At the crash site, just below the summit of a 13,365-foot-high granite peak in the Holy Cross Wilderness, a vast tract of national forest near Vail, investigators looking at the possibility suggested by Mr. Button did not recover enough human remains to determine whether his son had suffered from carbon monoxide poisoning. (They did conclude that he had not been using drugs or alcohol before the crash.)

But, in discounting an accident resulting from disorientation or loss of consciousness, the investigators noted that well after the refueling, Captain Button's A-10 Thunderbolt climbed from an altitude of 6,000 feet and threaded its way through 14,000-foot-high peaks.

An avid skier, Captain Button had skied in the Colorado Rockies, had been reprimanded by the Air Force for often going out of his way to fly over the Rockies and had talked of one day leaving the Air Force to fly commercial jets out of Denver. On his final flight, Craig Button, a New York City native, roared over New York Lake at 300 miles an hour, passed within two miles of Craig Mountain and crashed into Gold Dust Peak.

The Air Force report -- which was released only after the service's Office of Special Investigations had blackened out the names of almost everyone interviewed -- sketches a picture of a ''perfectionist'' who was inwardly torn by his relationships with his mother and a former girlfriend.

Craig Button, it says, reared as an only child of elderly parents, broke as a teen-ager with his parents' faith. His mother was a Jehovah's Witness, and his father had joined the denomination after retiring from the Air Force.

''My mother is a Jehovah's Witness, raised me to think that joining the military is wrong,'' Craig Button wrote to a commander as a 23-year-old Air Force R.O.T.C. cadet at the New York Institute of Technology in Old Westbury, N.Y.

And an old classmate from the R.O.T.C. program told an Air Force investigator that Mrs. Button ''would not allow him to wear his R.O.T.C. uniform in the house.''