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. 444 …Colorado, western Nebraska and western Kansas by the Industrial Research Institute of the University of Denver…
B. Project Facilities
To meet the requbaments of the contract. a research group
was built up and the following facilitiea were made availablea
1. Administrative section.
2. Engineering personnel were assigned to one or more of the
following groups:
(a) Balloon section
(b) Performance control section
(c) Telemetering section
(d) Analysis section (including meteorological and per-
for.mance data analysis)
3. A small machine shop was provided to manufacture experi-
mental models of equipment which was flown.
4. A field crew for launching, tracking and recovery of
balloons was established.
Work-shop. laboratory. office and storage space was pro-
vided by New York University (Figures 1 and 2). Field work
was largely conducted at Army bases and Air Forces installa-
tions. At one time the number of full-time employees reached
26 with 17 part-time men on the staff at that time. Most in-
dividuals were called upon to work in several departments
depending upon the urgency of field work. equipment preparation
or development work.
II. PRI~~IPLES OF BALLOON CONTROL
Following preliminary investigations, two distinct principles of
achieving consta~pressure altitude for free balloons were studied
in detail. The first of these is the maintenance of the balloon
at floating level by the use of a servo-mechanism or other con-
trol which causes the supported load to vary with the buoyancy of
the balloon. The second principle embodies the use of a non-
extensible balloon capable of withstanding a high internal pressure.
With a fixed volume and a given load. such balloons remain at a
constant pressure level as long as the internal pressure of the
balloon is equal to or greater than that of the air at floating
level. A surplus of buoyancy causes super-pressure. but when the
gas is cooled relative to the air environment such a surplus is
needed to prevent excessive reductions in balloon pressure. When-
ever the balloon's internal pressure becomes less than that of the
air. it falls to earth. Such a balloon was used by the Japanese
for the fire bombing of the western United States during World War II.
-s-

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.