Documents / FOIA release
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.
“Project Mogul”60+ pages
A22 FRIDAY, JANUARY 14, 1994 GAO Turns to Alien Turf in Probe Bodies of Space Voyagers Said to Have Disappeared in 19 47 By William Claiborne Washington Poat Staff Writer Where television's "Unsolved Mysteries" has tried and failed, the General Accounting Office is unafraid to venture. At the request of Rep. Steven Schiff (R- N.M.), Congress's investigative branch has launched a study to determine whether the government covered up a story alleging that the bodies of alien space voyagers were re- moved from a crashed flying saucer found near Roswell, N.M., in 1947. After the purported crash of the spacecraft, the bodies of the extraterrestrial visitors were said by a local undertaker and other conspiracy theorists to have been autopsied and secretly flown to an Air Force base in Ohio. Even though the "Roswell Incident" has been repeatedly dismissed by the Defense Depart- ment as nothing more than UFO fantasizing triggered by the discovery of a downed weath- er balloon, the GAO has begun searching for documents to prove allegations that the Air Force "suppressed" information sought by Schiff. Schiff is a member of the House Government Operations Committee, which oversees the GAO. GAO spokeswoman Laura A. Kopelson said the office's investigation, first reported in the Albuquerque Journal yesterday, stemmed from a meeting in October between Schiff and GAO Controller General Charles A. Bowsher. Schiff complaiiled then that the Defense Department had been "unresponsive" to his inquiries about the 1947 incident. Kopelson said "as far as I know only one in- vestigator had been assigned" to the case, and that not enough work had been done to report any results to Schiff. At another point, Kopel- son said "the people doing it are either on sick leave or are unavailable." She said there was no way of estimating how much the investigation would cost, and that the GAO does not release such information any- way. GAO conducted 1,380 inquiries into govern- ment operations in 1992. Its budget has risen from $46.9 million in 1965 to $490 million last year. The agency has been criticized, especially by Republicans, as the "lap dog of the request- ers," producing reports that tend to support whatever conclusion the requesting member of Congress suggests. Kopelson said Schiff had asked the GAO "to see if there is any evidence that information regarding UFOs had been suppressed" follow- dig the Roswell incident. Schiff, however, said that at a routine Octo- ber meeting he had merely complained about the Defense Department's lack of responsive- ness but a GAO official said, "We're willing to take a stab at it." Schiff, in a telephone interv1ew from Albu- querque, said that last March, after receiving inquiries from "UFO believers" and some Ros- well residents who were in the military in 1947, he wrote Defense Secretary Les Aspin asking for more information about the reported spacecraft crash and the alleged disappearance of the aliens' bodies. The crash o( a mysterous object 75 miles northwest of Roswell, which the Air Force lat- er claimed was a weather balloon equipped with a radar-reflecting device, was the subject of several books and remains many UFO buffs' greatest riddle. A privately owned museum in Roswell con- tains a number of documents and photographs purporting to prove existence of the aliens. It also displays a re-creation of the spacecraft surrounded by figures portraying the dead ex- traterrestrials. UFO buffs contend the incident marked the beginning of a government conspiracy to sup- press evidence of alien life. Much of the speculation stems from claims by William Haut, a former Air Force public af- fairs officer, who said that on July 2, 1947, he was told to prepare a news release reporting the Air Force had recovered parts of a flying saucer and then was told to change the story to report a weather balloon. Also, a nurse reportedly told a local funeral home director that she witnessed the autopsies of the spacemen, whom she described as having oversized heads and beetle-like features. The nurse subsequently died in a plane crash. After the autopsies, conspiracy theorists said the bodies were flown to Fort Worth and then to what is now Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. In 1989, NBC's "Unsolved Mysteries" inves- tigated the controversy, which the program's host, Robert Stack, concluded remained un- solved. Schiff said after calling Aspin last March to request a Defense Department briefing on the Roswell incident, he received a call from an Air Force lieutenant colonel, who brusquely told him the documents had been turned over to the National Archives. However, Schiff said, Archives officials told him they did not have the records on Roswell, even though they did have records of "Project Blue Book," a 1969 Air Force study of reported An "allen" depleted on NBC's "Unsolved Mysteries," which concluded case Is unsolved. UFO sightings. That study, Schiff said, did not deal with the Roswell case. "I was getting pretty upset at all the running around," Schiff said, adding that at his meeting with GAO officials, "they made an offer to help." "Generally, I'm a skeptic on UFOs and alien beings, but there are indications from the run- around that I got that whatever it was, it wasn't a balloon. Apparently, it's another gov- ernment coverup," Schiff said. He called the Defense Department's lack of response "astounding," and said government accountability was an issue "even larger than UFOs." Asked if the GAO might not be extending itself, Schiff acknowledged that the agency "usually does fiscal investigations and at pres- ent I can't find a fiscal impact" in the Roswell incident. Had the agency said, " 'This is beyond our realm of expertise.' " Schiff said, "I wouldn't insist on it." He added, "If the Defense Depart- ment had been responsive, it wouldn't have come to this."
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.