Military debunking main pageDebunking balloon demosBalloon crashes


Roswell-related caption to photos below reads:

"The year 1947 was the beginning of most American UFO sightings.  At that time military
authorities believed that many of the objects seen actually were weather balloons.  In 1947, the 
Navy launched several objects such as this  with four balloons and tin-foil covered reflectors to 
measure wind velocities by radar.  When the wreckage of one of these was recovered in Fort
Worth, Texas, in 1947, it was at first thought to be part of a flying saucer." 

The LOOK article is one of the rare references to the Roswell Incident between 1947 and the late 1970s when the case was revived.  Pictured below is Fort Worth AAF weather officer Irving Newton, often misidentified in books as Maj. Jesse Marcel, the Roswell head intelligence officer who first invesigated the crash.   Newton was ordered in by Gen. Roger Ramey, head of the 8th AAF in Fort Worth, in to put the official stamp of identification on the weather balloon supposed recovered near Roswell.  Ramey had already been unofficially identifying the debris as a weather balloon/radar target for about an hour. 

The LOOK caption is misleading and inaccurate.  The crash was not "in Fort Worth", but outside Roswell. The Navy was involved in debunking Roswell and the new flying saucers in a publicized Army/Navy debunking campaign involving weather balloons and radar targets, said to be mistaken for flying saucers.  Among the demonstrations, two Naval demonstrations were staged in Atlanta on July 9 and July 10, 1947,  involving identical radar targets as depicted below in the left photo.  However, the radar target in the Fort Worth photo was a different model, used in Army Air Force demonstrations at Fort Worth on July 10 and in Alamogordo on July 9.  In the Atlanta demonstration, the Naval officers there admitted they had never flown the radar targets before and were only doing it to mock the widespread saucer reports.