From 1947 until the late 1970s, the Roswell Incident was essentially a non-story. The reports that existed contain only descriptions of mundane materials that originated from the Project Mogul balloon train—“tinfoil, paper, tape, rubber, and sticks.”[7] The first claim of “bodies” appeared in the late 1970s, with additional claims made during the 1980s and 1990s. These claims were usually based on anecdotal accounts of second- and third-hand witnesses collected by UFO proponents as much as 40 years after the alleged incident. The same anecdotal accounts that referred to bodies also described massive field operations conducted by the U.S. military to recover crash debris from a supposed extraterrestrial spaceship.
Fig. 3. An illustration of a Project Mogul balloon train similar to one found on a ranch 75 miles northwest of Roswell, N.M. in June 1947, which contains all of the “strange” materials described as part of a “flying disc.” Initial confusion at Roswell AAF and delayed identification of this equipment was the first in a series of unrelated events now known as the “Roswell Incident.”
TRAIN FOR CLUSTER FLIGHT NO. 2
To Be Flown at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania
A technique used by some UFO authors to collect anecdotal corroboration for their theories was to solicit cooperating witnesses through newspaper announcements. For example, one such solicitation appeared in the Socorro (N.M.) Defensor Chieftain on November 4, 1992, on behalf of Don Berliner and Stanton T. Friedman, the authors of the book Crash at Corona. This request solicited persons to provide information about the supposed crashes of alien spacecraft in the Socorro area.[8]*
* Socorro, N.M. is situated at the northwest boundary of White Sands Missile Range, the largest military test range in the United States. Since the 1940s, White Sands and the surrounding areas of New Mexico have been the site of a high volume of military test and evaluation activity, including the launch and recovery of anthropomorphic dummies carried aloft by high altitude balloons.
Fig. 4. (left) Maj. Jesse Marcel, an intelligence officer from Roswell Army Air Field, with the debris found 75 miles northwest of Roswell in June 1947. When compared to a standard radar target used by project Mogul, it is clear that they are the same object. (Courtesy, Special Collections Division, the University of Texas at Arlington Libraries, Arlington, Tex.)
Fig. 5 & 6. (Below, left and right) Constructed of aluminized paper glued and taped to a balsa wood frame, several ML-307B/AP radar targets were used on the Mogul balloon train to make it visible to radar. (U.S. Air Force photos)
