Word: ballooned
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...furor was short-lived. At 8th Air Force headquarters the same night, Brigadier General Roger Ramey, after consultations with his weather forecaster, Warrant Officer Irving Newton, called in the local press and announced that the debris was the remnants not of a saucer but of a high-altitude weather balloon. The sticks and tinfoil, he explained, were from a reflector used to track the balloon by radar. The next day, under the headline GENERAL RAMEY EMPTIES ROSWELL SAUCER, the Daily Record reported his retraction and explanation. In the same edition, the paper quoted rancher Brazel, overwhelmed by the uproar...
Mogul, Moore explained, involved launching trains of balloons that carried acoustical equipment designed to monitor Soviet nuclear tests. So that the balloons could be tracked by radar, they were equipped with corner reflectors. Records showed that one such balloon train was launched on June 4 and was tracked to within 20 miles of the Foster ranch before it disappeared from the radar scopes in mid-June. Even more telling, Moore reported, the corner reflectors were put together with beams made of balsa wood and coated with "Elmer's-type" glue (to strengthen them). Also, he noted, the New York...
...holes in the testimony of such "witnesses" as Frank Kaufman and Jim Ragsdale. Pflock's conclusion: "It is all but certain that at least the great majority, if not all, of what was found at the debris field on the Foster ranch" was the wreckage of a Project Mogul balloon...
...wreckage of a "flying disk," sparking incredulous news stories around the world. A few hours later, a general at the regional Army Air Force command in Fort Worth, Texas, where the debris had been sent for further analysis, announced that what had really been recovered was a weather balloon. This is the indisputable core of the Roswell Incident. Whether one chooses to believe that the government has been covering up an affair involving extraterrestrials is, of course, a more subjective matter. But because Roswell represents the only time the U.S. military has gone on record saying that flying saucers exist...
...real truth, assuming it doesn't involve a weather balloon, is made harder to get at by the sometimes mutable memories of aging "witnesses" and the fact that some of the most provocative evidence is secondhand. Industrious UFOlogists may spend years tracking down slim leads like the one attributed to a former cafe owner in Taos, N.M., who told interlocutors that an old customer, a desert rat named Cactus Jack, once told her he was "out there when the spaceship came down" and saw dead aliens with blood "like tar." But despite the best efforts of Kevin Randle and others...