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The Roswell Report: Fact vs. Fiction in the New Mexico Desert

USAF / The Black Vault · 1995 · 882 pages · text by OCR

The Roswell Report: Fact versus Fiction in the New Mexico Desert was published by Headquarters United States Air Force in 1995. The Black Vault distributes this copy. It reproduces the report by Col. Richard L. Weaver and the synopsis by 1st Lt. James McAndrew, both written after a General Accounting Office inquiry requested by Representative Steven Schiff. The Air Force search found no evidence of an extraterrestrial craft or crew. It concluded that the Roswell debris most likely came from NYU Flight No. 4, a Project MOGUL balloon train.

  • p. 193 …overhead and followed the balloons out to sea. I have no idea about the results that…
  • p. 200 …the regular 334 that we had at sea level. From that they could deduce the temperature…
  • p. 243 …actually located on the jurisdictional lines between Sea Girt and Springlake, New Jersey. It was an…
  • p. 244 …The Sea Girt Inn? A: Exactly. That's where John had his office, and I was…
  • p. 320 …alone is about 24,000 miles at sea level, and about 4500 miles at 45,000…
  • p. 325 …twenty-five (25) feet at their largest sea-level diameter. The sonic unit was a combination…
  • p. 378 …per hour when one-fifth inflated at sea level). One other type of balloon which has…
  • p. 402 …Let us, then, compare the rate of leakage at any given altitude with leakage at sea…
  • p. 404 …The leakage at any altitude may be expressed as a function of leakage at sea level…
  • p. 405 Comparing rate of leakage at 40,000 feet with leakage at sea level: $$ \frac {L _ {4…
  • p. 407 …If a 20-foot diameter balloon $ \frac{1}{1 0} $ full were tested at sea level…
  • p. 408 …At sea level this is equivalent to 5.32 gm/hr. for a 20-foot diameter…
  • p. 414 …Using the rules of subsonic aerodynamics, Picard suggests that air at sea level escaping at 1333…
  • p. 415 …air at sea level (lb./ft. $ ^{3} $ ) 14.7 = pressure of air at sea level (psi…
  • p. 432 …to about 20 millibars and increased to sea-level pressure at different temperatures. The most comprehensive…
  • p. 563 …The height above mean sea level as determined from pressure measurements used in this work with…
  • p. 644 …point at which the radiosonde reaches the sea surface. ## 2. Earlier attempts There have been numerous…
  • p. 645 …The balloons floated between the surface and 30,000 ft above sea level; those which reached…
  • p. 704 …Met Gifford who has 90' sea rescue boat this project is planning to use. Stayed at…
  • p. 719 …Worzel working on gravity at sea. Saw Geo Woollard and the Ryders. Woollard after Guggenheim fellowship…
  • p. 779 …the launching site is markedly different from sea level, a shift in this curve is needed…
  • p. 817 …balloon at all times with respect to sea level. On this curve also it is customary…
  • p. 825 …The height above mean sea level as determined from pressure measurements used in this work with…
RW: We did this, as investigators would, logically. We figured, "where would this stuff be"? So we went to all the different records. Working for me I have a group of reservists who are declassification experts. They are excellent researchers. They spend their whole time dealing with records, so these people know where all this stuff is buried. So, we have been to all the major record centers. The Archives and nuclear records (ranging from unclassified to TS nuclear stuff because the 509th was the only nuclear unit in the world at that time. So, some of there records were TS and still are.) That is because they have never been declassified. Anyway, we found that there was no airplane crash that could account for this. Just to show you how unsafe it was to fly at that time, there were six airplane crashes in less than a month in New Mexico alone in 1947, and that doesn't include the rest of the United States. We were lucky to have six.

SC: Remind me to double back on that. Go ahead with your story and I'll tell you another little story.

RW: We found no indication of a V-2 launch that is not accounted for. There was one scheduled on the 3rd of July and that was scrubbed. There was no indication that there was some sort of nuclear accident at that time where we either dropped a weapon or did something stupid, which we had to consider during that period of time, but there is no indication of any of that happening. Weather balloon themselves are; (although they have a "return to" type of thing on them) supposed to crash. I mean, they go up and then sooner or later they're going to come down. Right? Now what we did find, however (and I not implying what you saw up there), but its a possibility. There was a project run by New York University, out of Holloman at that time. It was a balloon experiment that lasted for years. But at the time a portion of it was Top Secret. It has since then be declassified. It was called Project Mogul.

SC: Never heard of it.

RW: Mogul was designed to run balloons at very high altitudes with extremely sensitive acoustic sensors (what we were looking for were nuclear test on the part of the Russians, because we thought the Russians had gotten the bomb) so you needed high enough and far enough so, and at a constant altitude, we could see...because there were no satellite (Unintelligible) they had a couple Mogul balloons and several of those are unaccounted for during that period of time. They are very large in the sense that some of them were up to 600 feet long, not one gigantic balloon, but a series of balloons, because as they went up to altitude some of them broke off, and some of them dropped ballast and they were very sophisticated. They had a lot of tin foil on them and a lot of different things. Mogul is a possibility. We found a couple of researchers from New Mexico that we are in contact with now because they kept private records in some regards. But, of course that was a Top Secret project at the time and we don't know if Blanchard knew about that or not: (we don't have any indication that he did). And that they used the weather balloon in an attempt to cover the other balloon which was a classified project.

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Report, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. The text was read from the page images by an OCR model; expect the odd misread word. 882 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.