The article below was published in the newspaper The Petaluma Argus-Courier, Petaluma, California, USA, pages 1 and 4, on July 9, 1947.
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FT. WORTH, Tex., July 9 (AP)
An examination by the army revealed last night a mysterious object found on a lonely New Mexico ranch was a harmless high-altitude weather balloon.
Excitement was high in disc-conscious Texas until Brig. Gen. R. M. Ramey, commander of the 8th air forces with headquarters here, cleared up the mystery.
The bundle of tinfoil, broken wood beams and rubber remnants of a balloon was sent here yesterday by army air transport in the wake of reports that it was a flying disc.
But the general said the objects were the crushed remains of a ray wind target used to determine the direction and the velocity of winds at high altitude.
Warrant Officer I. Newton, forecaster at the army air forces weather station here, said "we use them because they go much
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higher than the eye can see."
The weather balloon was found several days ago in a desolate section of New Mexico by a rancher, W. W. Brazel. He said he didn't think much about it until he went into Corona, N. M., last Saturday and heard the flying discs reports.
He returned to his ranch, 85 miles northwest of Roswell, and recovered the wreckage of the balloon, which he had placed under some brush.
Brazel hurried back to Roswell, where he reported his find to the sheriff's office.
The sheriff called the Roswell Air Field and Maj. J. A. Marcel, 509th Bomb Group Intelligence Officer, was assigned to the case.
Newton said that when rigged up, the instrument "looks like a six-pointed star, is silvery in appearance and rises in the air like a kite."
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By J. KELLAHIN
ROSWELL, N. M., Jul 9 -- (AP) -- W. W. Brazel, the rancher credited for a time with finding the nation's first flying disc, is sorry he said anything about it.
The 48-year-old New Mexican said he was amazed at the fuss made over his discovery.
"If I find anything else short of a bomb it's going to be hard to get me to talk," he told the Associated Press early this morning.
Brazel's discovery was reported late yesterday by Lt. Salter [sic, Walter] Haut, Roswell Army Air Field public relations officer, as being one of the flying saucers that have puzzled and worried residents of 43 states in the past several weeks.
Later, however, Brig. Gen. Roger Ramey, commanding general of the Eight Air Force of which Roswell Field is a component, said Brazel's find was merely a weather radar target.
But Brazel wasn't making any claims. He sais he didn't know what it was.
He described his find as consisting of large numbers of pieces of paper covered with a foil-like substance, and pieced together with small sticks much like a kite. Scattered with the materials over an area about 200 yards across were bits of gray rubber. All the pieces were small.
"At first I thought it was a kite. But we couldn't put it together like any kite I ever saw," he said. "It wasn't a kite."
