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 21
It's of interest, in the Holloman report there's a big talk
about boiling balloons. That's certainly a heritage of the
association from our early balloon boiling days. When you look
at the instructions on the modern balloon, you see that it is
really a physical effect that can be controlled.
Q: You went on board at New York University, and you
immediately set out, as documented in the reports, acquiring the
various materials, [putting out bids], things of this nature. At
that point you were working at New York University under the
direction .•.
A: Spilhaus was the nominal principal investigator and
director of the project, but he just turned us loose.
Q: So you were the project engineer?
A: I was the project engineer, and Schneider was the
project administrator. We employed a lot of students, a lot of
people that we could, and were a mixture of trying to develop a
constant level balloon and providing service flights for Peoples.
Peoples was entirely our contact.
Q: He would come to New York University?
A: He would go down to Red Bank. He'd call and say he
wanted certain things, can you do it, so we made this flight out
at Lehigh and then we made the Helgoland flight down at Red Bank,
and he wasn't really happy. There were all sorts of constraints
flying balloons in the New York City area even then.
Q: All the problems with air traffic and getting FAA, or
their equivalent at that time, approval, etc.
A: So up in the stratosphere above my level, a decision
was made that we go to Alamagordo, and there would be a big
flight. We had balloons promised, but even ahead of that time
people wanted to test microphones. He had crary already, about
from December of '46, I think Crary went to Alamagordo and ran a
field station and •..
Q: That field station was for ballooning in general?
A: For Mogul. It was more than that. Crary was operating
sound-ranging microphones on the ground there. He was having
bombs dropped off the New Jersey coast and trying to pick up the
acoustic signals in New Mexico.
Q: He was having the bombs dropped in New Jersey, off the
coast, and trying to detect them in New Mexico?
A: That's correct.
Q: What technique? Balloon borne?

Cases discussed

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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.