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.
“Sea”23 pages
We may use this equation to approximate the rise of a full balloon system when controlled by overcompensated constant ballast flow:
$$
\frac {d z}{d t} = \frac {d W}{d t} \times A
$$
where z is the balloon ceiling, t is time, and W is total weight of the balloon system.
## B. Rate of Rise
The equation of Clarke and Korff:
$$
\frac {d z}{d t} = 2 7 2 \frac {F ^ {1 / 2}}{G ^ {1 / 3}} \frac {c m}{s e c}
$$
has been used to obtain the relationship between rate of rise and free lift (or excess buoyancy) for a balloon system of any given weight. For practical use, the equation has been modified to:
$$
\frac {d z}{d t} = 1 4 8 6 \frac {F ^ {1 / 2}}{G ^ {1 / 3}}
$$
where F is free lift in pounds and G is gross lift in pounds.
Although this equation was derived for use with extensible spherical balloons, it predicts closely the performance of non-extensible balloons while they are rising to floating level. An average value for the constant in equation (2) from actual flights is 1600 ft./min(1b.) $ ^{1/6} $
The deviation from this relationship, evidenced in several flights, may be due to several variations from the assumptions upon which the equation is based. This deviation has in general been an increase of rate of rise of from 0 to 25% at higher altitudes.
To explain this increase, let us first investigate the changes which may occur in the free lift. If any gas leaves the balloon because of leakage through the balloon or the appendix, the free lift will be reduced and the rate of rise will decrease (as it does after the balloon is full and "levels off"). Therefore, this variation may be ruled out when considering rise before the balloon becomes full.
Free lift will vary with changes of temperature of the lifting gas with respect to the free-air temperature. A change of this sort can be caused by acquisition of superheat of the lifting gas, or by temperature decrease or increase caused by adiabatic expansion or compression of the lifting gas. (These items will be discussed later in this report.) Actual temperature measurements during rising portions of flights indicate that there is no appreciable tempera- 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.