The article below was published in the newspaper The Beacon Journal, Akron, Ohio, USA, page 31, on July 10, 1947.
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By United Press
PRACTICAL JOKERS CONTINUED to have a high time with flying saucers today as the navy advised the more serious minded "eyewitnesses" that what they saw in the sky was only a weather observation device.
It cost the navy $25 to assure itself. Lt. Rell Zelle Moore, naval air station aerology officer, launched a "ray winds" [sic, "Rawin"] weather device is a $25 "operations saucer" at Atlanta, Ga. As the helium-filled balloon carrying a tin-foil screen soared over Stone Mountains, calls poured into Atlanta newspapers reporting "flying discs".
The 4-by-10 foot screen looked like a round aluminum disc at a high altitude.
"People are only just beginning to see these things aloft," said Lieut. Comm. Thomas H. Rentz.
Andrei I. Gromyko, soviet deputy foreign minister and delegate to the United Nations, vetoed suggestions that the "flying saucers" were of foreign origin.
"Some attribute it to the British for exporting too much of their scotch whiskey to the United states. Some say it is a Russian discus-thrower training for the Olympic games who does not realize his own strength. I do not hink these versions are correct," said Gromyko.
A PHILADELPHIA department store raised the total rewards offered for an authentic flying saucers to $8.000.
Marshall Stross, reporter for the Dayton, Ohio, Herald, put through a telephone call to Russia's Foreign Minister V. M. Molotov, in Moscow yesterday to find out whether Molotov had heard of the saucers whirling over North America.
Molotov wasn't available so Stross spoke to his personal secretary, Peter Seminov, and asked him if any saucers had been sighted over Moscow.
"No," said Seminov.
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GANNON COLLEGE scientists at Erie, Pa., solved one riddle but posed another. They identified a "flying saucer" found by a Troy, Pas., mill worker as a "scoria" of solidified frothing from a volcano.
But they couldn't explain how the scoria happened to be found in a field 3.000 miles from the nearest volcano.
A New York savings bank said the flying discs were soaring dollars which the public couldn't hang onto.
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NEW YORK (INS). -- Walter Winchell, New York columnist, wrote today that despite vigorous denials by army and navy officials, the flying saucers actually are flying wings being developed by the U.S. navy.
Winchell said they can land at a very low speed, making them good for carriers, and that there "is said to be an entire squadron at Muroc Field, Cal."
HE ADDED:
"About eight months ago, the newspapers carried a story to the effect that a retired U. S. navy admiral had said that the navy was developing a completely new type of rocket weapon far more useful than the atomic bomb and that it involved an entirely new principle.
"I clearly remember it in all of the papers but never heard anything further about it. I can't even remember the name of the admiral but I believe he was addressing a meeting."
