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XV what had happened and to calm things down, though his an- nounced plan to broadcast over the NBC network was never carried through. While this was going on, wreckage was packed up and loaded into an airplane to be flown to Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio, home of the USAAF's scientific labs. The press reported all of this and unanimously concluded that it had all been a mistake, that a balloon had been misidentified as a flying disc. According to the July 9 Washington Post "[Rancher William] Brazel found the broken remains of the weather device scat- tered over a square mile of his land.... He bundled the tinfoil and broken wooden beams on the kite and the torn synthetic rubber remains of the balloon together and rolled it under some brush...." As far as the press and the public were concerned, that was the end of the tale of the crashed "flying saucer." No one thought to question why something so commonplace as a weather balloon had caused so much commotion. Or how two officers of an elite AAF unit could possibly have failed to recognize it. Or how this small, flimsy contraption, which could hardly have come to earth violently, could have strewn its pieces over "a square mile" of sheep ranch. Had these questions been asked, the act of slamming the lid closed might not have been so effective. But they weren't, and the flying saucer wave of 1947 was allowed to die out. For more than two weeks, the papers and news broadcasts had been full of fascinating, fanciful-sounding stories of peculiar flying ob- jects, and nothing had come of it. It was time to move on to other matters. The baseball pennant races were in full swing, and both the press and the public were familiar with them and knew how to handle news of pinch-hit homers and shutouts. Flying discs made everyone just a little uncomfortable. INTRODUCTION