Army airfield in Chaves County, New Mexico, home in July 1947 to the 509th Bomb Group, at that date the only nuclear-armed unit in the world and the group that had flown the Hiroshima and Nagasaki missions. Its commander was Colonel William Blanchard, who authorised the flying disc press release, and its intelligence officer was Jesse Marcel. The base became Walker Air Force Base in 1948 and closed in 1967; the runways are now Roswell Air Center.
The concentration of nuclear, radar and rocket assets across southern New Mexico in 1947, Roswell in the east and White Sands and Alamogordo to the west, is the background every version of the Roswell Incident 1947 narrative uses, whether to argue that something unusual was tracked there or to argue that classified balloon work explains what fell.
Connections
Roswell Incident 1947 · Jesse Marcel · Walter Haut · Project Mogul · Wright-Patterson Air Force Base · GAO Roswell Records Report 1995 · Mac Brazel