On 8 July 1947 the 509th Bomb Group at Roswell Army Air Field issued a press release saying the field had come into possession of a flying disc. It was the only occasion on which a United States military unit announced recovery of one, and it stood for a few hours. That afternoon Brigadier General Roger Ramey, commanding Eighth Air Force at Fort Worth, told reporters the material was a weather balloon and a radar target, and Jesse Marcel was photographed beside balloon debris on the office floor. The debris had been collected by rancher William Brazel from the Foster ranch, some seventy-five miles north-west of Roswell.
The case was effectively dormant for thirty years. It returned through Marcel’s 1978 interview with Stanton Friedman and the books that followed, and by the 1990s had become the field’s central case, with witness accounts of bodies and a second site accumulating decades after the events they describe. Two Air Force reports answered it: the 1994 report identifying the debris as a Project Mogul balloon train, and the 1997 report attributing body accounts to high-altitude anthropomorphic dummy drops of the 1950s. The dummy explanation requires witnesses to have misdated their memories by years. What the contemporary paper record contains is the press release, the retraction, and the balloon photographs; everything else entered the record after 1978.
Connections
Roswell Army Air Field · Jesse Marcel · Roger Ramey · Walter Haut · Wright-Patterson Air Force Base · Majestic 12 · Crash Retrieval Program · Philip J. Corso · Kevin Randle · Philip Klass · GAO Roswell Records Report 1995 · Karl T. Pflock · Mac Brazel · Art Bell