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.
“US Navy”10 pages
sample stations. Figure 21 shows the calculated net lift of the General Mills balloons.
## C. Balloon Diameter-Weight Relationships
To facilitate design discussions, charts have been drawn up relating the approximate weight of a balloon to its size and the unit weight of the balloon fabric. A ten percent increase is added to the weight over that determined from the surface area to account for seams and shroud lines. Figures 22 and 23 are these charts.
## D. Rate of Rise
It is important that the rate of rise of a balloon be neither too fast nor too slow. For example, if a General Mills' 20-foot balloon rises faster than 900 feet per minute, there is danger of rupturing the balloon when pressure altitude is reached. On the other hand, if rates of rise under 400 feet per minute are chosen, since the free lift will be quite low, there is danger of: 1) a slight error in inflation resulting in the balloon's being unable to lift the equipment, or 2) with a wind much in excess of the rate of rise, the up-wind release failing due to the dragging of the equipment prior to its being lifted by the balloon.
To compute the free lift necessary for a given rate of rise, the equation developed by Korff $ ^{4} $ is used. This equation is:
$$
V = 4 1 2 \frac {(F)}{(G)} ^ {\frac {1}{2}} \frac {1}{3}
$$
where F = free lift in grams
V = rate of rise in feet per minute
G = gross lift in grams
For our purposes, we wish to find F and have modified the equation to read: 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.