Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 30, 1995 TAG: 9507310083
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: ALBUQUERQUE, N. M. LENGTH: Medium
Rep. Steve Schiff, R-N.M., said a General Accounting Office report shed no new light on the 1947 crash and showed important documents are missing.
``Documents that should have provided more information were destroyed,'' Schiff said. ``The military cannot explain who destroyed them or why.''
Schiff said the GAO estimates the information was destroyed more than 40 years ago.
The GAO report, released Friday, said two government documents are the only official records remaining of the crash near what was then the Roswell Army Air Force Base.
The mysterious crash has fueled speculation about aliens in the New Mexico desert, Cold War secrecy and a government cover-up.
The report said the Roswell base's administrative records from March 1945 through December 1949 and its outgoing messages from October 1946 through December 1949 were destroyed.
Those messages, internal military communications, would have shown how military officials in Roswell explained what happened to their superiors, Schiff said.
Scientists and Pentagon officials have said an experimental aerial surveillance balloon crashed near Roswell in 1947, but UFO buffs have contended that was a cover-up for a space ship crash.
The weather balloon story has since been discredited by the Air Force itself, which last year said the wreckage was probably a balloon launched as part Project Mogul. The project was a highly classified effort to detect Soviet nuclear weapons using balloons that carried radar reflectors and acoustic sensors, the GAO report said.
by CNB