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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. 193 …overhead and followed the balloons out to sea. I have no idea about the results that…
  • p. 200 …the regular 334 that we had at sea level. From that they could deduce the temperature…
  • p. 243 …actually located on the jurisdictional lines between Sea Girt and Springlake, New Jersey. It was an…
  • p. 244 …The Sea Girt Inn? A: Exactly. That's where John had his office, and I was…
  • p. 320 …alone is about 24,000 miles at sea level, and about 4500 miles at 45,000…
  • p. 325 …twenty-five (25) feet at their largest sea-level diameter. The sonic unit was a combination…
  • p. 378 …per hour when one-fifth inflated at sea level). One other type of balloon which has…
  • p. 402 …Let us, then, compare the rate of leakage at any given altitude with leakage at sea…
  • p. 404 …The leakage at any altitude may be expressed as a function of leakage at sea level…
  • p. 405 Comparing rate of leakage at 40,000 feet with leakage at sea level: $$ \frac {L _ {4…
  • p. 407 …If a 20-foot diameter balloon $ \frac{1}{1 0} $ full were tested at sea level…
  • p. 408 …At sea level this is equivalent to 5.32 gm/hr. for a 20-foot diameter…
  • p. 414 …Using the rules of subsonic aerodynamics, Picard suggests that air at sea level escaping at 1333…
  • p. 415 …air at sea level (lb./ft. $ ^{3} $ ) 14.7 = pressure of air at sea level (psi…
  • p. 432 …to about 20 millibars and increased to sea-level pressure at different temperatures. The most comprehensive…
  • p. 563 …The height above mean sea level as determined from pressure measurements used in this work with…
  • p. 644 …point at which the radiosonde reaches the sea surface. ## 2. Earlier attempts There have been numerous…
  • p. 645 …The balloons floated between the surface and 30,000 ft above sea level; those which reached…
  • p. 704 …Met Gifford who has 90' sea rescue boat this project is planning to use. Stayed at…
  • p. 719 …Worzel working on gravity at sea. Saw Geo Woollard and the Ryders. Woollard after Guggenheim fellowship…
  • p. 779 …the launching site is markedly different from sea level, a shift in this curve is needed…
  • p. 817 …balloon at all times with respect to sea level. On this curve also it is customary…
  • p. 825 …The height above mean sea level as determined from pressure measurements used in this work with…
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 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.