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.
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to the automatic ballast valve system, a fixed-flow needle valve was set to discharge ballast slightly in excess of the expected loss. Both systems failed to keep the balloon afloat, and a slow descent from its maximum altitude of 14,000 feet MSL resulted. The expected altitude of 38,000 feet was not reached, and this is believed to be due to mixing of the air with the lifting gas during rising. The bottom of the balloon was open with no protecting skirt or valve to keep out air. Since the thin fabric would rupture with an internal pressure of 0.017 psi, some form of skirt or external appendix was suggested for future flights. Radio reception with the 3 mc transmitter was excellent and far surpassed the performance of either the 72 mo or 394 mc transmitters which were also flown. Because of the low elevation angle of the transmitter, the single SCR-658 radio direction-finding equipment was not of much use for positioning. Tracking by aircraft was satisfactory throughout the flight.
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.