40989242-001

STATEMENT OF WITNESS Place : Tularosa, NM Date: 28 May 95 I, Bernard D. Gildenberg, GS-14, (Ret), hereby state that James McAndrew was identified as a Lieutenant, USAFR on this date at my home and do hereby, voluntarily and of my own free will, make the following statement. This was done without having been subjected to any coercion, unlawful influence or unlawful inducement. I became involved in high altitude balloon development while an undergraduate student at New York University (NYU). Following graduation I was hired by the Air Force at Holloman AFB and worked continuously as both a meteo…

standard procedure was to preposition military recovery crews near the projected point of payload impact. The crews consisted primarily of Air Force members in uniform and they operated military vehicles. I often directed these crews to “standby” along the shoulder of Highway 285, both north and south of Roswell until the balloon was in position. The recovery crews received detailed instructions from tracking aircraft that led them to the exact location of the payload. The recovery vehicles included, depending on the mission, a crane, Weapons carriers, communications van, and occasionally tank…

Another project I was involved with was the Air Force investigations of UFOs, Project Bluebook. Since I was a meteorologist and amateur astronomer I evaluated, starting in 1951, local sightings of UFOs. New Mexico had alot of sightings because of the good visibility and the many experimental projects of the White Sands Proving Grounds. During my time on Project Bluebook there wasn’t any sightings that we could not explain. Nevertheless popular literature still refers to some of these sightings as unexplained. Another project with which I was involved, was the NASA Voyager and Viking Projects. …