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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. 39 …An advance ground team, led by Albert P. Cray, preceded the NYU group to Alamogordo Army…
  • p. 96 …OSI also developed an advanced Narcotics Investigations Course designed to teach the latest technics in combatting…
  • p. 174 …Dr Crary and Dr Peoples were the advance people and scientific monitors for our project. Dr…
  • p. 247 …Spilly was a consultant, and even in his advancing age he was still an enormous source…
  • p. 273 …the advance party of the balloon group arrived by B-17. $ ^{21} $ On May 29, the…
  • p. 617 …in advance of balloon release and a second notice will be filed at the time of…
  • p. 618 …Upon attaining the desired altitude, the auxiliary lifting balloons will be released from the main balloon…
  • p. 694 …in advance of balloon release and a second notice will be filed at the time of…
  • p. 695 (1) The type balloon to be used in this phase of the project will be a…
executive officer of a flight detachment at Newark Airport. I got back from overseas in February of '46, I think. After getting out of the replacement depot, I got assigned back to Colonel Duffy and was assigned at Newark. I went on terminal leave something like July of '46 and went back to Georgia Tech and finished two quarters. I had two quarters to finish at Georgia Tech. While I was at Georgia Tech I began working with a microwave, an anonymous propagation research group that turned out, oddly enough, was under Colonel Duffy's direction. I didn't know it. It had nothing to do with my getting deployed there, but I had a student assistanceship working on that.

I made some report, and my name came back in front of Colonel Duffy in September, I think, of '46, and I got asked to come up to his office. I think he was still at Bradley Beach, Sharp River Hills Hotel there near Belmar, New Jersey. When I was there, who should come in but Spilhaus. They told me they had a problem involving balloons and asked if I would be interested in working with them, and they offered me a graduate assistanceship at NYU, and I wanted to go to graduate school in physics, so I was delighted to have that opportunity. That was either September or October of '46.

Q: So Spilhaus, since he was on the staff there, he invited you to come to New York University.

A: Yes, he did.

Q: So you went to New York University when?

A: Right after Christmas. January 1, 1947. The program had already started. I presume you have all the details. I have a copy of (inaudible) letter to General Spaatz. I presume you have all of that.

Q: I believe we do, but I'd still like to review it and make sure it's the same letter.

A: In any event, there was a big push. I guess after Operation Crossroads the first nuclear test in the Pacific was in July of '46, and Crary, because of the long range detection concept, Crary was sent to Ascension Island which is the antipode for, as close as they could get to the antipode for Bikini, and failed to detect any signal from Operation Crossroads, from the nuclear explosion.

Q: You mentioned detection. What drove the aspect of detection? Was it because of our test?

A: Yes, our test was being used as a signal source. The question was in order to detect any Soviet test, could we detect our own tests. So Crary was essentially sent to Ascension to see if he could detect the nuclear explosion.

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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.