THE `TRUTH' ON UFOS; ROSWELL REPORT FLOATS BALLOONS, PARACHUTES AS ANSWERS : RUMORS RESEARCHED.

Byline: William J. Broad The New York Times

No bodies. No bulbous heads. No secret autopsies. No spaceship. No crash. No extraterrestrials or alien artifacts of any sort. And most emphatically of all, no government cover-up.

The Air Force on Tuesday made public its latest report on the famous 1947 incident in the New Mexico desert near the town of Roswell that is at the heart of claims by flying-saucer fans that extraterrestrials have visited the Earth and which has become a celebrated part of American popular culture.

The report, in voluminous detail, says the supposed mountain of alien evidence is a mirage.

Just as old sightings of squids and whales spawned tales of sea monsters, so too, the Air Force says, the shadowy doings of brave fliers, high-altitude balloons, lifelike crash dummies and saucerlike craft in the southeastern New Mexico desert at the dawn of the Space Age were glimpsed and embellished over the decades into false evidence of aliens.

For instance, one serviceman who crashed in a test balloon 10 miles northwest of Roswell suffered an injury that caused his head to swell and resemble the bulbous cranium of the classic science-fiction alien, the report says. This secretive 1959 mishap, it adds, apparently led decades later to tales of a crashed extraterrestrial that walked under its own power into a military hospital.

So, too, dummies were routinely dropped from balloons to test parachutes and were sometimes lost in the desert and disfigured in suggestive ways, their hands often missing a finger.

A distinguishing characteristic of the aliens supposedly sighted near Roswell, the report notes, is four fingers.

Sheila Widnall, secretary of the Air Force, in a foreword to the report, said the service worked for more than three years to find the truth behind the rumors and make it public. ``With this publication,'' she said, ``we have reached our goal.''

She praised the ``dedication and accomplishments'' of the men and women who served their country in the Southwest decades ago, several of whom were killed or injured in the line of duty.

Some critics fault the government for addressing the topic of alien visitations, laughing it off as ludicrous.

But other experts say America's obsession with unidentified flying objects has never been greater and praise efforts to combat what they view as a dangerous mania. They note the recent suicides of 39 members of the Heaven's Gate cult, who believed an alien spaceship passing near Earth would take them to an ethereal paradise.

Not surprisingly, true believers in Roswell are unshaken, seeing the new report as evidence of the most egregious government cover-up of all time, one whose 50th anniversary is to be celebrated early next month with a bash in the New Mexico desert.

Cover-up charged

``This is the biggest story of the millennium: a visit to the Earth by extraterrestrial spacecraft and the cover-up of the best evidence, the bodies and the wreckage, for 50 years,'' said Stanton Friedman, who has written about the Roswell incident and is to be a featured speaker at the upcoming gala.

In an interview, he accused the Air Force of false reasoning, selective use of data and lying.

``The evidence is overwhelming that planet Earth is being visited by extraterrestrial spacecraft,'' said Friedman, who lives in New Brunswick, Canada, and whose 1992 book, ``Crash at Corona,'' is in its sixth printing. (Corona is a village closer to the purported crash site than Roswell.)

Critics of the report bridle at its main thesis: that civilians are confusing military activities that took place over more than a decade and falsely recalling them as a single incident. Such memory failures, critics say, are highly unlikely.

But the Air Force in its report says the witnesses are often recalling events more than four decades old and could have easily mixed up the dates that badly.

Joseph KittSinger Jr., a retired Air Force colonel who was much decorated for his pioneering jumps from balloons high over the New Mexico desert, praised the report as exhaustive and overdue.

``I'm insulted at how this fraud has been perpetrated and delighted that the Air Force has taken it on,'' he said in an interview. ``Most of those people know it's a fraud, and the others are deluded.'' The report, he added, ``is a great piece of work.''

The much-debated incident took place on a desolate stretch of desert that was surrounded by a number of secret military bases. Increasingly, the site or sites (the faithful disagree on its exact location) are today ringed by tourist attractions that play on the extraterrestrial theme.

Converging on Roswell

More than 100,000 sky-watchers and conspiracy theorists are expected to visit Roswell for the incident's golden-anniversary celebration during the first week of July. Festivities are to include a Soapbox Derby-style race of homemade alien vehicles.

The hullabaloo got started in July 1947 when a ranch foreman, W.W. Brazel, found strange, shiny material littering the ground. He turned it over to the sheriff, who gave it to military authorities at the nearby air base.

On July 8, the Roswell Army Air Field issued a news release about the crash of a flying disc, prompting a local newspaper, The Roswell Daily Record, to run an article under the headline, ``RAAF Captures Flying Saucer.''

Military officials retreated the next day, calling the curious debris merely a downed weather balloon. With that, the matter was largely forgotten until the late 1970s with the birth of what eventually became a small industry of experts, books, articles and television shows recounting alien visitations and conspiracy theories.

Under growing pressure from true believers and curious congressmen, the Air Force in February 1994 began to investigate just what took place many decades ago, its review including military data that had been classified secret during the CSold War.

A 23-page report made public in September 1994 said the silvery wreckage in the desert had been part of a top-secret system of atomic espionage. That admission made the 1947 story about a weather balloon a white lie. Carried high into the atmosphere by balloon, the spy sensors listened for weak reverberations from Soviet nuclear blasts half a world away.

But the 1994 report said nothing about extraterrestrial beings, who in various accounts of the Roswell crash number between two and eight, dead and sometimes alive. The silence arose because the Air Force found nothing in the balloon saga to account for the reports of aliens, so it ignored the topic at the time and only later came up with a detailed and intriguing explanation.

The new Roswell report, titled ``Case Closed,'' was written by Capt. James McAndrew, an intelligence officer assigned to the secretary of the Air Force's Declassification and Review Team. Its 231 pages are designed to go beyond the 1994 report by revealing more about federal work in the desert and examining what apparently inspired sightings of not only alien artifacts but of the extraterrestrials themselves.

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos

PHOTO (1 -- 2) Just a dummy?

The Air Force says what looked like a body in a bag, above, was actually a test dummy from a balloon flight, insulated to protect sensitive equipment. At right, ``Sierra Sam'' posed with 1st Lts. Eugene Schwartz, left, and Raymond Madison.

Associated Press