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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. 26 …Since 1978-1980, other UFO researchers, most notably Donald Schmitt and Kevin Randle, claim to have…
  • p. 28 …Randle and Donald Schmitt; The Truth About the UFO Crash at Roswell (1994), also by Randle…
  • p. 131 …I have reviewed the pictures in the 1991 Book by Randle and Schmitt on the UFO…
  • p. 139 …It had been alleged in a number of books, including the one by Randle and Schmitt…
  • p. 141 …I went through and pulled out wherever, in this book UFO Crash at Roswell by Randle…
  • p. 142 …From the very start, when these clowns started hounding me, Randle and Schmitt, I told they…
  • p. 147 …He makes a number of claims that, at least Randle and Schmitt; and when I say…
  • p. 149 …risk injury to civilians on the ground. Randle asked if he remembered any talk at all…
  • p. 161 …Well, of course, Randle and Schmitt do claim that those people are out there and that…
  • p. 162 …Well, I got a perfect example of this with Randle and Schmitt. Randle is the outgoing…
  • p. 173 …On review of the photos in the Randle/Schmitt book, the material looks like one of…
A: What the wind did.

The description that Brazel gives here that everything would weigh about five pounds when it was all together, is more than you would have gotten from a single balloon.

Q: Those were measured in terms of 300 to 500 grams or something like that?

A: Three hundred and fifty only. At that time we didn't have any bigger balloons than 350 grams, so the balloons would have been 350 grams.

Q: About one pound.

A: Correct. And the targets are nominally maybe a quarter of a pound.

Q: Those targets are only four to five ounces?

A: Here was the specification spelled out for it. Approximate weight, 100 grams. These, as I say, are somewhat heavier than the ones we had.

Q: You indicated that the balsa wood was coated with some sort of glue such as Elmer's glue.

A: That's my memory. It wasn't completely coated. Some of it was and some of it wasn't.

Q: Some of the balsa wood is fairly dense, as far as being durable, and one of the descriptions concerning this "wood-like" material was that you couldn't dent it with your fingernail. So if you have a fairly dense balsa wood coated with a glue, it may be quite possible that a person would not be able to put their fingernail in it.

A: That's correct. It's my memory that the reflective material was more aluminum foil than here. These are second or third iteration targets, as evidenced by this picture, wherever that picture is down in here of the 1948 flight. It certainly looks more aluminum-foil like.

Q: What year were you discharged from active duty?

A: '46.

Q: Before you left active duty, while you were still working with Duffy and Spilhaus, did they invite you to join the staff at New York University, or to continue your studies there?

A: I came back from overseas and was assigned to Colonel Duffy's, he had a little flight detachment assigned to him with a B-29 and a B-25 and some other aircraft. I ended up being the

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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.