The summer of the flying disc
Summer, 1947. Rumors of flying discs were everywhere. In Roswell, New Mexico, Dan Wilmot and his wife sat on their porch at 105 South Penn. A Wednesday night. About ten minutes before ten o'clock.
A large glowing object zoomed out of the sky from the southeast. It looked oval, "like two inverted saucers, faced mouth to mouth." The entire body glowed as though light were showing through from inside. Wilmot put it at about 1,500 feet, doing between 400 and 500 miles per hour. He heard no sound. His wife heard a swishing sound for a very short time. After perhaps 40 or 50 seconds it disappeared over the treetops toward Six Mile Hill.
The ranch near Corona
June 14, 1947. On the Foster ranch, about 30 miles south of Corona, W. W. "Mac" Brazel and his 8-year-old son Vernon found debris spread over some 200 yards. Rubber strips. Tinfoil. A rather tough paper and sticks. Tape with flowers printed upon it. Brazel was sure of one thing. "I am sure that what I found was not any weather observation balloon."
On July 4 he returned with his family to gather it. Then he told Sheriff George Wilcox. Soon Maj. Jesse A. Marcel, intelligence officer of the 509th Bomb Group, was out looking for more pieces.
Noon, July 8
At noon on July 8, Roswell Army Air Field announced that the 509th had been "fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc." The same day, at Fort Worth, Brig. Gen. Roger M. Ramey called it a weather balloon. Photographers caught Marcel and Ramey with torn foil and sticks laid on packing paper. An FBI teletype described a hexagonal disc suspended from a balloon. Then the story went quiet.
The second life
In 1978 it came back. Marcel described fragments strewn over an area about three-quarters of a mile long. Material "not any thicker than tin foil" that "could not be burned" and "could not be broken." Symbols he called hieroglyphics. "It was not anything from this earth, that I'm quite sure of."
More witnesses followed. Mortician Glenn Dennis spoke of calls from the base about preserving bodies. Walter Haut, the 1947 public information officer, left a sealed affidavit describing a craft in Building 84 and bodies under a tarpaulin, each about the size of a 10-year-old child. In 1991, Col. Thomas DuBose said the balloon story was a cover story to divert the attention of the press.
The Air Force answers
In 1994 the Air Force named the most likely source. Project Mogul, a classified program that hung microphones from balloon trains to listen for Soviet atomic tests. Charles B. Moore pointed to Flight 4, launched June 4 and never recovered. Mogul's radar targets used foil, balsa sticks and purplish-pink tape with flower and heart symbols. The GAO found that key RAAF records had been destroyed, with nothing to show who destroyed them or when. In 1997, Case Closed said the bodies were probably test dummies carried aloft by high altitude balloons in the 1950s. Critics found cracks in the later testimony too. Dennis gave false names for the nurse. The 1995 alien autopsy film was admitted fake in 2006.
Legacy
Roswell now has the International UFO Museum and Research Center, opened in 1991, and a UFO Festival every year since 1995. About 90,000 visitors come each year. Folklorists study the case as a modern myth. And the Wilmots' glowing disc, seen days before the debris made headlines, still has no specific explanation.
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