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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. 704 …Saw Bob Foster 731, also on way to NYC April 8 Mon. Arrived NYC 730 am…
  • p. 705 …I caught 550 train out of Penn Station to Red Bank, NJ April 29 Mon. Up…
  • p. 706 …1130 pm Owl to NYC May 6 Mon. Caught 625 train out of Penn Station to…
  • p. 707 Dec 2 Mon. Cakhurst. Cold wave hit about midnight - temperature down to $ 1 5^{\circ} $ - strong…
  • p. 708 …Dec 23 Mon. Oakhurst. Worked on Alamogordo and Flight 13. Had flight # 14 this pm. - 24…
  • p. 709 …Jan 13 Mon. Oakhurst. Working on sky wave curves. Made plans for Alamogordo this Thursday Jan…
  • p. 710 …Arrived AP about 1230 Feb 3 Mon Oakhurst. Peoples in Washington regarding balloon ascention in June…
  • p. 711 …Feb 24 Mon. Alamogordo. Waited for air transportation today but none available and may not be…
  • p. 712 …In Asbury Park 3 pm March 10 Mon Oakhurst. Vivian and I worked on Flight 25…
  • p. 713 …Cleaned out hanger and emptied trash out at East White Sands April 7 Mon Talked to…
  • p. 714 …April 21 Mon. Alamogordo Air Base. Bill Edmonston and I went out to Tularosa Range and…
  • p. 715 …May 19 Mon Reynolds and I left about 0946. May 19 Mon Reynolds and I left…
  • p. 716 …May 26 Mon. Worked on Tests 1 and 2 records today. No signals from Roswell - some…
  • p. 717 …Took Ireland, Mears, Winton, Olsen to Alamogordo to catch train this pm June 9 Mon. Bill…
  • p. 718 …July 7 (Mon) Alamogordo. Balloon Flight 11 A off at 0503. Big plastic with small auxiliary…
  • p. 719 …Aug 4 Mon. Up to Oakhurst. Hunt Aug 4 Mon. Up to Oakhurst. Went over developments…
this manual in '44. I was commissioned in September of '43, finally, and then finished the school in November, was assigned to write this manual which was finished in the summer of '44, and then I got an assignment to China.

Q: With Dr. Spilhaus?

A: No. I ended up being the weather equipment officer for CBI and the Spilhaus came over later. At that time the war was going very much better. Spilhaus and Duffy had a long range storm detection system, the spheric system, the predecessor of what's used now for lightning detection, the storm scopes, and the LLP. If you're familiar with LLP, the lightning location system...

Q: Used by the Weather Service.

A: We have one of the stations here on campus. And we actually have, if you're interested later on we'll go over and show you, we have a map of the lightning strokes over the entire U.S. as they occur. We have a read-out right here in our laboratory.

Q: So you're doing that work from China?

A: Spilhaus came over with the spherics net, it was called, and got a station installed in Chianting, China to work, of course, for the bombing of Japan. So Spilhaus came over I think the summer of '45 is when he came over. We had the radio wind, the ra-win, the SCR-658s, we had a number of them that were being installed. We had one up in Yunan in the communist area; we had several of them in China for getting good wind measurements. Spilhaus had been involved in that. I think by '45 it was clear that things would be over relatively soon. We thought we'd be back in '48. In any event, he got an assignment over to 10th Weather in the summer of '45 and came over.

Q: At what point did you ever hear the term long range detection?

A: That's a good question. I didn't know the name Mogul until Robert Todd told me two years ago. I'd never heard the name Mogul -- the classification was that high. I knew what we were doing. When "Helgoland" was exploded in April of '47, we had balloons in the air. We launched balloons out of the Watson Laboratory, actually Eatontown, what had been the Eatontown Signal Laboratory, but I think it was now Watson Laboratory. In any event, we launched a string of balloons, even though we didn't have [constant-level] balloons, we still carried microphones aloft and a C-54 orbited overhead and followed the balloons out to sea. I have no idea about the results that they got.

## Q: Did you number that balloon flight?

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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.