Dallas Morning News, July 9, 1947, page 1

Discovery Discredited
Suspected 'Disk' Only
Flying Weather Vane

The first real suspect in the flying saucer hunt was examined Tuesday and declared to be a phony.
This latest disk flurry was punctured at Fort Worth after an afternoon of excitement that reached into official Washington circles.
An object found near Roswell, N.M.,  and forwarded to the Fort Worth Army Air Field, was claimed to be a weather instrument such as used by both the army and the United States Weather Bureau.
Interest had grown to such a peak, however, that Brig. Gen. Roger M. Ramey, commander of the Eighth Air Force, made a radio-broadcast at Fort Worth Tuesday evening to dispel hopes that the mystery had been solved at last.
The New Mexico disk story first came from Roswell Army Air Field, where it was announced that flying saucer had landed on a ranch near there last week and had been turned over to military authorities by the sheriff's office.
Army intelligence officers looked over the object, then started it for Wright Field, Ohio, for further inspection.  After that announcement, the alleged disk disappeared for an hour or so.

Then it turned up in Fort Worth, being examined by officers there.
Telephone wires buzzed busy signals at the Fort Worth Army Air Field as the news spread.  Lt. Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg, deputy chief of the Army Air Forces, hurried to the AAF press section in Washington to take active charge of gathering news of the new disk find, the Associated Press reported.
Maj. E. M. Kirton, intelligence officer at Fort Worth Army Air Field, blew the disk theory sky high at 5:30 p.m. when he told The Dallas News "there is nothing to it."
   "It is a Rawin high altitude sounding device," Major Kirton said.


He described such an instrument, when undamaged, as of a design resembling a six-pointed star.
The army and the Weather Bureau use the device attached to a balloon, for gathering high altitude data.  It is made partly of tinfoil-like material, the officer said.

The identification at Fort Worth is final, Major Kirton said, and it will not be necessary to forward the object to Wright Field, as originally planned.  What will be done with it?
"I suppose we will throw it away," Major Kirton ventured.
   
The battered weather device was flown to Fort Worth in a B-29.  It had been found by a New Mexico rancher, W. W. Brazell [sic], on his property eighty-five miles northwest of Roswell.  Brazell had no telephone and no radio; had heard nothing of the disk reports.  The rancher bundled up the remains of the shattered gadget and put them under some brush.
On a trip to town at Corona, N.M., Saturday night, Brazell heard the first reference to the "silver" flying disks, the Associated Press reported.
Brazell hurried home, dug up the remnants of the device Sunday and on Monday headed for Roswell to report his find to the sheriff's office.
An Associated Press dispatch from Fort Worth quoted Warrant Officer Irving Newton, weather forecaster at the army installation, as saying the Rawin device was used to determine the direction and velocity of winds at high altitudes.  Some eighty weather stations in the nation use them, Newton said.  They go higher than the eye can follow and they are sighted by radar.  Newton said he used identical balloons during the invasion of Okinawa to obtain weather data for use in bombardments.