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.
“Randles”11 pages
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
A: No, we didn't. Q: Not a letter or a number? A: Wait a minute. The answer is, I don't know. Q: If you did give it a letter or a number would it be on... There are some of these flights that appeared to have no sequence number and they were talking in terms of being service flights and the impression that we got was that the service flights were either test flights just to check the balloons out or they were the highly classified flights where the information was not being logged into essentially an unclassified document. A: You notice that Flight 1 was made from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. ## Q: The football field there? A: LeHigh, exactly. That's where we did it, from the football field. And we did this because a professor at NYU had just gone to head up the physics department at LeHigh and he invited us over. His name was Frank, Butler keeps coming to mind, but I'm not sure that's the right name. Anyway, we went there and that was for an early, early attempt for Helgoland. I think the Helgoland explosion got scrubbed, but we had balloons in the air from this and we were woefully not ready. We had all sorts of problems. We adopted the balloon technique that a cosmic ray investigator at NYU, a fellow named Sergei Korf, we adopted his technique and we had a lot to learn. We got our hands torn up with nylon line being pulled through it as we couldn't hold the balloons down in the wind... Q: Speaking of nylon line, were these braided type lines or were they monofilament type lines? A: Neither. I think initially we used either parachute cord, which was braided. I don't remember the details of what we used, but we rapidly used that the radiosonde cord we used was not strong enough at all to hold the forces that came, so we went to what was called lobster twine. We used a lot of lobster twine that was twisted, a laid line that was used in lobster nets. Q: Do you recall there ever having been some sort of monofilament similar to the monofilament fishing line in any of the projects? A: I think there was none available at that time. My memory, the answer is yes, we've used an awful lot of monofilament and we use it now all the time. Q: But at that time you don't think it was available? A: I think it was not available.
Report, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 882 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.