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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. 190 …Well, Boford was Navy, that was the Navy... Q: Like taking a Pi Ball reading now…
  • p. 191 …fabricate balloons for us. During that period we heard of the Navy project that was going…
  • p. 207 …But were any of those used as precursors to Mogul or... A: None whatsoever. That was…
  • p. 270 …Ewing had conducted considerable research for the Navy during World War II, studying, among other things…
  • p. 323 …f) Measurements of actual sound channel transmission using a small stratosphere balloon carrying sound receivers and…
  • p. 657 …At the present time this company cannot supply us with balloons until Navy clearance is obtained…
  • p. 693 …for six hours using a non-extensible envelope with the addition of a ballast valve to…
  • p. 704 …Met Gifford who has 90' sea rescue boat this project is planning to use. Stayed at…
  • p. 705 …Wyckoff, Hungerfield, Vaux and myself regarding Navy participation with us in Crossroads. Captain Kellogg of Weather…
  • p. 718 …Schneider up with O'Day to check use as NYU station. Alamoggrdo crew helped get helium…
miles. Then he had Don Edmondson went to Silver City frequently. Then he had some place he called Donna, Las Cruces is in Donna Anna County, but I don't know where his Donna site was. But I think he had microphones scattered all around in central New Mexico and West Texas. But the explosions were all created either on the White Sands Proving Ground, or there were V-2 rockets, or they were things coming from...

I won't take the time now, but he talks about cruises, which apparently are, maybe they were cruisers firing off the Jersey coast.

We got off into this, we were talking about tracking, and we went down to, in early June, to make service flights which were to be tracked by radar, and the radar was unsuccessful. It's my memory that we made a number of flights just to test out the radar. These would not have had a reward tag on them. These were throw away flights. Once a target like this comes down from high altitude or drag, you don't want it back. It's my memory we didn't want to have anything traced back to us, if we weren't going to go out and pick it up.

Q: So you just kind of let the material lie wherever it fell?

A: We shot a balloon into the air and didn't want to do any more. There are some pictures of our going out to recover things. On one of the early flights we went out east of Roswell, and I remember beyond the Bottomless Lakes, going out in oil well country, picking up one of our flights that had come down. We aggressively tried to recover our own flights.

Q: So were you directed to that location by aircraft?

A: By the aircraft.

Q: Did they give you a lat and long, landmark?

A: We talked to them by radio. The transmitters on these microphones were so low powered that, believe it or not, they had B-17s just orbiting under our balloons with receivers aboard the aircraft, and we, of course, would talk to the aircraft, and they'd tell us when things would come down. So it was a coordinated operation.

Q: So you had explosions or V-2 going through. So the aircraft had recording devices. You had the acoustical pickup on the balloon and the aircraft had the recording device that would record the sounds.

A: That's correct. Would record the signal from the balloon.

Q: In what media was it recorded on?

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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.