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A year later, in 1995, New Mexico congressman Steven Schiff announced the results of a General Accounting Office (GAO) the results General announced the results of a General Accounting Office (GAO) investigation, which he initiated on behalf of his constituents, attempting to access records related to events surrounding a mysterious crash in 1947, near Roswell, New Mexico, which has become famous due to the popular belief that what came down was a flying saucer. "The GAO report states that the outgoing messages from Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF) for this period of time were destroyed without proper authority," Schiff explained in his press release. "It is my understanding that these outgoing messages were permanent records, which should never have been destroyed. The GAO could not identify who destroyed the messages, or why." [6] The Air Force had claimed for nearly half a century that the crashed object was a weather balloon. In 1994, while Schiff was waiting for results from the GAO, it retracted that statement and announced that the crash debris actually came from a then-classified device to detect evidence of possible Office Soviet nuclear testing. [7] Naturally, that delayed explanation raised enough new questions to keep the Roswell controversy going, one that includes a volume of compelling witness testimony contradicting the Air Force position. The unsuccessful efforts of both Goldwater and Schiff to obtain information through official channels do not prove a cover-up of knowledge about what UFOs are, as so many would like to believe, but they do reveal how difficult it is to acquire definitive information about UFOs from the U.S. government. In fact, each component used to argue that excessive government secrecy shows there is an official cover-up of knowledge about UFOs could have a host of possible alternative explanations. We know that the FOIA does not work efficiently, and that the complicated bureaucracy involved with record keeping is overwhelmed and not well organized. UFOs might logically be on the bottom of the list of priorities. And where are all those who would have worked on this deep, black program—hundreds or thousands of specialists, or their surviving family members? Certainly at least a few would feel the moral imperative to share knowledge or discoveries about UFOs with the rest of humanity, and would take the risk of doing so, perhaps even seeking shelter in whistleblower protection programs. And yet there have been, so far as we know, no deathbed confessions or willed documents from any of these government scientists, nor have any wives revealed the truth about a Special Access Program on UFOs. Not even one. And finally, we have not seen the results of any truly fantastic back-engineered military technology that might have resulted from captured UFOs, despite rumors to the contrary. Directives to military and government employees instructing them to keep sensitive matters quiet are standard operating procedure for a range of issues and a range of purposes. The sudden appearance of an unknown object creating havoc for Air Force pilots at sensitive air bases would not be something any military authorities would wish to make public,