Report by the General Accounting Office, published in July 1995 at the request of Congressman Steven Schiff, on the results of a search for federal records concerning the 1947 crash near Roswell, New Mexico.
The finding that matters
The report is mostly negative: it located the Air Force’s own 1994 study and little else of substance. Its one durable result is administrative. Outgoing messages from Roswell Army Air Field covering March 1945 to December 1949 had been destroyed, and the GAO could find no authority for the destruction, meaning the records were disposed of outside the retention rules that governed them.
How both sides read it
For the crash-retrieval literature it is the closest thing to documented evidence of a cover-up, and In Plain Sight uses it that way. Against that, records destruction of this kind was common in the period and the GAO did not find that the disposal was deliberate or targeted. What it establishes is a gap in the record at exactly the place a researcher would want to look, and that the gap was not created lawfully.
Connections
Roswell Incident 1947 · Roswell Army Air Field · In Plain Sight · Ross Coulthart · The Day After Roswell · Project Mogul · Kevin Randle