GAO Opens New Investigation Into The Roswell Crash

FBI Admits It Wasn't A Weather Balloon!

Where television's "Unsolved Mysteries" has tried and failed, the General Accounting Office is unafraid to venture! At the request of Rep. Steven Schiff, R-N.M., Congress' investigative branch has launched a study to determine whether the government covered up a story alleging that the bodies of alien space voyagers were removed from a crashed flying saucer found near Roswell, N.M., in 1947.

After the purported crash of the spacecraft, the bodies of the extra terrestrial visitors were said by a local undertaker and many UFO researchers to have been autopsied and then secretly flown to an Air Force base in Ohio.

Even though the "Roswell Incident" has been repeatedly dismissed by the Defense Department as nothing more than UFO fantasizing triggered by the discovery of a downed weather balloon, the GAO has begun searching for documents to prove allegations that the Air Force "suppressed" information sought by Schiff.

Schiff is a member of the House Government Operations Committee, which oversees the GAO.

GAO spokeswoman Laura A. Kopelson said the office's investigation, first reported in the Albuquerque Journal on Thursday, stemmed from a meeting in October between Schiff and GAO Controller General Charles A. Bowsher. Schiff complained then that the Defense Department had been "unresponsive," to his inquiries about the 1947 incident.

Kopelson said "as far as I know only one investigator had been assigned" to the case so far, and that not enough work had been done to report any results back to Schiff.

At another point, Kopelson said "the people doing it are either on sick leave or are unavailable."

She said there was no way of estimating how much the investigation would cost, and that the GAO does not release such information anyway.

GAO conducted 1,380 inquiries into government operations in 1992. Its budget has risen from $46.9 million in 1965 to $490 million last year. The agency has been criticized, especially by Republicans, as the "lap dog of the requesters," producing reports that tend to support whatever conclusion the requesting member of Congress suggests.

Kopelson said Schiff had asked the GAO "to see if there is any evidence that information regarding UFOs had been suppressed" following the Roswell incident.

Schiff said that at a routine October meeting he had merely complained about the Defense Department's lack of responsiveness. A DOD spokesperson had earlier told Schiff that Roswell "is none of your business."

Schiff, in a telephone interview from Albuquerque, said that last March, after receiving inquiries from "UFO believers and some Roswell residents who were in the military in 1947, he wrote to Defense Secretary Les Aspin asking for more information about the reported spacecraft crash and the alleged disappearance of the aliens' bodies.

The crash of a mysterious object 75 miles northwest of Roswell, which the Air Force later claimed was a weather balloon equipped with a radar-reflecting device, was the subject of several books by Stanton Friedman, a noted nuclear physicist who worked on nuclear powered aircraft during the period of the Roswell crash.

A private museum in Roswell contains a number of documents and photographs purporting to prove the existence of the aliens.

Additionally, FBI spokespersons have admitted that the object they examined from the Roswell site was definitely "not a weather balloon."

UFO investigators who have researched information about the Roswell crash have always asked these questions: "If it was a simple weather balloon, why the shroud of secrecy and why did the AAF fly the debris under guard to be examined elsewhere? And why did they change the original press release?"

After years of doubting the proponents of the Roswell crash, we now believe at least one and perhaps two saucers were recovered from the area in 1947. Were they off-world craft spying on planet Earth or were they advanced Nazi saucers from polar or lunar bases? If the GAO does its job properly, we may soon have the answers!