Documents / Report
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.
“Mons”16 pages
balloons out of a Goodyear film called pliofilm. It was a vinyl chloride that just went to hell when exposed to sunlight. It really came apart. So I'm very proud that we began pushing them for polyethylene balloons. With some difficulty we got Otto Winzen who was the entrepreneur and promoter, working with Get, and we got him to make these balloons you see here in the design that was being planned for Project Helios, with the pliofilm balloons. At the same time we got an entrepreneur who was even faster acting, and that was this fellow A.J. Smith. A one-man shop. He would do anything for money. He, indeed, did. With no great technical background, he made a number of these balloons for us. Q: Kind of a garage type of affair where he would sit down and make them one by one and... A: I don't know. He got some girls and got some assembly workers, for a contract from us. Anyway, we got these balloons going, made visits to Minneapolis to push General Mills. The pressure from the Air Force was enormous. There was a similar problem, of course, in developing microphones that would pick up low frequency sound waves with Columbia. There was much enthusiasm, in testing these microphones. ## Q: How did you come to join the Army Air Force? A: When World War II broke out I applied for pilot training, and so did everybody else. Because I was a senior at Georgia Tech in a chemical engineering course with a fair amount of thermodynamics and other things, I got diverted into the meteorological cadet program. I still wanted to be a pilot but I got diverted into the meteorological cadet program, and the next class that I could join didn't start until December of '42. I joined up sometime in '42. So I went through the meteorological cadet program and found I was a lousy forecaster, but I did end up, when Spilhaus came recruiting for people with engineering background, I got recruited into Colonel Duffy's liaison office. ## Q: Was that directly for General Arnold's staff? A: I was assigned, believe it or not, to Headquarters, Air Force... I still have the Headquarters Air Force [rondelles]. I ended up being assigned to Headquarters, Army Air Force. I was a second lieutenant. Q: So you got recruited by, at that time, Captain Spilhaus. A: Right, and I got sent to the Weather Equipment Technician School in Spring Lake, New Jersey, essentially Fort Monmouth. When I finished the training course for radiosonde and for maintenance of equipment, I was headed for North Africa, and I had a medical problem. When I got out of the hospital, I was assigned back to Colonel Duffy. I remained there. I finished
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