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35 JOURNAL
JANUARY 26, 1938 – APRIL 12, 2023
STUART DEATON SHANOR
Sometime in the summer of 1947, W.W. “Mac” Brazel found wreckage on his ranch in Lincoln County, New Mexico, near the town of Corona, a pip on the map with a population of about 500. The nearest big town, Roswell – with 25,000 people, it was the third biggest city in the State – was approximately seventy-five miles to the northeast. So Mac brought some of what he had found
to Sheriff George Wilcox of Roswell, who in turn brought it to the attention of Colonel William Blanchard, the commanding officer of the Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF).
The next day, the RAAF released a written statement that announced “The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday when the intelligence office of the 509th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force, Roswell Army Air Field, was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc through the cooperation of one of the local ranchers and the sheriff’s office of Chaves County.”
But U.S. Army officials quickly reversed themselves on the “flying saucer” claim, stating that the found debris was actually from a weather balloon.
And weather balloon was the official story until 1994, when the U.S. Air Force issued a report in which it admitted that the story was bogus. The wreckage, the Air Force now claimed, came from a U.S. spy device created for an until-then classified project called Project Mogul. The device – a con- nected string of high-altitude balloons equipped with microphones – was designed to float furtively over the USSR, detecting sound waves at a stealth distance to monitor the Soviet government’s attempts at testing their own atomic bomb. Because Project Mogul was a covert operation, a false explanation of the crash was necessary to prevent giving away details of their spy work.
Many remained skeptical of the government’s new explanation. Roswell, to this day, remains the epicenter of the widespread belief that we have been visited by aliens.