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.
“Blanchard”20 pages
second cluster flight, provision was also made to release balloons if the train rose above 40,000 ft. The flying line in the second train was approximately 500 ft. long.
This cluster flight is tedious to prepare and difficult to launch, and is a greater hazard to aircraft than the plastic balloons will be because of the great length of the cluster train.
## III e) Apparatus and Equipment.
A detailed explanation is not given on the equipment of the Cluster Flight. However, a layout sketch is enclosed in the appendix. An important piece of new apparatus for this project is the ballast valve or dribbler, a photograph and drawings of which appears in the appendix. It consists of a special diaphragm which operates a needle valve. Normally the valve is closed as the diaphragm is open to the air before the balloon reaches the desired altitude. This allows the pressure inside the diaphragm to be the same as the outside pressure. The diaphragm is sealed electrically by the baroswitch of the flight radiosonde when the balloon train passes a predetermined altitude. Whenever the balloon train descends below this preset altitude, the increase of pressure on the sealed diaphragm causes the needle valve to be opened. The greater the excess in pressure on the diaphragm the more ballast there is released through the valve. Thus a proportional restoring force is applied to the train. The ballast that is to be used is a petroleum cut boiling from $300^{\circ}$ to $400^{\circ}\mathrm{F}$ with a density of about .78 and a minimum change of viscosity with temperature. Two different type fluids that may meet this specification are the Army type compass fluid 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.