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. 19 …However, too much activity was going on for the project to remain completely hidden. A MOGUL…
  • p. 73 …of the physicians who participated in this project. I must respect his confidentially and anonymity. He…
  • p. 278 …Not from the people in the project, not disclosure by them, but simply the obvious activity…
PROFESSOR MOORE - 6/8/94
side. I thought the B Model was a 1947 vintage and assumed,
wrongly so, that the C Model would have come later.
53
A: This, then, is really ••• So they didn't change the
numbers. It does show the little swivel there, in '44. Well, as
always, my memory can be improved.
Tibbetts, the radar lieutenant working for Fletcher, said
that when they got these in '44 there was a lot of trouble with
breakage in the air and they had to go back for reinforcement.
Q: That's where maybe the tape came in?
A: He said that's where the tape came in. Because it
certainly doesn't show this. There's just no question in my
memory, bad as it may be, that there was a tape there. That
impelled me to drag out Herbert Crow•s letter. While I'm finding
that, here is a communication between Todd and a Warrant Officer
Newton, who identified things in General Ramey's office.
(Pause}
Q: It says a material like mylar. Do you have any
knowledge of when that term came into use? mylar is a
polyethylene, it's a metalized polyethylene.
A: It's not really a polyethylene, it's a polyturpoline ...
Q: I'm not a chemist.
A: It's really quite a different thing. We certainly got
involved with mylar balloons in General Mills around 1950 or
1951.
Q: Nothing that early, though.
A: I think not. It was really quite a new plastic. This
is mylar. As you can see from the appearance, it's really quite
different than polyethylene. It's non-extensible, where this
really stretches. This scatters light and this doesn't. We have
flown mylar balloons and mylar balloons vacuum coated with
aluminum, but I think we didn't fly any in this era. It would be
my guess that someone is sort of confusing this with later
things. There were a lot of mylar balloons carried on rockets,
and it was called Jim's sphere. Someone named Jim came up with
the idea of increasing the turbulence around a following sphere
by putting a little protuberance, little combs out on it. That
was Jim's sphere. A lot of them were flown to measure winds in
the low ionosphere, flown on rockets, from White Sands. They
could well have fallen, but to my memory, it would have been
anachronistic, out of times.
Here's a letter to me from Herbert Crow who was one of my
technicians in the 1948 operation. These pictures you saw,

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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.