One July long ago, the fake UFO crash “Roswell Incident” made Fort Worth famous

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(Adapted from columns dated July 5, 1997 and July 6, 2017.)

The UFO craze reached Fort Worth in the hot July of 1947.

The infamous wreckage of a tinfoil “saucer” from the Roswell incident – we now know it was a top-secret spy balloon – has arrived at the local air force base after a crash that is still kicking up dust.

First, a spokesman for the US Army Air Force in New Mexico called it a “flying saucer.” Then, for 40 years, it was dismissed as a misguided weather balloon.

While a Star-Telegram reporter was writing a serious article about the wreckage—and taking photos that would become some of the paper’s most famous—the city was already poking fun at the UFO hysteria.

An ad in the rival Fort Worth Press read:

“SAUCERS! / 15¢ a set with cup / Counter No. 11 – Below Leonards”

In a front-page article, sports columnist Blackie Sherrod described UFOs as “silvered recordings of Frank Sinatra.”

Film critic Jack Gordon provided a quick-witted response.

“The surest way to believe in flying saucers,” he wrote, “is to be drunk.”

In the Star-Telegram, Brigadier General Roger Ramey, commander of the 8th U.S. Air Force, held out pieces of aluminum foil and sticks to reporter J. Bond Johnson and claimed it was just a weather balloon.

Over the years, UFO researchers have made these photos the undisputed best-seller of all time from our photo archive at the University of Texas at Arlington.

Johnson happened to be late in the newsroom on July 8, 1947, when local editor Cullum Greene sent him to the air base to look at the wreckage that had been flown in from Roswell on a B-29.

What the New Mexico public information officer initially described as “nothing created on this earth” was gathered from a ranch near Corona, New Mexico. Both the rancher and the pilot who flew it to Fort Worth described it as just a small bundle.

“’Disk-overy’ near Roswell identified as weather balloon,” read the headline.

Johnson, then 21, the son of a Methodist minister and later a minister himself, had completed his studies at what is now Texas Wesleyan University.

His sister, Elaine J. Carroll, said Johnson got the job because the staff photographers were away and he had a Speed ​​​​Graphic camera.

Johnson took six photos of Ramey and the other officers with what Johnson described as “crumpled aluminum foil, broken sticks and shredded rubber.”

Researchers visited the UTA library to study the photographs and read the telegram in Ramey’s handwriting.

“This is perfect UFO evidence,” said Iowa researcher Kevin Randle, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and war veteran.

“… There are people who say it refers to ‘victims of the wreck,’ but there is no consensus on that,” Randle said.

The government’s story about a “weather balloon” only fueled curiosity further.

“Everyone agrees that something fell from the sky,” Randle said. “So far, all the evidence that it was an alien spacecraft has flown past our ears.”

It’s just fun, and has been for over 75 years.