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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…
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.