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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…
thought the Roswell incident, so-called, was caused by one of our balloons.

Q: Did anyone ever mention it to you once you returned? Did any of the Red Bank folks mention it to you, or even in passing, or told you that maybe you'd better tighten up your procedures or anything of that nature, or a memo?

A: I have no memory. I do think that Peoples had the idea that it was one of our balloons, and it wasn't a matter of tightening up our procedures, it was just one of our balloons we couldn't recover. As you'll see looking at Crary's diary, there was no frantic effort to recover the earlier flights, even though they had microphones on them. I read to you one about some equipment had been stolen by the time we got there. As you can see in the diary, there's no record that there was any major problem.

Q: So even though the equipment was taken, there was no shroud of secrecy, the MPs didn't come out and close down the area or anything of this sort.

A: No, not at all.

Q: It was just expected in the normal course of research Expendable equipment.

A: Expendable equipment.

Q: And you had no fear that it was going to be taken by enemy agents or...

A: No, the biggest fear was the thought of loose talking, and we just didn't talk about the purpose of this. We certainly did talk a lot about our balloons, and there was just no security or no concern. We were flying constant level balloons.

Q: For pressure and temperature...

A: For meteorological trajectories. A lot of interest in trajectories.

One thing I should mention is that after I had visited from William Moore around '80 or '81, I wrote Ro Peoples and at that time Jim Peoples was in the Geology Department at the University of Kansas. I wrote him and got a letter back from Ro Peoples saying that he had died. So I wrote her back and said there was considerable interest still in this Roswell incident, and did he ever get called out... I do know that on occasion he got involved in classified things and left us. I asked her did he ever talk to her about anything regarding this debris that had been recovered. Her letter, which I perhaps can find somewhere, was the fact that no, he thought that flying saucers were a bunch of hooey, and he had a very low opinion of people who believed in

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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.