Word: saucerful
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...509th's press officer, tells it, he was ordered by Colonel William Blanchard, the group commander, to issue a press release. Haut, now 75 (he and his wife have license plates that read MR UFO and MRS UFO), remembers Blanchard's saying, "We have in our possession a flying saucer. This thing crashed north of Roswell, and we've shipped it all to General Ramey, 8th Air Force at Fort Worth...
Haut's press release caused a sensation. RAAF CAPTURES FLYING SAUCER ON RANCH IN ROSWELL REGION, proclaimed the Roswell Daily Record on July 8. Word of the "capture" quickly spread, and the phone lines in the offices of Sheriff Wilcox and First Lieut. Haut were jammed for hours with press inquiries from around the world...
...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...
...remembers what happened next with understated anguish: "The burst door. Wood ripped from hinges, cracking like ice under the shouts. Noises never heard before, torn from my father's mouth. Then silence. My mother had been sewing a button on my shirt. She kept her buttons in a chipped saucer. I heard the rim of the saucer in circles on the floor. I heard the spray of buttons, little white teeth...
Sights like that are jarring to the senses because our experience tells us that certain things, both in and out of nature, do not go together. Meret Oppenheim's fur-covered cup, saucer and spoon is always upsetting, no matter how often one looks at it, because we tend to keep certain textures and functions separate in our minds. Snow on a beach is not upsetting in the same way, but it startles the imagination. Where a child built a castle in the sand, he might make a snowman in winter. Or he could build a fort, two forts...