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roswell

Office of the Secretary of Defense · 993 pages · text from the file's own layer

The Roswell Report: Fact versus Fiction in the New Mexico Desert was published in 1995 by Headquarters United States Air Force. It was written in response to Representative Steven H. Schiff's request and a General Accounting Office audit, and it contains Col. Richard L. Weaver's report and 1st Lt. James McAndrew's synopsis, along with attachments, appendices and photographs. The report says researchers found no evidence of an extraterrestrial craft or crew. It concludes that the 1947 debris came from a Project MOGUL balloon train.

  • p. 19 …MOGUL; their job was to deliver nuclear weapons, not to detect them. The unusual combination of…
  • p. 36 …happened near Roswell may have involved nuclear weapons. This was a logical area of concern since…
  • p. 41 …to determine the state of Soviet nuclear weapons research. This was the early Cold War period…
  • p. 183 …that time where we either dropped a weapon or did something stupid, which we had to…
  • p. 201 …long range balloons; although not effective as weapons, they did initiate the long-range balloon research…
  • p. 213 …Charles Ziegler was working on the history of nuclear weapons detection capability. He had some letters…
  • p. 249 …Out PM with several NYU men by weapons carrier, but we never located it. Rocket postponed…
  • p. 251 …so I took a weapons carrier and drove up there. We were aggressively trying to recover…
  • p. 253 …We drove up in a weapons carrier to the Roswell Army Air Field, and tried to…
  • p. 264 …We civilians were driving weapons carriers to carry helium around, and to go into town to…
  • p. 273 …a book on the history of nuclear weapons detection. It figured, of course, that Project MOGUL…
  • p. 274 …I had considerable background in nuclear weapons detection, using devices that I had developed in the…
  • p. 326 …in the :world capable of delivering nuclear weapons. It now appears that the debris from MOGUL…
  • p. 401 …a.~tack:; -;;it"t st.~c!"et weapons. ' The moat prom1a1ne. .eJ"PC'• oi: li6tening etatlon…
  • p. 804 …Dec 13 Fri.Woody and I left Alamogordo Air Base in weapon carrier and scouted out…
  • p. 805 …went in borrowed weapon carrier. '.:oody and Jeff 7owler took other weapon carrier ::1~d collected…
  • p. 808 …Phil and Sal went out to Dona and Launching Sites with weapon carrier. Hoffman, DeTurk and…
  • p. 812 …May 19 Mon Reynolds and I left about 0745 in weapon carrier for Silver City. Arrived…
  • p. 813 …Edmondson and I left about 0845 in weapon carrier for Roswell. Arrived at Hagerman about 12…
  • p. 815 …Out pm with several NYU by weapon carrier but we never located it. Rocket postponed until…
SC: Please, do.
RW: We did this, as investigators would. logically. We figured, "where would this stuff be"? So
we went to all the different records. Working for me I have a group of reservists who are
declassification experts. They are excellent researchers. They spend their whole time dealing
with records, so these people know where all this stuff is buried. So, we have been to all the
major record centers. The Archives and nuclear records (ranging from unclassified toTS nuclear
stuff because the 509th was the only nuclear unit in the world at that time. So, some of there
records were TS and still are.) That is because they have never been declassified. Anyway, we
found that there was no airplane crash that could account for this. Just to show you how unsafe it
was to fly at that time, there were six airplane crashes in less than a month in New Mexico alone
in 1947, and that doesn't include the rest of the United States. We were lucky to have six.
SC: Remind me to double back on that. Go ahead with your story and rn tell you another little
story.
RW: We found no indication of a V-21aunch that is not accounted for. There was one scheduled
on the Jrd of July and that was scrubbed. There was no indication that there was some sort of
nuclear accident at that time where we either dropped a weapon or did something stupid, which
we had to consider during that period of time, but there is no indication of any of that happening.
Weather balloon themselves are; (although they have a "return to" type of thing on them)
supposed to crash. I mean, they go up and then sooner or later they're going to come down.
Right? Now what we did find, however (and I not implying what you saw up there), but its a
possibility. There was a project run by New York University, out ofHoDoman at that time. It
was a balloon experiment that lasted for years. But at the time a portion of it was Top Secret. It
bas since then be declassified. It was called Project Mogul.
SC: Never heard of it.
RW: Mogul was designed to run balloons at very bigh altitudes with extremely sensitive acoustic
sensors (what we were looking for were nuclear test on the part of the Russians, because we
thought the Russians had gotten the bomb) so you needed high enough and far enough so, and at
a constant altitude, we could see... because there were no satellite (Unintelligible) they had a
couple Mogul balloons and several of those are unaccounted for during that period of time. They
are very large in the sense that some of them were up to 600 feet long, not one gigantic balloon,
but a series ofballoons, because as they went up to altitude some of them broke off: and some of
them dropped ballast and they were very sophisticated. They had a lot of tin foil on them and a
lot of different things. Mogul is a possibility. We found a couple of researchers from New
Mexico that we are in contact with now because they kept private records in some regards. But,
of course that was a Top Secret project at the time and we don't know if Blanchard knew about
that or not: (we don't have any indication that he did). And that they used the weather balloon in
an attempt to cover the other balloon which was a classified project.

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FOIA release, from the osd collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 993 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.