Military Post-Roswell Debunking Campaign

This highly significant photo below appeared July 11 in the Fort Worth Star- Telegram, the same newspaper which was responsible for most of the photos taken in Gen. Ramey's office two days earlier. There were two more photos of this demonstration (below), all three photos now residing in the Special Collections Division of the University of Texas, Arlington, in the Star-Telegram "Roswell" photo collection. Pictured in the photos is a demonstration launch at the Fort Worth air base of a weather balloon radar target of the same variety sometimes used with the Mogul balloons (the contemporary USAF explanation for the Roswell crash). Also in the background is a large radar trailer used to track the balloon (compare to radar trailer pictured in Kansas City photo below). These photos almost certainly prove that these radar targets were readily available at the base. Obviously the radar target displayed in General Ramey's office did not have to come from a Mogul balloon. The only other alternative is that the AAF went through quite a bit of effort to procure not only the balloon with radar target, but also the radar tracking trailer solely for this debunking demonstration. The caption of the picture in the Star-Telegram is an obvious effort to debunk the reported saucers and the Roswell event as being the result of radar targets.

The pictures below are from a flying saucer debunking newsreel that was made at the time of the other demonstrations, but the exact location(s) where the newsreel was made and other details are still being determined. This demonstration may ultimately have been the most important of them all as a debunking vehicle, because the weekly newsreels were probably seen by millions of people all over the country. The newsreel depicts multiple weather balloons prior to launch and during launch, and a Rawin ML-307 radar target. The targets are again equated to objects that people claim to have been seeing (the targets are called the "famous flying saucer.") Also depicted is a radar tracking trailer which is strikingly similar to those shown in the Kansas City and Fort Worth demonstrations of July 9 and July 10, 1947. The star on the trailer also indicates that it is U.S. Army. The Air Force public relations department released this film clip along with other video documentation as part of their media event on June 24, 1997, when they announced their "crash dummies" "explanation" for the reports of bodies at Roswell. The segment is somewhat misleadingly labeled as "Examples of equipment used in Project Mogul," although this balloon demo had nothing to do with Mogul, but was instead part of the military saucer debunking campaign post-Roswell.