Kansas City Star-Times, July 9, 1947, p.1
(retrieved 2026 from Newspapers.com)
DISKS ARE THEIR JOB
------------
Members of Fairfax Radar Unit Launch Them to Measure Wind.
----------------
NEW DISK CLUE A DUD
The flying disk found Monday [July 7] near Adrian, MO., is a reflector which had been sent out by an army radar bomb scoring unit at Fairfax field. [Kansas City, MO]
Lieut. Roger E. Cuddeback explained yesterday that the tinfoil-covered triangular box was part of the unit’s equipment, sent out on balloons. Two reflectors a day leave Fairfax field and usually ascend to about 100,000 feet before the balloon breaks. Then the silvery box falls to the ground.
When he reflectors are released, one at 10 o’clock in the morning and one at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, they are “tracked” with radar equipment to make wind measurements. The reports are sent to the weather bureau as a double check of its measurements.
The balloon released at 3 o’clock yesterday was about eight feet in diameter. On a 10-foot lenth of cord dangled the target, a concentric arrangement of triangles which presented a broad tinfoil-faced side no matter which way it turned.
Filled with hydrogen (it’s cheaper than helium), the balloon ascended rapidly and almost vertically above the radar bomb scoring station behind the T.W.A. overhaul base at the field. The antenna atop the radar trailer quickly turned its beam fully on the target.
The target went up about 1,400 feet a minute and soon could not be seen. But the balloon, expanding as it hit lighter air, continued in sight for fifteen minutes. From it’s starting point it moved almost directly between the watchers and the sun, the light behind it giving it a brass-colored appearance. It was impossible to distinguish that it was a ball rather than a disk.
Personnel at the base unit are used to watching the balloons to a height of 40,000 feet without the aid of binoculars. The radar plotting room at the station can track targets a lateral distance of about twenty-five miles. Letters from persons finding the not-to-be-returned targets have come from much greater distances.
Lieutenant Cuddeback said that one balloon hit a 119-mile-an-hour wind at 25,000 feet when twenty miles from the airport. That was the fastest wind recorded at Fairfax. With such a velocity, he said a balloon might be carried hundreds of miles but never at 1,000 miles an hour. Other AAF detachments also make regular wind checks.
Photo Caption (Adrian MO rawin)
THE TALL TALES OF FLYING DISKS had many Adrian, Mo., residents scoffing until this bright, silver object was found on a farm ten miles east of town. Emery Dowell, 23 is shown examining the box-like structure after its recovery. There is no mystery about it. It’s a radar reflector, covered with tin foil, which army air base weather units attach to balloons and send aloft to determine the direction and velocity of wind currents at high altitudes—(Associated Press photograph)-
Adrian, Missouri, July 7, 1947
