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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. 296 …181 min.1500' Max.29700' Const.29200' Croft, Kansas 555 miles Successful controlled…
  • p. 457 …Released from Alamogordo, New Mexico, 1647 MST, September 9, 1947 Recovered at Croft, Kansas On this…
  • p. 612 …29100' Croft, Kansas 555 miles Successful controlled altitude flight demonstrating altitude controls maintains height through…
  • p. 651 …The balloon was ultimately recovered from Croft, Kansas, a distance of 530 miles from the release…
This altitude-control system operated well enough to produce a heighttime curve (Figure 4) with one descent checked by ballast dropping. Too much weight was lost in this action, and the train rose until some of the balloons were burst. Subsequent descent was not checked.

Figure 4

From this flight it appears that the inherent instability of freely extensible balloons is so great that no simple control will cause them to remain at one pressure level.

Tracking for the entire flight period was accomplished with a C-54 aircraft. Two theodolite stations were operated, one at the launching site and one at Wafford Lookout, a fire tower about 20 miles northeast of the release point.

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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.