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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…
Q: So is that pretty much maybe a condition of hiring? I notice you used a lot of former military people. Did you just tell them at the outset, "This is a classified project for AMC?" Or were they not read on to the project at all?

A: By and large, people thought we were flying balloons for the Air Force.

Q: As far as they were concerned they were just launching meteorological balloons?

A: That's correct.

Q: They didn't particularly quiz you about the microphone you hung in there or...

A: No.

Q: The balloons that you did launch for Project Mogul and some of the other test balloons, without the actual instrument packages, did they have reward tags, "Return to New York University," or "Return to Roswell Army Air Field," or to Alamagordo Army Air Field or anything like that?

A: The ones that we wanted to get back, which were the test constant level balloons and the ones that had microphones on them, by and large, they did have NYU reward tags on them.

Q: Dr. Peoples, whoever was directing you, was there ever any concern voiced that this is a top secret object we're sending into the atmosphere and we're not sure where it's going to come to earth. Did they ever express any problem with that, that wherever it came down, it came down?

A: I think the argument was that when it came down, it would be mixed in with our other gear, and it was just part of a flight that was to be recovered by NYU. He thought nobody would interpret what those sorts of instruments would be.

Q: So the tags were kind of generic, like a meteorological tag, say. "This consists of meteorological instruments..."

A: "This is a research balloon flown by New York University..."

Q: Were you doing other research? When you went to New Mexico was there another agenda other than the top secret project?

A: None whatsoever. Our whole life revolved around the NYU constant level balloon project. We were developing constant level balloons, and the service flights for Peoples just sort of got hidden in that.

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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.