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. 31 …SEARCH STRATEGY AND METHODOLOGY To insure senior Air Force leadership that there were no hidden or…
  • p. 32 …Secretary of the Air Force or the Senior Security Official of the Air Force that would…
  • p. 34 …Besides the obvious irregularity and illegality of keeping such information from the most senior Air Force…
  • p. 106 n1e Public Information Office was host during the mon~~ to the Senior Air Scouts of ~ie…
  • p. 163 …Sir, you were the senior officer and the commander at the detachment there at Roswell?
  • p. 164 …The senior was a Master Sergeant by the name of Rickett and the young agent, Jack…
  • p. 170 …implying that was you, since you were the senior guy. SC: rmjust reading this end quote…
  • p. 177 …But Rickett, the Provost Marshal and the senior intelligence officer walked into the debris field, examined…
  • p. 227 …Because I was a senior at Georgia Tech in a chemical engineering course with a fair…
  • p. 260 …I would have thought, since Crary was a senior person and he and Peoples, Peoples was…
some tape with flowers printed upon it had been used in the
construction. No string or wire were to be found but there were
some eyelets in the paper to indicate that some sort of attachment
may have been used. Brazel said that he had previously found two
weather balloons on the ranch, but _that what he found this time did
not in any way resemble either of these.
EVOLUTION OF THE EVENT FROM 1947 TO THE PRESENT
General Ramey's press conference and rancher Brazel's statement effectively
ended this as a UFO-related matter until1978, although some UFO researchers
argue that there were several obtuse references to it in 1950's-era literature.
Roswell, for example, is not referred to in the official USAF investigation of UFOs
reported in Project Bluebook or its predecessors, Project Sign and Project Grudge,
which ran from 1948-1969 (which Congressman Schiff subsequently learned when
he made his original inquiry).
In 1978, an article appeared in a tabloid newspaper, the National Enquirer, which
reported the former intelligence officer, Marcel, claimed that he had recovered
UFO debris near Roswell in 1947. Also in 1978, a UFO researcher, Stanton
Friedman, met with Marcel and began investigating the claims that the material
Marcel handled was from a crashed UFO. Similarly, two authors, William L.
Moore and Charles Berlitz, also engaged in research which led them to publish
a book, The Roswell Incident, in 1980. In this book they reported they interviewed
a number of persons who claimed to have been present at Roswell in 1947 and
professed to be either firsthand or secondhand witnesses to strange events that
supposedly occurred. Since 1978-1980, other UFO researchers, most notably
Donald Schmitt and Kevin Randle, claim to have located and interviewed even
more persons with supposed knowledge of unusual happenings at Roswell. These
included both civilian and former military persons.
Additionally, the Robert Stack-hosted television show "Unsolved Mysteries"
devoted a large portion of one show to a "re-creation" of the supposed Roswell
events. Numerous other television shows have done likewise, particularly during
the last several years, and a made-for-TV movie on the subject is due to be
released this summer. The overall thrust of these articles, books, and shows is that
the "Roswell Incident" was actually the crash of a craft from another world, the
US Government recovered it, and has been "covering up" this fact from the
American public since 1947, using a combination of disinformation, ridicule, and
threats of bodily harm, to do so. Generally, the USAF bears the brunt of these
accusations.
From the rather benign description of the "event" and the recovery of some
material as described in the original newspaper accounts, the "Roswell Incident"
has since grown to mythical (if not mystical) proportions in the eyes and minds
of some researchers, portions of the media and at least part of the American
public. There are also now several major variations of the "Roswell story." For
13

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.