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The Roswell Report: Fact vs. Fiction in the New Mexico Desert

USAF / The Black Vault · 1995 · 882 pages · text by GLM-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. 270 …other things, the "sound channel" in the ocean. He proved that explosions could be heard thousands…
  • p. 477 …feet carried this second flight into the Pacific Ocean. Radar, RDF and theodolite were used to…

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This was the fourth flight made with a single, 7-foot, .001" polyethylene balloon (Figure 37), carrying a light load to relatively low altitudes.

Figure 37: 7-Foot polyethylene balloon

On Flight 74, the automatic ballast meter showed that a ballast flow of 200 grams per hour was required by an automatic ballast valve on such a balloon. Flight 84 was launched in August, 1948 with a low-altitude barograph and no altitude controls to ascertain how long such a balloon would stay up. Using radar and helicopter that balloon was tracked for nearly 2 hours at an altitude of 12,500 feet with a load of 3 kilograms. It was still floating when lost.

On Flight 86, a fixed ballast leak was used, set at 170 grams per hour. After an early failure of the radiosonde transmitter, this balloon was followed with a plane; a floating level of about 14,500 feet was maintained for 4 hours, with a rise of "ceiling" of about 1200 feet per hour.

This balloon was observed during descent and was still distended, indicating that the lifting gas had been replaced by air both before and during descent.

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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.