Documents / Report
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.
“Gross”27 pages
side. I thought the B Model was a 1947 vintage and assumed, wrongly so, that the C Model would have come later. A: This, then, is really... So they didn't change the numbers. It does show the little swivel there, in '44. Well, as always, my memory can be improved. Tibbetts, the radar lieutenant working for Fletcher, said that when they got these in '44 there was a lot of trouble with breakage in the air and they had to go back for reinforcement. Q: That's where maybe the tape came in? A: He said that's where the tape came in. Because it certainly doesn't show this. There's just no question in my memory, bad as it may be, that there was a tape there. That impelled me to drag out Herbert Crow's letter. While I'm finding that, here is a communication between Todd and a Warrant Officer Newton, who identified things in General Ramey's office. (Pause) Q: It says a material like mylar. Do you have any knowledge of when that term came into use? mylar is a polyethylene, it's a metalized polyethylene. A: It's not really a polyethylene, it's a polyturpoline... Q: I'm not a chemist. A: It's really quite a different thing. We certainly got involved with mylar balloons in General Mills around 1950 or 1951. Q: Nothing that early, though. A: I think not. It was really quite a new plastic. This is mylar. As you can see from the appearance, it's really quite different than polyethylene. It's non-extensible, where this really stretches. This scatters light and this doesn't. We have flown mylar balloons and mylar balloons vacuum coated with aluminum, but I think we didn't fly any in this era. It would be my guess that someone is sort of confusing this with later things. There were a lot of mylar balloons carried on rockets, and it was called Jim's sphere. Someone named Jim came up with the idea of increasing the turbulence around a following sphere by putting a little protuberance, little combs out on it. That was Jim's sphere. A lot of them were flown to measure winds in the low ionosphere, flown on rockets, from White Sands. They could well have fallen, but to my memory, it would have been anachronistic, out of times. Here's a letter to me from Herbert Crow who was one of my technicians in the 1948 operation. These pictures you saw,
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.