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. 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…
COL TRAKOWSKI - 6129/94 6
Q: A few more names came off that news article where they're displaying the balloon
launch-Maj. W. D. Pritchard, Maj. C. W. Mangum, Lieutenant Siegal, and a Capt. L. H. Dyvad.
A: None of those names are in my memory, firm in my memory, at all.
Q: You were aware of the previous Colonel Duffy's predecessor, Major Crane ...
A: I never met Richard [Robert] Crane. I knew him only by the path of debris he left behind.
I never met him.
Q: When you took over, was there any worry about security on the project, that security was
possibly a problem, or that there was a problem or that there could be a potential problem that might
warrant scrutiny by Air Force intelligence or security people?
A: We were aware of the delicacy of security on the project, and the reason was obvious. You
could not conduct field operations of the size that we had to without somebody asking questions. Anybody
with a pair of 8x50 binoculars on the side of the mountain could look down and see what was going on,
and that, of course, would prompt questions. We were aware of all that, and we didn't really know what
to do about it except to go on doing our job and taking care of things as they occurred. But we were
aware of the sensitivity and of the weakness of security in Project MOGUL. Not from the people in the
project, not disclosure by them, but simply the obvious activity that could be observed.
You can't fill a balloon that's give-or-take 60 feet high without somebody seeing it.
Q: When you were at Alamagordo and some of the various balloons were being launched,
what was the largest array that you saw out there?
A: You mean payload?
Q: No, the entire assembly. The balloons, payloads, reflectors ...
A: I didn't observe any of the reflectors, and if I did, they were so commonplace that it
wouldn't have stuck in my memory. The neoprene balloons bearing reflectors were just common
occurrences. I wouldn't have lodged any of those observations in memory because they were just too
common.
Q: Charlie Moore has indicated that some of the balloons they tried during the early
experiments were the relatively new types of reflectors that probably had never been used in New Mexico
before, the M307B model, and that Ed Istvan had gone to several essentially toy manufacturers, to try to
get some of these reflectors made.
A: That's correct. I don't know [about] that Ed Istvan ... Ed Istvan got out of line. Charlie may
have told you this, and I don't mean to tell tales about Ed, but Ed was a very .. .indeed, every man on
Colonel Duffy's staff was very energetic. It was the Signal Corps' responsibility to procure those targets;
it was not the responsibility of our and Colonel Duffy's office. However, to accelerate the activity of the
Signal Corps and spur them to action, our Air Force officers in Colonel Duffy's office were literally on
the backs of the Signal Corps people who did the job, and oftentimes did things they shouldn't have and

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.