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
## B. Project Facilities To meet the requirements of the contract, a research group was built up and the following facilities were made available: 1. Administrative section. 2. Engineering personnel were assigned to one or more of the following groups: (a) Balloon section (b) Performance control section (c) Telemetering section (d) Analysis section (including meteorological and performance data analysis) 3. A small machine shop was provided to manufacture experimental models of equipment which was flown. 4. A field crew for launching, tracking and recovery of balloons was established. Work-shop, laboratory, office and storage space was provided by New York University (Figures 1 and 2). Field work was largely conducted at Army bases and Air Forces installations. At one time the number of full-time employees reached 26 with 17 part-time men on the staff at that time. Most individuals were called upon to work in several departments depending upon the urgency of field work, equipment preparation or development work. ## II. PRINCIPLES OF BALLOON CONTROL Following preliminary investigations, two distinct principles of achieving constant-pressure altitude for free balloons were studied in detail. The first of these is the maintenance of the balloon at floating level by the use of a servo-mechanism or other control which causes the supported load to vary with the buoyancy of the balloon. The second principle embodies the use of a non-extensible balloon capable of withstanding a high internal pressure. With a fixed volume and a given load, such balloons remain at a constant pressure level as long as the internal pressure of the balloon is equal to or greater than that of the air at floating level. A surplus of buoyancy causes super-pressure, but when the gas is cooled relative to the air environment such a surplus is needed to prevent excessive reductions in balloon pressure. Whenever the balloon's internal pressure becomes less than that of the air, it falls to earth. Such a balloon was used by the Japanese for the fire bombing of the western United States during World War II.
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.