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Still, as the Roswell controversy becomes more heated, Washington has been under increasing pressure to resolve it. At the urging of New Mexico Representative Steven Schiff, who complained about a government "cover-up" of Roswell and the "runaround" he was getting from the Pentagon, the General Accounting Office announced in January 1994 that it would launch a hunt for any documents related to the "incident." That announcement was noted in the Washington Post under the headline "GAO Turns to Alien Turf in Probe: Bodies of space voyagers said to have disappeared in 1947."
Stung by the publicity, the Air Force reacted defensively. It promptly began a six-month investigation of its own, and released its report the following July. The Air Force investigators, under Colonel Richard Weaver, interviewed the surviving firsthand witnesses to the debris recovery, searched records and followed leads that brought them to Charles Moore, a scientist who in 1947 was working on the then top-secret Project Mogul.
Mogul, Moore explained, involved launching trains of balloons that carried acoustical equipment designed to monitor Soviet nuclear tests. So that the balloons could be tracked by radar, they were equipped with corner reflectors. Records showed that one such balloon train was launched on June 4 and was tracked to within 20 miles of the Foster ranch before it disappeared from the radar scopes in mid-June. Even more telling, Moore reported, the corner reflectors were put together with beams made of balsa wood and coated with "Elmer's-type" glue (to strengthen them). Also, he noted, the New York toy company that manufactured the reflectors had reinforced the seams with leftover tape that Moore recalled had "pinkish-purple abstract flower-like designs"--markings that Major Marcel could have interpreted as hieroglyphics.
Finally, the Air Force report stated, "there was no indication in official records from the [1947] period that there was heightened military operational or security activity which should have been generated if this was, in fact, the first recovery of materials and/or persons from another world." The GAO probe, released in 1995, reported much the same conclusion.
Perhaps even more disturbing to Roswell buffs was "Roswell in Perspective," an article in the publication of the Fund for UFO Research. That report was the product of a two-year investigation by Karl Pflock, who, after a career that included stints in the CIA and the Pentagon, resigned to become a full-time UFO investigator and writer.
Pflock, who still believes that some UFOs are extraterrestrial, nonetheless diligently pursued leads and helped uncover the Charles Moore revelations. Pflock also found gaping holes in the testimony of such "witnesses" as Frank Kaufman and Jim Ragsdale. Pflock's conclusion: "It is all but certain that at least the great majority, if not all, of what was found at the debris field on the Foster ranch" was the wreckage of a Project Mogul balloon.
Still another recent defector from the ranks of the hopeful is Kent Jeffrey, a Delta Air Lines pilot and UFO buff best known for his "Roswell Declaration," a petition urging the Federal Government to promptly release all documents pertaining to Roswell.