Government Records: Results of a Search for Records Concerning the 1947 Crash Near Roswell, New Mexico
U.S. General Accounting Office, report to Rep. Steven H. Schiff. GAO/NSIAD-95-187 · July 1995
The most-cited and least-read document in the Roswell case. A congressman asked the government’s own auditors to go and look for the records; this is what they found, and what they found missing. Twenty-six pages, fully searchable, and it does not say what either side says it says.
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What is on which page
p.4 (Results in Brief)
The destruction finding, in the auditors’ own words. “RAAF administrative records (from Mar. 1945 through Dec. 1949) and RAAF outgoing messages (from Oct. 1946 through Dec. 1949) were destroyed. The document disposition form does not indicate what organization or person destroyed the records and when or under what authority the records were destroyed.” This is the sentence that launched a thousand articles — and it is real.
p.6
The context that almost never travels with it. The National Personnel Records Center’s Chief Archivist told GAO the disposition form “did not properly indicate the authority under which the disposal action was taken,” and that “from his personal experience, many of the Air Force organizational records covering this time period were destroyed without entering a citation for the governing disposition authority.” GAO then checked: “Our review of records control forms showing the destruction of other records — including outgoing RAAF messages for 1950 — supports the Chief Archivist’s viewpoint.” The destruction was real. It was also, on the evidence GAO gathered, ordinary.
p.4
What actually survived: two documents. “Our search for government records concerning the Roswell crash yielded two records originating in 1947 — a July 1947 history report by the combined 509th Bomb Group and RAAF and an FBI teletype message dated July 8, 1947.” That is the entire contemporaneous federal paper trail the auditors could find.
p.6
What the unit history says. The RAAF public information office “was kept quite busy . . . answering inquiries on the ’flying disc,’ which was reported to be in [the] possession of the 509th Bomb Group. The object turned out to be a radar tracking balloon.” GAO notes that the RAAF’s commanding officer certified by his signature that the report was a complete and accurate account of the unit’s activities in July 1947.
p.4
The air-accident check. Army regulations in 1947 required air accident reports to be kept permanently. GAO identified four Army Air Forces accidents in New Mexico in July 1947 — all involving military aircraft, and all occurring after July 8, the date the RAAF first announced a “flying disc.” The Navy reported none. Air Force officials also told GAO that under the rules then in force, the crash of a weather balloon required no report at all — which is why an absence of paperwork proves less than it appears to.
Note. Read carefully, this document cuts both ways, which is why both camps quote it and neither quotes it at length. Records covering exactly the relevant period were destroyed with no authority recorded — that is in the report. So is the archivist’s evidence, corroborated by GAO’s own sampling, that this was common practice for Air Force records of that era rather than anything specific to Roswell.
Provenance and licence
Released by: U.S. General Accounting Office, report to Rep. Steven H. Schiff. GAO/NSIAD-95-187.
Original copy: U.S. Government Publishing Office (GovInfo). We did not obtain this document; we are hosting a copy so that the citation in the case file resolves to something durable.
Licence: Public domain — work of the U.S. federal government.
How this copy was checked: Downloaded from GovInfo; the GAO’s own copy at gao.gov returns 403, to a browser user-agent as well as a plain one, so GovInfo is the working source rather than a preference. Page 1 was read directly: title, GAO/NSIAD-95-187, July 1995, report to the Honorable Steven H. Schiff. 22 of the 26 pages carry a usable text layer, and every passage quoted above was located by page in it. The page numbers above are PDF-viewer positions (page 4 of 26, page 6 of 26), which is what your reader will show you; the report’s own printed footers number those same pages 2 and 4.
26 pages · 0.3 MB · PDF