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
Q: How did you come in possession of it? A: Todd. Todd does everything. Q: Did he say where he got these documents? A: Freedom of Information, I think. Q: It looks like National Archives. I believe I have this letter. So Ewing was at Woods Hole... A: And was going to head up the geophysics department at Columbia. These are subsequent documents of people in the Air Force considering the desirability of it. After Crossroads there seemed to be an enormous push to try to put microphones into the sound channel. During WWII, the Signal Corps had laid on them the requirement to develop a constant level balloon. It had not been very successful. I knew a bunch of people in the balloon branch. The reason I got into balloons is that while I was working on this manual there was a great problem in the winter of '43 with the supply of gum rubber cut off, meteorological sounding balloons weren't flying very well. In the summer time, the balloons would go through the depth of the troposphere, but in the winter time, the balloons began bursting down at levels of 15,000 feet or so because the neoprene wouldn't stretch at low temperatures. Somewhere Spilhaus came up with the idea, talked to somebody in the Weather Bureau, that maybe you ought to heat the balloons. He told a couple of us second lieutenants, that I wonder if that would work. We got a blow torch and a mop bucket and we had a radiosonde, and he was in charge of the Air Force push on radiosonde technology. I was his leg man on that. We put a blow torch on a mop bucket and heated the water to boiling and flew the balloon. Much to our surprise, the balloon went to about 60,000 feet. ## Q: So it stretched without rupturing. A: It turns out that neoprene crystallizes and you can make it back into an amorphus state with high elasticity. Elasticity changes as a function of the degree of crystallinity. By heating, we removed that. In any event, there was a group in Spilhaus's detachment known as the balloon [boilers]. The Signal Corps, it turned out, was very unhappy with this idea. They wanted no interest in it at all, and their manual doesn't use it. But that was my introduction, that's how I got attached to ballooning, as a result of doing this simple thing for Spilhaus.
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.