GAO Revised Roswell Report at Rep. Schiff's Request

SUN's continuing investigation has revealed that Congressman Steven Schiff (R.-New Mexico) got the General Accounting Office to revise its initial report when its lengthy investigation failed to find any evidence of a crashed ET craft or a government cover-up. The initial (early June 1995) report informed Schiff that the GAO had located two documents, one of them an FBI teletype, which confirmed the USAF's 1947 explanation that the debris discovered by "Mac" Brazel on the Foster ranch 75 miles north of the Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF) was from a crashed weather balloon and its radar target [SUN #35/Sept. 1995]. This contradicted Schiff's earlier views -- as reported in the Jan. 14, 1994 edition of The Washington Post -- that "it wasn't a balloon. Apparently, it's another government cover-up."

SUN has learned that on June 14, 1995, Schiff and members of his staff met with the GAO's two principal Roswell investigators, Gary K. Weeter and Jack Kriethe, to discuss the initial draft of the Roswell report. Schiff asked whether GAO investigators had looked for outgoing teletype messages from RAAF after it had issued a press release on July 8, 1947, saying a flying disc had been recovered. The GAO representatives said that they did not recall finding any such messages when they visited the National Personnel Records Center (NPRC) in St. Louis but that they had not considered this significant enough to mention in their report. Nor had GAO found any teletype messages from the Pentagon or 8th Air Force Headquarters to RAAF dealing with the incident which might prompt RAAF to respond by teletype rather than by telephone. But prompted by Schiff's query, GAO investigators said they would check their notes when they returned to their office.

GAO subsequently called the St. Louis center's Chief Archivist, W. G. Seibert, and learned that outgoing teletype messages from RAAF for the period of Oct. 1946 through December 1949 had been destroyed, probably in the mid-1950s when 38,000 boxes of old records were transferred to St. Louis. On June 20, GAO so informed Schiff who then "suggested" that GAO revise its report to mention these "missing records." The GAO did so. (Schiff is a member of the House Government Operations Committee which oversees the GAO.)

On July 5, 1995, the GAO sent a revised (second) draft report to all interested agencies including the Pentagon and NPRC, seeking their comments. This new draft included the following: "In our search for records concerning the Roswell crash, we learned that some government records covering RAAF activities have been destroyed and others have not. For example, our investigation indicates that ... RAAF outgoing messages (October 1946 through December 1949) have been destroyed. These records were listed on the RAAF document disposition register as 'permanent' records. Senior government records management officials told us that because these were permanent records, they should not have been destroyed."

NPRC's Chief Archivist sharply challenged the accuracy of these last two sentences in his July 7 message to GAO, sent by fax at approximately 4:30 p.m. (CDT). The GAO accepted Seibert's corrections and deleted from the final report the erroneous claim that the "missing" RAAF documents "were permanent records [and] they should not have been destroyed."

However, Schiff's office apparently had already written a press release (based on the GAO's second draft) and failed to notice that this erroneous GAO statement had been deleted in the final report. So the Schiff press release featured the "missing documents." It quoted Schiff as saying: "It is my understanding that these outgoing messages were permanent records, which should never have been destroyed." Schiff added: "At least this effort caused the Air Force to acknowledge that the crashed vehicle was no weather balloon," revealing that he had not studied the USAF's 23-page report.

Not surprisingly, many resulting newspaper articles on the GAO report, prompted by Schiff's press release, carried headlines like: "MILITARY DOCUMENTS FROM ROSWELL INCIDENT ARE DESTROYED" or "RECORDS DESTROYED IN UFO INCIDENT." Thanks to Schiff's suggested revision and his misleading press release, he was spared the embarrassment of admitting that the GAO investigation had failed to find any mention or evidence -- even in the highly classified minutes of the National Security Council -- that the US. had recovered a crashed ET craft in New Mexico.

One curious omission in the GAO's Roswell Report is that it does not comment on the accuracy of the USAF's report on its own lengthy investigation into the "Roswell Incident," which was released a year earlier. The USAF report concluded that the unusual debris discovered by "Mac" Brazel on June 14, 1947, was from a train of about 20 weather balloons and group of radar targets that had been launched on June 4, 1947, from Alamogordo AFB, N.M., as part of a then Top Secret Project Mogul experiment, intended to detect Soviet nuclear tests [SUN #30/Nov. 1994]. The June 4 launch had been tracked on radar to within 17 miles of the Brazel ranch before radar contact was lost.

The explanation for this curious omission, SUN has learned, is that Schiff did NOT ask the GAO to evaluate the accuracy of the USAF report. One possible explanation for Schiff's failure to ask GAO to evaluate the USAF report is that it was simply an oversight; the other is that Schiff feared the GAO would endorse the USAF report.

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GAO Report on the "Roswell Incident"

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