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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…
June 4th, "Out to Tulerosa Range and fired charges between 0-0 and 0-6" something. "No balloon flight again on account of clouds. Flew regular sonobuoy mike with cluster balloons and had good luck with receiver on ground but poor on plane." I think that's Flight 4 right there.

Q: So that's June 4th.

A: As to that flight made by Mirs and Hackman earlier, we have no record of it here in the NYU summary.

Q: If he flew that on June 4th and it carried the microphones, the radar reflectors, that would have been with a neoprene type balloon.

A: There were no plastic balloons delivered until the 28th or 29th of June that year. So everything as evidenced on the Helgeland flight that we made and the other flight, they were all meteorological balloons prior to late June.

Q: That would have also had the B Model reflector, this type of reflector, but the B Model?

A: My memory is that Jim Peoples, because we were being sent down by B-17 and by air, didn't let us take the radiosonde receiving equipment which at that time was very heavy. It was like a 500 pound rack with a receiver, frequency meter, recorder, etc., and we weren't allowed to use that. Instead, the idea was that Peoples would provide tracking on the balloons with radar targets and so on. So this is where I think the radar targets come in. If you look in these reports you'll find here statements, radiosonde reception, and you'll see 60 percent with recorder, 50 percent without recorder, 100 percent without recorder for June 5th. A hundred percent without recorder.

So I think we tried the radar targets, as I remember, our contact who was a Captain Larry Dyvad found that they weren't able to track our flights at all. They had a radar that was entirely aimed at looking at the missiles. To look at slow moving balloons with poor signal return was difficult for them. So we started off with making single target flights. I think we went to multiple target flights, and still didn't have any success, so I began putting radiosondes and then just audibly, as the tones would change, I would log it on a piece of paper. I'd count the pressure... Are you familiar with radiosondes?

Q: Somewhat.

A: The commutator with the pressure contacts, etc. I would count contacts and record it and you'll see in some of these flight reports, there's two different interpretations possible, depending on what the contact sequence was. An ordinary radiosonde is very good for something that's going one way. But for something that's going to go up and float, you can

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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.