Roswell Incident -- The Congressional and Government Investigations
Roswell Incident -- The Congressional and Government Investigations
The 1994 Air Force Investigation
Following sustained pressure from New Mexico congressman Steven Schiff, the General Accounting Office (GAO) launched an investigation into government records related to the Roswell Incident in 1993-1994. The Air Force, responding to this pressure, conducted its own internal investigation and published its findings in 1994 as "The Roswell Report: Fact vs. Fiction in the New Mexico Desert."
The report, authored by Captain James McAndrew, concluded:
- The recovered debris was from Project Mogul -- a classified high-altitude balloon surveillance program designed to detect Soviet nuclear tests
- The extreme sensitivity of Mogul's classified mission explained the military's reluctance to identify the debris accurately in 1947
- No alien spacecraft or bodies were recovered
The GAO's concurrent review of government records found that outgoing messages from Roswell AAF from 1947 -- messages that would have documented what was actually recovered and what instructions were given -- had been destroyed. The destruction of these records, the GAO noted, was not procedurally authorized.
The Destruction of Roswell Records
The GAO's finding that Roswell AAF's outgoing messages had been destroyed is one of the most significant archival developments in Roswell research. The GAO stated:
"The outgoing messages from Roswell AAF for this period are not available for review. According to the Air Force, this occurred because (1) the RAAF records for July 1947 were allegedly destroyed without proper authority..."
The destruction of relevant records does not prove a cover-up -- records are routinely destroyed in government archives, and some destruction is accidental or procedurally irregular without being conspiratorial. However, the loss of precisely the records that would be most informative about what happened in July 1947 is the kind of archival gap that has been impossible to close.
The 1997 Air Force Report
In 1997, timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Roswell Incident, the Air Force published "The Roswell Report: Case Closed." This second report was specifically designed to address witness claims of alien bodies by attributing them to misidentified crash test dummies from Project High Dive, a high-altitude parachute testing program.
The chronological problem noted by Friedman and others: the Air Force acknowledged that the Project High Dive dummy drops occurred primarily from 1953 to 1956 -- six to nine years after the 1947 events. The Air Force's explanation for this discrepancy was that witnesses may have "merged" or "confused" memories from different time periods.
Congressional Hearings
The United States Congress has held several hearings related to UFO disclosure:
- 1968: UFO hearings before the House Committee on Science and Astronautics; Friedman submitted written testimony supporting the extraterrestrial hypothesis
- 1993-1994: Congressman Steven Schiff's requests that triggered the GAO investigation
- 2023: The House Oversight Committee held public hearings at which witnesses including former intelligence official David Grusch testified under oath about alleged government UAP programs; these hearings were the most significant congressional action on UFO disclosure since the 1960s and represented a dramatic shift in political willingness to treat the subject seriously -- a shift that Friedman, who died in 2019, did not live to see in its fullest form
