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.
“Headquarters”32 pages
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Q: But you had them available for study, but you didn't launch them. A: No, they didn't have any. Q: In the New York University report it says that you were provided two Japanese balloons. A: That's interesting, because I have no memory of them whatsoever. Spilhaus may have. But I have no memory that I ever saw them. In the spirit of being given proper scientific credit, in the paper that you have, the Journal of Meteorology Paper, we, heavily written by Spilhaus, credited the Japanese with doing, with their trans-Pacific flights. So what we were doing certainly was based, came after what they had done, and we didn't want to take credit away from them. But I'm told that on my own, completely free from this, I talked with Wadati and others on a Japanese balloon. I've never seen a Japanese balloon that I know of, I've never seen the payload, but I do have fragments of the Mulberry Favor. Frankly, we did not depend on the Japanese balloons. The Japanese just preceded us. But we didn't pattern what we were trying to do on what the Japanese did. After all, they had opaque balloons, and my belief from the beginning is balloons ought to be transparent so they don't absorb sunlight so at sunset you don't have the cooling and the ballasting. So we owe nothing to the Japanese other than the fact they were ahead of us. Q: You went on these field trips. When you left, getting back to the cover story, you were the project engineer. Did people come to you and say you need to put something together in case one of these things falls in somebody's hands? You didn't. Did you brief your people, your personnel, when they were there, that they if should go into town for food or something if someone says "Why are you there?"... A: We were certainly secretive and not talkative, but at the same time... Q: In other words, was there a developed cover story where everyone got together, discussed what you were going to say or not say concerning the various activities that were going on at Alamagordo and other locations? A: That's a good question. I have no memory of such a thing. I'm just aware that we were under very strong stricture not to encourage speculation on what we were doing.
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.