The Roswell Report: Case Closed

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 196 7, 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 1 968 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.
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