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136 the material sent on to Washington and he told Marcel to speak to no one about his experience and to return to Roswell. As a loyal and realistic officer, Marcel did exactly that. General Ramey invited the press in to announce that the excitement was over, and that the wreckage found on the Fos- ter ranch was nothing more than the remains of the radar reflector from a rawinsonde weather balloon. To do this in a convincing manner, he had someone find just such a device, made certain it looked badly damaged and presented it to the press. He then called in Warrant Officer Irving Newton from the base weather office, who promptly and correctly identified it as a weather balloon and its radar reflector. The press obligingly took notes and photographs of General Ramey and Major Marcel, and quickly put the story out on the wires: The "crashed flying saucer" was no more than a weather balloon that had been misidentified by the rancher and the first military people to see it. Major Marcel had been ordered to keep quiet, and Captain Cavitt was nowhere to be seen. The military people who could easily have spilled the beans had thus been taken care of. It should be noted here that, due to the brief window of opportunity between Walter Haut's press release (at noon, Al- buquerque time) and Ramey's official explanation a few hours later, the only newspapers that carried the crashed-saucer re- covery story were evening papers from the Midwest to the West, such as the Chicago Daily News, the Los Angeles Herald Express, the San Francisco Examiner, and the Roswell Daily Record. Major newspapers like the New York Times, the Wash- ington Post, and the Chicago Tribune were moming papers and so carried only the cover-up story the next morning. Next on the list of potential threats to the government's plan was William "Mac" Brazel, who may not have had much tech- nical background, but clearly knew a weather balloon when he saw one. More important, he could describe the wreckage in sufficient detail to convince almost anyone that it was very unusual stuff. The military took Brazel into custody for about a week, CRASH AT CORONA