Documents / FOIA release

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
side. I thought the B Model was a 1947 vintage and assumed,
wrongly so, that the C Model would have come later.
53
A: This, then, is really ••• So they didn't change the
numbers. It does show the little swivel there, in '44. Well, as
always, my memory can be improved.
Tibbetts, the radar lieutenant working for Fletcher, said
that when they got these in '44 there was a lot of trouble with
breakage in the air and they had to go back for reinforcement.
Q: That's where maybe the tape came in?
A: He said that's where the tape came in. Because it
certainly doesn't show this. There's just no question in my
memory, bad as it may be, that there was a tape there. That
impelled me to drag out Herbert Crow•s letter. While I'm finding
that, here is a communication between Todd and a Warrant Officer
Newton, who identified things in General Ramey's office.
(Pause}
Q: It says a material like mylar. Do you have any
knowledge of when that term came into use? mylar is a
polyethylene, it's a metalized polyethylene.
A: It's not really a polyethylene, it's a polyturpoline ...
Q: I'm not a chemist.
A: It's really quite a different thing. We certainly got
involved with mylar balloons in General Mills around 1950 or
1951.
Q: Nothing that early, though.
A: I think not. It was really quite a new plastic. This
is mylar. As you can see from the appearance, it's really quite
different than polyethylene. It's non-extensible, where this
really stretches. This scatters light and this doesn't. We have
flown mylar balloons and mylar balloons vacuum coated with
aluminum, but I think we didn't fly any in this era. It would be
my guess that someone is sort of confusing this with later
things. There were a lot of mylar balloons carried on rockets,
and it was called Jim's sphere. Someone named Jim came up with
the idea of increasing the turbulence around a following sphere
by putting a little protuberance, little combs out on it. That
was Jim's sphere. A lot of them were flown to measure winds in
the low ionosphere, flown on rockets, from White Sands. They
could well have fallen, but to my memory, it would have been
anachronistic, out of times.
Here's a letter to me from Herbert Crow who was one of my
technicians in the 1948 operation. These pictures you saw,

Cases discussed

About this file

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.