Roswell Army Air Field announces recovery of a 'flying disc'

On 8 July 1947, the Public Information Office at Roswell Army Air Field in New Mexico issued a press release announcing that the 509th Bomb Group — at the time the only nuclear-armed unit in the world — had come into possession of a 'flying disc' recovered from a ranch in the surrounding desert. The wire services carried the story nationwide within hours.

Later that day, the higher-headquarters Eighth Air Force in Fort Worth retracted the announcement and presented to reporters debris that was identified as a downed weather balloon. The recovered debris had originally been examined by Maj. Jesse Marcel, the base intelligence officer, who would later say in interviews that the material did not, in his view, resemble any conventional balloon.

In 1994 and 1997, the U.S. Air Force published two reports identifying the recovered debris as belonging to Project Mogul, a then-classified high-altitude balloon program intended to detect Soviet nuclear tests. The Roswell case nevertheless remains a touchstone of the public conversation about government secrecy and UAP.