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. 9 …Appendices to the McAndrew Synopsis are identified by gray tabs which apear at the top right…
  • p. 28 …The rubber was smoky gray in color and scattered over an area about 200 yards in…
  • p. 38 …a thick, foil like metallic gray substance; a brittle, brownish-black plastic- like material, like Bakelite…
  • p. 43 …the ruptured and shredded neoprene would "almost look like dark gray or black flakes or ashes…
  • p. 205 …Some of the material would ahnost look like dark gray or black flakes or ashes after…
  • p. 222 …He talks about the smoky gray rubber ••. Q: Which these samples here, as you say, if…
  • p. 241 …There's a gray area here. I was certainly aware that what we were doing in…
  • p. 379 …that he might have found a smoky gray in color and scattered vatlon balloons on the…
PROFESSOR MOORE - 6/8/94
At the same time, then Captain Fletcher was assigned •••
Duffy had heard that weather was giving trouble to radar, so
Colonel Duffy just turned around and said, "Gee, you mean radar
can pick up weather?" And ended up with Captain Fletcher being
assigned to both convert this for looking at storm clouds and
also to make wind measurements. There was a big problem, the
Weather Bureau prior to World War II determined upper winds
merely by releasing a pilot balloon, following with the
(inaudible), and estimating the rate of rise, and then from the
elevation and azimuth angles and the assumed height after a
certain time, to calculate what the winds were.
Q: Is that the Boford Scale?
A: Well, Boford was Navy, that was the Navy .••
Q: Like taking a Pi Ball reading now.
A: Exactly. It was called a Pi Ball then and it is now.
9
Colonel Duffy pushed very heavily to get electronic means for
·measuring winds aloft. There were two approaches. One, use a
radar target, and the SCR-584 with which you may be familiar --
the early gun-laying radar. Colonel Duffy talked to the field
artillery that was procuring through the Signal Corps, gun-laying
radar, the SCR-584, which is, that's this radar right here.
Q: We've seen that photo before.
A: This is Spilhaus•s book. So Fletcher ended up with a
whole bunch of his own 2nd lieutenants around. There was a Jud
Tibbett from whom I have a photograph showing an earlier model
target, the A Model target. Istvan was one. There are a bunch
of them listed. This listing is for you if you'd like to have
it.
Tibbetts ended up being the big installer of radar and, in
fact, was assigned down to the Tularosa Range Camp to make wind
measurements for the Trinity shot, the test in 1945. As far as I
know, that was the first time these targets had been used in New
Mexico. Tibbetts, who until recently lived in Albuquerque, he's
now moved to Scottsdale, Arizona. Tibbetts says that he did not
ever fly this kind of target in New Mexico, which will be of
interest with you when they talk about, that people should have
known what a target looked like.
Q: Right. There were discussions concerning having radar
targets, but supposedly the B Model and subsequent models were
brand new, had never flown anything like that in this area.
A: According to Tibbetts, the A Model had bit aerodynamic
drag. It was a flat plane of aluminum foil and had two triangles
coming down that made a corner reflector. The A Model looked
like ••• Then across here was that. This is one surface, this is
another surface, and this is yet another, and they were held by

Cases discussed

About this file

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