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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. 28 …In all, he estimated, the entire lot would have weighed maybe five pounds. There was no…
  • p. 231 …It was like a 500 pound rack with a receiver, frequency meter, recorder, etc., and we…
  • p. 233 …About one pound. A: correct. And the targets are nominally maybe a quarter of a pound…
  • p. 238 …They went and got a whole bunch of soo pound bombs out of the Earl Ammunition…
  • p. 258 …Third balloon with two and a half pound stick of TNT and cap set by pressure…
  • p. 263 …releasing something like maybe several hundred 500 pound bombs for this. At the same time, Trakowski…
  • p. 323 …I 4 inches wide, and weighing 13 pounds (Atch 4). The sonabuoy contained both the acoustical…
  • p. 379 …have weighed maybe five pounds. rancher living 30 mlles south. east bright wreckage made up on…
  • p. 408 …six (6) scientists and twelve (12) thousand pounds of' equipnent from BElliAR, NEV; JERSEY to KWAJALErn…
  • p. 475 …Dry ice consumption at -GOOF is approxi- mately 150 pounds for a 24-hour period. It…
  • p. 483 …is free lift in pounds and G is gross lift in pounds. Although this equation was…
  • p. 536 …New Mexico In this flight, a 65-pound load was lifted with a linear array of…
  • p. 538 …and tour larger lifting balloons, a 53-pound load was carried alott on this flight. At…
  • p. 542 …wall) to lift • total load of S5 pounds as high aa posaible (Figure 7). 'lbe small…
  • p. 588 …the AM-1 transmitter (with about 10 pounds of batteries) was received for about 400 miles…
  • p. 608 …Buoyer.cy per Pound Mol of GaS••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••l6 V. Glossary of Term•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••21 VII. Summary of…
  • p. 614 …foot balloon should be held tinder 30 pounds; 2) ratEBot rise should be less than 900…
  • p. 621 …of 50,000 feet, with a 30-pound payload, risea about 900 feet with each kilogr…
  • p. 641 …Given: (l) The pound molar volume of any gas at standard conditions=359 ft. 3 - 15 -
  • p. 642 …2370 fte3 273.2 126 This is the mean pound molar volume at 15 km for…
  • p. 643 …foot diameter, at an altitude where the pound molar volume is 1000 ft. 3 (This is…
  • p. 715 …Suspended from the balloon is a 100 foot one thousand pound test nylon line which carries…
  • p. 736 …The solid-ballast system was complex; approxi- mately 900 pounds of sand was used on each…
  • p. 737 …It has an ultimate tensile strength of 1,900 pounds per square inch at 2SC, which…
  • p. 780 …for attaching rigging lines supporting a ~5-pound load to bottom of balloon ~nd means for…
  • p. 862 …Yii th a 20•foot General Mills balloon, using helium, a payload of 40 pounds will…
  • p. 868 …Thus, if a 40-pound load is to be lifted, it is not safe to use…
  • p. 889 …This is the volume of a pound mol of any gas at those condi- tions. By…
  • p. 893 …Elliptical shot bags, weighing 100 pounds,are used to hold the base of the bubble to…
  • p. 907 …using 15 pounds (7 kilograms) of batteries. Longer periods of transmission may be achieved by intermittent…
  • p. 984 …The detonation, or "shot" (right), of 500 pounds of TNT was monitored at White Sands Proving…
PROFESSOR MOORE - 6/8/94
strings from these four corners. Obviously, trying to take
something that's almost a meter in cross section, a meter on a
side, take it sideways up through, gave a lot of drag, and it
took a lot of lift to make the balloons rise very rapidly.
10
so instead, somebody came up with this smart idea of this
other arrangement of a corner reflector that had much less drag.
These, according to Tibbetts, weren't distributed until something
like November of 1945. As far as I know, as you will see in the
various correspondence, there were no SCR-584s which were
required to track them, issued to the weather services here in
New Mexico. Obviously, after the Trinity shot, there was no bit
military operation that required wind determination in New
Mexico.
Q: so essentially you'd say there were no radar reflectors
in New Mexico until 1947 until this appeared?
A: That's my opinion.
Q: Was Major Pritchard doing any kind of balloon project?
A: No. He and Dyvad and others were at Watson
Laboratories. I understand from Trakowski that Alamagordo Army
Air Field was about to be closed down as surplus. The people at
Watson Laboratories seized on it and were able to keep it on
active status for two projects -- one, the radar project from
Watson Laboratories that was set to track the V-2 being flown
from the proving ground across the Tulerosa Valley; and Project
Mogul.
I joined the NYU group in January of '47, and while I was
finishing up at Georgia Tech I had talked to my chemical
engineering professors, I'd already been recruited by Duffy and
Spilhaus, and I asked if you wanted to make a balloon of non-
extensible material, what plastic would you use. My professor
named Grubb told me you ought to consider polyethylene. It's a
new plastic just now becoming available. You can heat seal it.
It has a lot of desirable properties.
So as soon as I got to NYU, I began talking to everybody I
could find in Manhattan-- DuPont, all the sales offices ••.
Q: We saw your listing.
A: I was concerned with where we could get the plastic and
who we could get to manufacture the balloons. I was in my 20's,
just a recent graduate. I knew nothing about manufacturing. But
we did try to get a manufacturing company that would fabricate
balloons for us.
During that period we heard of the Navy project that was
going on at General Mills where Jean Get was planning to make a
flight to 100,000 feet. General Mills at that time was making

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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.