In a July long ago, the ‘Roswell Incident’ spy-UFO crash brought fame to Fort Worth | Opinion
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(Adapted from columns published July 5, 1997, and July 6, 2017.)
The UFO craze came to Fort Worth one hot July in 1947.
The infamous tinfoil wreckage of a “saucer” from the Roswell Incident — we now know it was a top-secret spy balloon — arrived at the local air base after a crash that still stirs up dust.
First, a U.S. Army Air Force spokesman in New Mexico called it a “flying saucer.” Then, it was dismissed for 40 years as a wayward weather balloon.
While a Star-Telegram reporter was writing a serious news story about the debris — and taking photos that would become the newspaper’s most famous — the city was already mocking UFO hysteria.
An ad in the competing Fort Worth Press read:
“SAUCERS! / 15¢ a set with cup / Counter No. 11 — Downstairs Leonards”
In a Page One essay, sports columnist Blackie Sherrod described UFOs as “resembling silver-plated Frank Sinatra recordings.”
Movie critic Jack Gordon landed a zinger.
“The surest way to believe in flying saucers,” he wrote, “is to be into your cups.”
In the Star-Telegram, Brig. Gen. Roger Ramey, commander of the 8th Air Force, held up shreds of tinfoil and sticks for reporter J. Bond Johnson and claimed that it was only a weather balloon.
Over the years, UFO researchers made the photos the runaway all-time No. 1 seller from our photo archives at the University of Texas at Arlington.
Johnson happened to be in the newsroom late on July 8, 1947, when city editor Cullum Greene sent him to the air base to see the wreckage flown via B-29 from Roswell.
What the information officer in New Mexico had first described as “nothing made on this earth” was gathered up 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,” the headline read.
Johnson, then 21, a Methodist minister’s son and later a minister himself, had graduated from what is now Texas Wesleyan University.
His sister, Elaine J. Carroll, said Johnson got the assignment because the staff photographers were gone and he had a Speed Graphic camera.
Johnson shot six frames of Ramey and other officers with what Johnson described as “crumpled tinfoil, broken sticks and ragged rubber.”
Researchers have visited the UTA library to study the photos and to read the telegram in Ramey’s hand.
“This is the perfect piece of UFO evidence,” said Iowa researcher Kevin Randle, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and combat veteran.
“ ... There are people who say it refers to ‘victims of the wreck,’ but there’s no consensus,” Randle said.
The government’s story about a “weather balloon” only fed the curiosity.
“Everybody agrees something fell from the sky,” Randle said. “So far, all the evidence for it being alien spacecraft has blown up in our faces.”
It’s simply been fun for more than 75 years.
