Introduction
In July 1994, the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force
concluded an exhaustive search for records in response to a General
Accounting Office (GAO) inquiry of an event popularly known as the
“Roswell Incident.” The focus of the GAO probe, initiated at the request
of New Mexico Congressman Steven Schiff, was to determine if the U.S.
Air Force, or any other U.S. government agency, possessed information
on the alleged crash and recovery of an extraterrestrial vehicle and its
alien occupants near Roswell, N.M. in July 1947.
Reports of flying saucers and alien bodies allegedly sighted in
the Roswell area in 1947, have been the subject of intense domestic and
international media attention. This attention has resulted in countless
newspaper and magazine articles, books, a television series, a full-length
motion picture, and even a film purported to be a U.S. government “alien
autopsy.”
The July 1994 Air Force report concluded that the predecessor
to the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Army Air Forces, did indeed recover
material near Roswell in July 1947. This l,OOO-page report methodically
explains that what was recovered by the Army Air Forces was not the
remnants of an extraterrestrial spacecraft and its alien crew, but debris
from an Army Air Forces balloon-borne research project code named
MOGUL.’ Records located describing research carried out under the
MOGUL project, most of which were never classified (and publicly
available) were collected, provided to GAO, and published in one volume
for ease of access for the general public.*
Although MOGUL components clearly accounted for the claims
of ‘flying saucer” debris recovered in 1947, lingering questions remained
concerning anecdotal accounts that included descriptions of “alien”
bodies. The issue of “bodies” was not discussed extensively in the 1994
report because there were not any bodies connected with events that
occurred in 1947. The extensive Secretary of the Air Force-directed
search of Army Air Forces and U.S. Air Force records from 1947 did not
yield information that even suggested the 1947 “Roswell” events were
anything other than the retrieval of the MOGUL equipment.’
‘h,oa,‘LrecordswhichultimatelyleadI” theidentificati””“f theoriginofthe,947cl*imsof’~“yingsa”ce~”
drhris.describedballoonrcrearchthatwasneverclassified.0th Mor.oirecords,describingmilitary
applicariuns ofbalioon-homeacousticalsensors,wcrcdeclassified.alongwithmillions ofpagcsofother
unrrlatcdexecutivebranchdocumentsbyExccurivs Order I1652,issuedonMarch6,1972by
Preside”,RichardM.Nix”“.
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