The Roswell Report: Case Closed
Capt. James McAndrew, Secretary of the Air Force Declassification and Review Team; Headquarters United States Air Force · 1997
The Air Force’s second and final report, and the one that tried to explain the bodies. Whatever you make of its conclusions, it is the official position stated at length with its sources attached — 232 pages including signed witness statements and an appendix of dummy-drop locations. It is quoted constantly and read rarely.
Open the PDF — 232 pages, 18.7 MB
Hosted here in full. Nothing has been re-compressed, re-OCR’d or altered.
What is on which page
Cover
“THE ROSWELL REPORT: CASE CLOSED”, Headquarters United States Air Force, accession number 19970625 053, marked DISTRIBUTION STATEMENT A: Approved for public release; Distribution Unlimited. The title is not modest and was not meant to be.
Section One, p.5
Flying Saucer Crashes and Alien Bodies — the report’s answer to the bodies-in-the-desert strand. Its four parts are the crash sites and research methods (p.11), High Altitude Balloon Dummy Drops (p.23), high-altitude balloon operations (p.37), and a comparison of witness accounts to Air Force activities (p.55). The dummy-drop argument is the load-bearing one and it starts on p.23.
Section Two, p.75
Reports of Bodies at Roswell Army Air Field Hospital — a separate strand from Section One, dealing with the hospital accounts rather than the desert ones: The “Missing” Nurse and the Pediatrician (p.81), aircraft accidents (p.93), high-altitude research projects (p.101), and a comparison of the hospital account to a balloon mishap (p.109). The conclusion is at p.123.
Appendix A, p.155
Anthropomorphic Dummy Launch and Landing Locations — the tabulated drop record underpinning the report’s central claim that witness memories of small bodies recovered in the desert derive from later high-altitude dummy tests. It is an appendix of dates and places, which is what makes it checkable.
Appendix B, p.160 onward
Signed witness statements from named participants with ranks — among them Col. Joseph W. Kittinger Jr., Col. Dan D. Fulgham, Bernard D. Gildenberg and Lt. Col. Raymond A. Madson. Whatever the report concludes, it does not hide who it spoke to.
Note. This copy has no text layer. It is a page-image scan, so it cannot be searched in a PDF reader; the page references above come from the report’s own printed table of contents, which is the pagination a reader would cite anyway. The chronology also matters: the Air Force published this in 1997, after the 1995 GAO search, and it is best read as the service’s answer to questions that search left open rather than as an independent investigation.
Provenance and licence
Released by: Capt. James McAndrew, Secretary of the Air Force Declassification and Review Team; Headquarters United States Air Force.
Original copy: Internet Archive (scan of the Headquarters USAF / GPO edition). 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. The cover carries “DISTRIBUTION STATEMENT A: Approved for public release; Distribution Unlimited.”
How this copy was checked: The cover page was rendered from the hosted file and read directly. The accession stamp was additionally cropped and enlarged to confirm the digits, because a precise identifier of that kind is exactly the sort of detail that should not rest on a glance: it reads 19970625 053. Note that the Internet Archive OCR of this scan does not contain the accession number or the distribution statement at all, so the cover cannot be checked from the text transcript — only from the page image. Page count confirmed at 232 and the absence of a text layer confirmed programmatically. All section and appendix page numbers above were taken from the report’s own printed table of contents, read in full. The author note in the same front matter identifies McAndrew as an Intelligence Applications Officer on the Secretary of the Air Force Declassification and Review Team, and as co-author with Col. Richard L. Weaver of the 1995 report The Roswell Report: Fact vs. Fiction in the New Mexico Desert — so the 1995 and 1997 reports share an author.
232 pages · 18.7 MB · PDF