The 1994/5 Air Force Report
By the mid-1990s, the Roswell UFO incident, the alleged crash and recovery of aliens and their spacecraft near Roswell, New Mexico, USA in 1947 had generated a mini-industry, with numerous books suggesting an alien cover-up and Roswell itself transformed into a popular tourist destination centered on UFO-related attractions.
Polls, like a 1997 CNN/Time poll, suggested that a strong majority of Americans believed that the government was hiding evidence of the existence of aliens, and specifically, that the Roswell incident involved the recovery of aliens.
In that context, many were demanding answers from their government on what really happened at Roswell in 1947, so in January 1994, Congressman Steven Schiff requested that the United States Congress’ investigative branch, the General Accounting Office (GAO), look into the matter. The next month, the Air Force was informed of the GAO’s planned formal audit. The Air Force was not the sole agency to be investigated, but it was the focus of the investigation as it had been consistently identified as most involved with the alleged cover-up. (The US Army Air Forces became the US Air Force in September 1947 and inherited all personnel, equipment, records etc.) The Secretary of the Air Force subsequently ordered an investigation to locate any information it had on the incident. (pp. 1,10–11)
The result, published in 1994 and 1995 was a near-1000 page report entitled “The Roswell Report: Fact versus Fiction in the New Mexico Desert.” The report was significant for identifying for the first time a likely source of the debris found on the Foster ranch: the remnants of a balloon train from a secret military program called Project Mogul. Though several others had suggested a Mogul program balloon as a possible candidate previously, the report had specific information that had never been revealed before about the program that led many to conclude that the “incident” had been explained.
Read more about this topic: Air Force Reports On The Roswell UFO Incident
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