From: Doug Roberts (doug@nolimits.demon.co.uk)
Copyright: 1995 by The Associated Press, R
Date: Sat, 29 Jul 95 14:50:05 PDT
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) -- Key military documents on the so-called Roswell Incident, cited by UFO buffs as an alien crash, were apparently destroyed without authorization decades ago, a congressman said Saturday.
Rep. Steve Schiff of New Mexico said a General Accounting Office report shed no new light on the 1947 crash and showed that 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 Air Force has said that the wreckage was probably a balloon launched as part of a classified government project to detect Soviet nuclear weapons.
The GAO report, released Friday, said that two government documents are the only official records remaining of the crash near what was then the Roswell Army Air Force Base.
For nearly half a century, the mysterious crash has fueled speculation about aliens in the New Mexico desert, Cold War secrecy and a government cover-up.
``The debate on what crashed at Roswell continues,'' the GAO report said.
It 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, the Republican congressman said.
``My understanding is that these were permanent records which should not have been destroyed,'' Schiff said.
Scientists and Pentagon officials have said an experimental aerial surveillance balloon crashed northwest of Roswell in 1947, but UFO buffs have contended that was a cover up for the crash of an alien space ship.
The GAO report includes an FBI teletype and a reference to a ``radar tracking device,'' or weather balloon.
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.