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.
“Headquarters”32 pages
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
Q: A few more names came off that news article where they're displaying the balloon launch—Maj. W. D. Pritchard, Maj. C. W. Mangum, Lieutenant Siegal, and a Capt. L. H. Dyvad. A: None of those names are in my memory, firm in my memory, at all. Q: You were aware of the previous Colonel Duffy's predecessor, Major Crane... A: I never met Richard [Robert] Crane. I knew him only by the path of debris he left behind. I never met him. Q: When you took over, was there any worry about security on the project, that security was possibly a problem, or that there was a problem or that there could be a potential problem that might warrant scrutiny by Air Force intelligence or security people? A: We were aware of the delicacy of security on the project, and the reason was obvious. You could not conduct field operations of the size that we had to without somebody asking questions. Anybody with a pair of 8x50 binoculars on the side of the mountain could look down and see what was going on, and that, of course, would prompt questions. We were aware of all that, and we didn't really know what to do about it except to go on doing our job and taking care of things as they occurred. But we were aware of the sensitivity and of the weakness of security in Project MOGUL. Not from the people in the project, not disclosure by them, but simply the obvious activity that could be observed. You can't fill a balloon that's give-or-take 60 feet high without somebody seeing it. Q: When you were at Alamagordo and some of the various balloons were being launched, what was the largest array that you saw out there? A: You mean payload? Q: No, the entire assembly. The balloons, payloads, reflectors... A: I didn't observe any of the reflectors, and if I did, they were so commonplace that it wouldn't have stuck in my memory. The neoprene balloons bearing reflectors were just common occurrences. I wouldn't have lodged any of those observations in memory because they were just too common. Q: Charlie Moore has indicated that some of the balloons they tried during the early experiments were the relatively new types of reflectors that probably had never been used in New Mexico before, the M307B model, and that Ed Istvan had gone to several essentially toy manufacturers, to try to get some of these reflectors made. A: That's correct. I don't know [about] that Ed Istvan... Ed Istvan got out of line. Charlie may have told you this, and I don't mean to tell tales about Ed, but Ed was a very...indeed, every man on Colonel Duffy's staff was very energetic. It was the Signal Corps' responsibility to procure those targets; it was not the responsibility of our and Colonel Duffy's office. However, to accelerate the activity of the Signal Corps and spur them to action, our Air Force officers in Colonel Duffy's office were literally on the backs of the Signal Corps people who did the job, and oftentimes did things they shouldn't have and
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.