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The Roswell Report: Fact vs. Fiction in the New Mexico Desert

USAF / The Black Vault · 1995 · 882 pages · text by GLM-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. 9 …Appendices to the McAndrew Synopsis are identified by gray tabs which appear at the top right…
  • p. 25 …The rubber was smoky gray in color and scattered over an area about 200 yards in…
  • p. 35 …a thick, foil like metallic gray substance; a brittle, brownish-black plasticlike material, like Bakelite; and…
  • p. 40 …the ruptured and shredded neoprene would "almost look like dark gray or black flakes or ashes…
  • p. 173 …Some of the material would almost look like dark gray or black flakes or ashes after…
  • p. 187 …He talks about the smoky gray rubber... Q: Which these samples here, as you say, if…
  • p. 206 …There's a gray area here. I was certainly aware that what we were doing in…
  • p. 308 …The rubber was smoky gray in color and scattered over an area about 200 yards in…

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A: Brush recorders. [Strip charge] recorders feeding out at high speed. You'll see in here, you'll see the sort of records.

Q: The graphic representation.

A: The recorders looked like that.

Q: So that was recorded on the aircraft and then...

A: That's correct. As you'll see, they said they had receivers at Roswell, at Alamagordo, and they had them on the airplane.

Q: But most of the detection was via the aircraft because of the low power receivers.

A: Most of the reception, the detection, was really... The balloon received the acoustics, and sent it down by radio to the aircraft. It often didn't work. That was the reason why for Operation Sandstone in April and May of '48, we went up and down the Rio Grande Valley... Here are some of the pictures. There's a ground cloth for the balloon to be laid out. There's a balloon being inflated, just getting ready. So we tried to get up wind.

That's a device from White Sands that was picked up around Carazoso and was reported in to us, and we thought it was one of ours. So I took a weapons carrier and drove up there. We were aggressively trying to recover our equipment and that just happened to be something that was on the ground. The technician that had been in that group, remember the [Marginal] tape, Herbert Crow. That's a picture he took when we were aggressively trying to recover a load. That turned out not to be ours.

## Q: What is it, and who did it belong to?

A: It probably was flown on a rocket or by Marcus O'Day who was the chief scientist at Watson Laboratory. Dr. O'Day. You'll see, when you read the Duffy thing, where Duffy thinks maybe there were things that were flown by Dr. O'Day. Anyway, that just happens to be a picture in the collection of NYU photographs.

Q: So there were a lot of other people flying balloons or launching...

A: Not balloons. We were the only balloon flyers. That came down by parachute. But there were a lot of rockets being flown in the early days there, and a lot of high altitude aircraft. Duffy says there were dropsondes.

Q: So it could be that some of the material found may not have been associated with a balloon. It is possible it could have been some other type of material. But the description that

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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.