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xiv vague reports of unbelievable sights in the sky, here at last was something tangible. Not that any hard-nosed reporter took the preposterous story at face value, but at least it was more than the usual claim by some housewife that she had seen an alumi- num disc fly over her backyard. Questions poured into Army Air Forces information offices from Roswell to Washington, and a lot of men in uniform ran around in circles. About three hours after the story went out, it was canceled and replaced by another, quite different one: The wonderful "flying disc" was nothing more than the radar reflector from a wandering weather balloon that had somehow been misiden- tified by the first people to see it. There were sighs of relief in offices in the Pentagon as well as in newsrooms where veteran journalists had been trying to deal with some news that didn't fit the established pattern. U.S. Eighth Air Force headquarters at Fort Worth, Texas, then became the center of activity. Pieces of the remains of whatever-it-was were flown there from Roswell in a B-29 Superfortress, one of the airplanes operated by the 509th Bomb Group, which was the sole unit in the world equipped to deliver atomic weapons. It had been the B-29s of the 509th that had dropped A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Major Marcel flew to Fort Worth with the wreckage he had helped recover from the ranch crash site, and it was shown to Eighth Air Force commander Brig. Gen. Roger Ramey. He had a small quantity of it placed in an office and permitted press photographers to take pictures from a distance, while forbid- ding them to get close enough to touch it. The office was closed briefly, then reopened so that the press could see wreckage close-up and even handle it. Warrant Officer Irving Newton was called in from his post as base weather officer and promptly identified the wreckage as a radar reflector from a weather balloon known as a rawinsonde. It was used to determine the speed and direction of high- altitude winds and was a standard piece of equipment in those days. General Ramey went on a Fort Worth radio station to explain INTRODUCTION