Documents / Report
This July 1994 report from the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force (SAF/AAZ) was prepared in response to a General Accounting Office audit that Congressman Steven Schiff requested about the 1947 Roswell Incident. The report describes Air Force searches of records and interviews with people involved, including Sheridan Cavitt. It found no records of a cover-up, alien bodies or extraterrestrial materials. It concludes that the debris found near Roswell most likely came from a Project Mogul balloon that was never recovered.
“William Moore”2 pages
Not surprisingly, the research team found the usual number of problems in many of the records centers (particularly St. Louis) with misfiling, lost or misplaced documents, mismarking of documents, or the breaking up of record groups over the years and refiling in different systems. This included, for example, a small amount of missing "decimal files" from the 509th Bomb Group at Roswell that covered the years 1945-1949, that were marked on the index as "destroyed." The researchers noted that there was no pattern to any anomalies found and that most discrepancies were minor and consistent with what they had found in the past on similar projects. WHAT THE ROSWELL INCIDENT WAS NOT Before discussing specific positive results that these efforts revealed, it is first appropriate to discuss those things, as indicated by information available to the Air Force, that the "Roswell Incident" was not: An Airplane Crash Of all the things that are documented and tracked within the Air Force, among the most detailed and scrupulous are airplane crashes. In fact, records of air crashes go back to the first years of military flight. Safety records and reports are available for all crashes that involved serious damage, injury, death, or a combination of these factors. These records also include incidents involving experimental or classified aircraft. USAF records showed that between June 24, 1947, and July 28, 1947, there were five crashes in New Mexico alone, involving A-26C, P-5 IN, C-82A, P·SOA and PQ·l4B aircraft; however, none of these were on the date(s) in question nor in the area(s) in question. One of the additional areas specifically set forth by GAO in its efforts was to deal with how the Air Force (and others) specifically documented ." .. weather balloon ... and other crash incidents." In this area, the search efforts revealed that there are no air safety records pertaining to weather balloon crashes (all weather balloons "crash" sooner or later); however, there are provisions for generating reports of "crashes" as ground safety incidents in the unlikely chance that a balloon injures someone or causes damage. However, such records are only maintained for five years. A Missile Crash A crashed or errant missile, usually described as a captured German V-2 or one of its variants, is sometimes set forth as a pbssible explanation for the debris recovered near Roswell. Since much of this testing done at nearby White Sands was secret at the time, it would be logical to assume that the government would handle any missile mishap under tight security, particularly if the mishap occurred on private land. From the records reviewed by the Air Force, however,·there was nothing located to suggest that this was the case. Although the bulk of remaining testing records are under the control of the OS Army, the subject has also been very well documented over the years within Air Force records. There would be no reason to keep such information classified today. The USAF found no indicators or even
Report, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 22 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.