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.
From this survey and a study of aerostatics, 10, 16, 16 it appeared that a non-extensible balloon is highly desirable due to the vertical stability exhibited when such a balloon is full of the lifting gas: A non-extensible balloon with no diffusion or leakage through the walls, which could withstand a high internal pressure, would automatically remain at the density where the buoyancy of the full balloon equaled the load. In practice, control devices are needed to offset the leakage and diffusion of the lifting gas and to correct for the motion of the balloon due to diurnal changes of the balloon's temperature and to correct for vertical wind currents in the atmosphere. It was decided to use a plastic as the balloon fabric, since available plastics have suitable characteristics, and are also relatively inexpensive as compared to coated fabrics. The desirable properties to be considered in the selection of a plastic balloon material are: a. Ease of fabrication b. High tear resistance c. Light weight d. High tensile strength e. Chemical stability f. Low permeability g. Low brittle temperature h. High transparency to heat radiation Table I is a qualitative-characteristics catalog of the film and fabrics investigated. The data in the table are presented as approximations because of the great variations of a given property with choice of samples and test methods. From this study, polyethylene, nylon, saran, and neoprene-
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.