The US Army reported recovering a “flying disc” in 1947. Then it changed its story

In the summer of 1947, the United States was in the early stages of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Explaining the mood, Historian Roger Launius said, “There was great concern that we were going to be head-to-head with the Soviet Union in a competition that could last a short or a long time, but may well end in nuclear annihilation.”

Into that uneasy moment, strange objects started to appear in the sky, and a New Mexico rancher found something even more strange. Here’s what happened next.

This story began with Kenneth Arnold, who was an amateur pilot and businessman. While flying near Mount Rainier, he reported that he saw a flying saucer. And that single account kicked off a wave of reports, and hundreds of UFO sightings followed.

By mid-June to early July, the number of reports had reached its peak across the country.

On July 7, 1947, rancher W. W. “Mac” Brazel went to Sheriff George Wilcox’s office in Roswell, New Mexico. He had found wreckage a few days earlier on the Foster Ranch, about 75 miles northwest of town. It included metal pieces, tinfoil, broken wood beams, rubber strips, and thick paper. 

Brazel had heard radio talk of flying saucers and wondered if his find was connected. The sheriff called the local Army air base, and Maj. Jesse Marcel went to the ranch to help gather the debris.

The next day, on July 8, the Roswell Army Air Field put out a press release. It declared: “The flying object landed on a ranch near Roswell sometime last week.” The local paper ran the headline “RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region.”

According to the University of North Texas report, the announcement was perhaps the first time the government had ever taken reports of alien aircraft seriously.

Military police collected the wreckage and sent it to Eighth Air Force headquarters in Fort Worth, Texas. A few hours after the first announcement, the airfield issued a correction saying the debris came from a weather balloon. Many suspected this was a cover-up.

In a 1978 interview, Major Jesse Marcel, RAAF Intelligence Officer, said, "I was pretty sure it was not a weather balloon. I had handled many of them. It wasn't."

But years later, declassified documents revealed Project Mogul, which was a War Department program. It sent high-altitude balloons carrying instruments aloft to detect sound waves from atomic bomb tests. It was done in hopes of learning whether the Soviet Union had nuclear weapons. In 1994, an Air Force records search concluded the debris came from a balloon that was not being used strictly for weather purposes. 

In the decades after 1947, there were many more UFO reports, including two more near Roswell. In fact, some reports also noted that alien bodies had been discovered near the crash debris. According to the U.S. Air Force, these bodies were actually "anthropometric test dummies" and sometimes even "real bodies" of personnel who had been injured or killed in the line of duty. To respond to the later claims, the Air Force published a 1997 update titled “The Roswell Incident: Case Closed.”