Documents / FOIA release
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.
“Headquarters”29 pages
To use the first of thes~ principles it is possible to main- tain a conditi~n of buoyancy by at least the following two me- thods: (1) dropping a part of the load. as ballast, to match the loss of lifting gas which occurs as a result of diffusion and leakageJ (2) replacement of the lifting gas by evaporation from a reservoir of liquified helium or hydrogen. Of these two methods, ballast dropping is most satisfactory from the consideration of simplicity of control and safety of personnel. While the use of liquid helium is theoretically ·more efficient, the amount and com- plexity of control equipment adds much to the cost and also the weight of air-borne equipment. The development of non-elastic balloons which oe.n withstand high internal pressure was investigated. Two designs which compro- mise extreme cost (required for balloons of high internal pressure) with small wall strength, hence small super pressure, were tested. At first, attempts were made to control balloon performance by using buoyancy-load balance techniques with elastic balloons, but the difficulties which were experienced resulted in the development of a third principle of operation combining a non-extensible balloon with a system of controls which can be applied either to a freely expanding balloon or to a balloon of fixed volume. III. ME'IRODS OF ATTACK The work on the development of controlled-altitude balloons may be divided into three phases, each one identified by the type of bal- loon which was us.ed. Concurrent with the balloon development was the design and testing of control equipment required to maintain the balloon at specific altitudes. Some of the equipment instru- mentation was used on more than one kind of balloon, but in general the problems and methods of attack are identified with one of the three types of balloons. A. Rubber Balloons Following the example of Clarke and Korff, assemblies of neo- prene rubber balloons were first considered. Using these freely expanding balloons it was necessary to balance the load to be lifted with the buoyancy given by an integral number of balloons. One or more accessory balloons were attached to the assembly to provide lifting force to carry the train aloft. Vii th the gear at a predetermined altitude, the lifting bal- loons were cut loose from the train by a pressure-activated switch,leaving the equipment at floe.ting level, more or less exactly balanced. Since there is no inherent stability in an extensible balloon, any existing unbalance will cause the train to rise or fall indefinitely until the balloon reaches -a-
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.