The balloon named on 8 July was the public name. The project behind that kind of train was not public. Project Mogul, run for the Army Air Forces by New York University and Columbia, was a classified attempt to hear a Soviet nuclear test from far off, by hanging acoustic sensors on long strings of balloons. The balloons and the radar targets on them were ordinary. The purpose was not. In 1994 the Air Force, after a request from Representative Steven Schiff of New Mexico, published The Roswell Report: Fact versus Fiction in the New Mexico Desert. Charles Moore, who had flown the NYU balloons, matched Albert Crary’s diary to a service flight, Flight 4, launched from Alamogordo on 4 June 1947 and never recovered. The train used neoprene balloons, balsa, foil-and-paper reflectors, and tape. Moore’s reconstruction puts the unrecovered flight on a path that can reach the Foster ranch. No one found a serial number in Brazel’s debris. Flight 4 is the flight that fits the date, the materials, and the gap in the recovery log. It is not a piece of the ranch debris with a number still on it.

The flowered tape is the point where the later legend touches the 1947 paper. Brazel said there were letters on some parts, and tape with flowers. Jesse Marcel Jr., decades later, remembered purple symbols like hieroglyphs on a beam in the kitchen. Printed tape is the contemporary object that carries marks of that kind. “Not of this earth,” which Marcel Sr. told Stanton Friedman in 1978, is not what the Daily Record printed in 1947, and it is not what the photographs in Ramey’s office show.

The missing-records claim is narrower than it is usually told. The General Accounting Office, in GAO/NSIAD-95-187 (July 1995), searched classified and open files at the Defense Department, the FBI, the CIA, and the National Security Council. It found two records from 1947: the 509th history, which calls the disc a radar-tracking balloon, and the FBI teletype, which says the same. It also found that Roswell Army Air Field administrative records from 1945 through 1949, and outgoing messages from October 1946 through December 1949, had been destroyed. The disposal form does not name who destroyed them or cite the authority. The National Personnel Records Center’s chief archivist told the GAO that many Air Force files of that era were destroyed the same way, without a proper citation on the form. The GAO did not find an order to purge a Roswell crash file. It found a hole in the message files for a period of years, and no crash report to put in the hole. Army rules required a permanent report for an air accident. A weather balloon did not require one. Of four military aircraft accidents in New Mexico that July, all were after 8 July, and all were ordinary aircraft. The CIA’s search under “Roswell, New Mexico” produced no document.

Bodies are a second story, and they start in 1978. Friedman’s interview with Marcel reopened the case. The National Enquirer ran Marcel in February 1980. Charles Berlitz and William Moore’s The Roswell Incident (1980) added the claim that the debris in the Fort Worth photographs had been swapped for a weather balloon before the cameras, and it added Grady “Barney” Barnett. Barnett was dead. Friends said he had described a disc and small bodies on the Plains of San Agustin, near Socorro, about 150 miles west of the Foster ranch, and a party of archaeologists who were turned away by soldiers. There is no 1947 paper for that site. Friedman kept it. Kevin Randle and Donald Schmitt, in their 1994 book, told their own readers to discard it.

The body site has moved every time a new witness was added. Randle and Schmitt’s UFO Crash at Roswell (1991) put a gouge and a military cordon on the Foster ranch and brought in Glenn Dennis, a Roswell mortician. Dennis said the base asked him about small caskets, and that a nurse told him she had seen an autopsy of small bodies. He came forward after Unsolved Mysteries in 1989. The nurse has never been identified. Crash at Corona (1992), by Friedman and Don Berliner, put Gerald Anderson on the San Agustin plains as a boy who saw a craft and four beings, one alive. Anderson’s diary did not hold up, and Randle rejected the story. The Truth About the UFO Crash at Roswell (1994) moved the crash to the evening of 4 July, north of Roswell rather than on the Foster ranch, and added Jim Ragsdale, Frank Kaufmann, and a story that Lt. Gov. Joseph Montoya had seen bodies. Ragsdale’s account changed from one telling to the next. Kaufmann’s documents were later shown to be forged. The researchers who built the case do not agree on the date, the field, or the number of crashes.

Haut’s 2002 affidavit, released after his death in 2005, says he was shown a craft and bodies in a hangar. In 1947 his own release said the intelligence office would not describe the object. The affidavit contradicts the man who wrote the only contemporary announcement. The 1995 “alien autopsy” film sold by Ray Santilli was a staged film. He later said so. Majestic 12, the supposed recovery memo, was already labeled a hoax in Randle and Schmitt’s 1994 book. A 2011 claim that the craft was a Soviet hoax carrying surgically altered children rests on one unnamed source. It is not in the 1947 file.

The Air Force’s second report, The Roswell Report: Case Closed (1997), tried to account for the bodies rather than the foil. It pointed to anthropomorphic dummies dropped in high-altitude parachute tests in the 1950s, and to two later airborne accidents with casualties. Those dates are years after Brazel’s pasture. The report can speak to witnesses who, long afterward, mixed decades. It does not put a body on the Foster ranch in July 1947. Nothing written that month does.

What a researcher can use without taking anyone’s later word is the week itself. A ranch foreman brought in a few pounds of rubber, foil, paper, sticks, and tape. A bomb group called it a flying disc for an afternoon. The same day, Fort Worth called it a balloon and a radar target, photographed it, and told the FBI. The classified balloon program that matches those materials was Mogul. The craft, the bodies, and the second crash site are claims added from 1978 on, and the people who advanced them have not settled on one story.