Documents / Report

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. 9 …Appendices to the McAndrew Synopsis are identified by gray tabs which appear at the top right…
  • p. 25 …The rubber was smoky gray in color and scattered over an area about 200 yards in…
  • p. 35 …a thick, foil like metallic gray substance; a brittle, brownish-black plasticlike material, like Bakelite; and…
  • p. 40 …the ruptured and shredded neoprene would "almost look like dark gray or black flakes or ashes…
  • p. 173 …Some of the material would almost look like dark gray or black flakes or ashes after…
  • p. 187 …He talks about the smoky gray rubber... Q: Which these samples here, as you say, if…
  • p. 206 …There's a gray area here. I was certainly aware that what we were doing in…
  • p. 308 …The rubber was smoky gray in color and scattered over an area about 200 yards in…
On these flights fixed ballast leaks of from 250 to 600 grams per hour were used. These leaks were provided through round orifices rather than through needle valves which had been in use previously. This improvement reduced the possibility of clogging.

On Flight 43 the first model of an Olland-cycle pressure modulator was flown with a modified T-69 (400 mc) radiosonde transmitter. The results obtained on this flight were not satisfactory, but later test proved successful.

The train seen in Figure 16 is typical of those flown during this period. Note the presence of the device to rip the balloon when descending into air lanes and thus speed up its fall.

Flight 16: Train, typical of those flown in April, 1948

Cited by

Cases discussed

About this file

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.