The Roswell Report: Case Closed

Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.

# STATEMENT OF WITNESS

Place :

Date: 28 October 1996

I, William C. Kaufman, Lt. Col., USAF (Ret), hereby voluntarily and of my own free will, make the following statement. This was done without coercion, unlawful influence or unlawful inducement.

I was drafted into the Army of the United States in 1943, transferred to the Army Air Forces, and was commissioned as a pilot in 1944. From 1950 until 1967, with a break for training for a combat tour in Korea and for educational assignments to AFIT, I was assigned to the Aero Medical Laboratory at Wright Patterson AFB, OH. During that time I was a physiological training officer and worked in the development of early pressure suits. I tested many high altitude pilots and also the first group of astronauts. Later during my Air Force career, in 1961, I earned a Ph.D. in Physiology and Biophysics. I was assigned to the Aero Medical Laboratory for three tours and retired in 1968 as the Chief of the Biodynamics Branch of the Aero Medical Field Laboratory at Holloman AFB, NM.

During my third assignment at Wright Patterson, I volunteered, along with Capt Dan Fulgham, to be a backup pilot for Capt Joe Kittinger for his high altitude balloon project, Project Excelsior. Capt Kittinger instructed Capt Fulgham and me in ballooning in May 1959. At the end of an overnight training flight, on the morning of May 21, 1959, northwest of Roswell, NM, we (Kittinger, Fulgham and I) had an accident with the balloon. We were practicing touch and go landings when a severe gust of wind overturned the gondola, dumping all of us to the ground with the gondola on top of us. The accident occurred in a small pasture where a pony was grazing next to a small cottage. For safety, we were followed during hours of darkness by a C-131 aircraft and during the day by a H-21 helicopter. We were followed the entire time by technicians in a truck for communications and for the recovery of the balloon and gondola. Seeing the accident, the crews of the helicopter and the recovery trucks came to our assistance, much to the dismay of the farmer who owned the pony, which had run away when the truck broke down the fence to reach the crash site. I recall that a member of the helicopter crew attempted to calm the farmer.