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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…
Released from Alamogordo, New Mexico, 1241 MST, August 25, 1948 Recovered at Lovington, Texas

This flight was planned to measure the diffusion and leakage of lifting gas through a 20-foot, .001" polyethylene balloon at 40,000 feet. A fixed-leak orifice was set to flow at 100 grams per hour, and an automatic ballast valve was included to supply more ballast as demanded. This automatic valve broke on release, and the flow of 100 grams per hour was not sufficient to keep the balloon and equipment up.

Temperature data on this flight was obtained from thermistors inside the balloon, inside the battery and in the free air. These data and the heighttime curve are shown in Figure 38. During the period from 1400 to 1530 when

Figure 38

the balloon was slowly descending, the temperature of the gas increased with respect to the free air temperature, and a differential of 150C was recorded at 1530. With subsequent, more rapid descent, this differential was reduced, presumably by ventilation. The battery box temperature remained above 100C after four hours aloft.

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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.