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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. 39 …An advance ground team, led by Albert P. Cray, preceded the NYU group to Alamogordo Army…
  • p. 96 …OSI also developed an advanced Narcotics Investigations Course designed to teach the latest technics in combatting…
  • p. 174 …Dr Crary and Dr Peoples were the advance people and scientific monitors for our project. Dr…
  • p. 247 …Spilly was a consultant, and even in his advancing age he was still an enormous source…
  • p. 273 …the advance party of the balloon group arrived by B-17. $ ^{21} $ On May 29, the…
  • p. 617 …in advance of balloon release and a second notice will be filed at the time of…
  • p. 618 …Upon attaining the desired altitude, the auxiliary lifting balloons will be released from the main balloon…
  • p. 694 …in advance of balloon release and a second notice will be filed at the time of…
  • p. 695 (1) The type balloon to be used in this phase of the project will be a…
maintenance of the purity of the lifting gas, this balloon floated in a region of very low pressure, thus reducing the loss of buoyancy by diffusion.

Figure 30: Aluminum battens for balloon appendix

A third factor contributing to the long flight was the heat gained by adiabatic compression of the helium during descent. In the temperature in- version of the stratosphere this adiabatic heating would add to the buoyancy by superheating the lifting gas.

From this flight it becomes apparent that the control required to maintain buoyancy at high levels is much smaller than that at low levels. On the next day, before Flight 75 had ended, a second 70-foot balloon was flown with standard automatic ballast controls, and this flight was never recovered. Presumably the marked easterly flow then observed above 60,000 feet carried this second flight into the Pacific Ocean.

Radar, RDF and theodolite were used to track the balloon.

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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.