working for me I have a group of reservists who are
declassification experts. They are excellent researchers. They spend their whole time dealing
with records, so these people know where all this stuff is buried. So, we have been to all the
major record centers. The Archives and nuclear records (ranging from unclassified toTS nuclear
stuff because the 509th was the only nuclear unit in the world at that time. So, some of there
records were TS and still are.) That is because they have never been declassified. Anyway, we
found that there was no airplane crash that could account for this. Just to show you how unsafe it
was to fly at that time, there were six airplane crashes in less than a month in New Mexico alone
in 1947, and that doesn't include the rest of the United States. We were lucky to have six.
SC: Remind me to double back on that. Go ahead with your story and rn tell you another little
story.
RW: We found no indication of a V-21aunch that is not accounted for. There was one scheduled
on the Jrd of July and that was scrubbed. There was no indication that there was some sort of
nuclear accident at that time where we either dropped a weapon or did something stupid, which
we had to consider during that period of time, but there is no indication of any of that happening.
Weather balloon themselves are; (although they have a "return to" type of thing on them)
supposed to crash. I mean, they go up and then sooner or later they're going to come down.
Right? Now what we did find, however (and I not implying what you saw up there), but its a
possibility. There was a project run by New York University, out ofHoDoman at that time. It
was a balloon experiment that lasted for years. But at the time a portion of it was Top Secret. It
bas since then be declassified. It was called Project Mogul.
SC: Never heard of it.
RW: Mogul was designed to run balloons at very bigh altitudes with extremely sensitive acoustic
sensors (what we were looking for were nuclear test on the part of the Russians, because we
thought the Russians had gotten the bomb) so you needed high enough and far enough so, and at
a constant altitude, we could see... because there were no satellite (Unintelligible) they had a
couple Mogul balloons and several of those are unaccounted for during that period of time. They
are very large in the sense that some of them were up to 600 feet long, not one gigantic balloon,
but a series ofballoons, because as they went up to altitude some of them broke off: and some of
them dropped ballast and they were very sophisticated. They had a lot of tin foil on them and a
lot of different things. Mogul is a possibility. We found a couple of researchers from New
Mexico that we are in contact with now because they kept private records in some regards. But,
of course that was a Top Secret project at the time and we don't know if Blanchard knew about
that or not: (we don't have any indication that he did). And that they used the weather balloon in
an attempt to cover the other balloon which was a classified project.

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FOIA release, from the osd collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 993 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.