Roswell UFO Incident: From Corona Ranch to Hangar 18

On 4 June 1947, researchers at Alamogordo Army Air Field launched a long train of Project Mogul balloons, carrying devices meant to listen for Soviet atomic tests. They then lost contact with the balloons and their equipment within 17 miles of a ranch near Corona. The field is now Holloman Air Force Base. This is the starting point of the official explanation of Roswell: not a visitor from space, but a missing balloon train.

Location precision: Sources name Alamogordo Army Air Field, now Holloman Air Force Base, but no launch spot; the pin marks the base, which is not open to the public.

Rancher W. W. "Mac" Brazel managed a ranch near Corona. He found tinfoil, rubber, tape and thin wooden beams scattered across several acres. With no phone or radio, he was at first unaware of the flying disc craze. On 5 July, when he visited Corona, his uncle Hollis Wilson suggested the debris could be from a "flying disk". Corona is a village of about 129 people on U.S. Route 54 in Lincoln County, New Mexico.

Location precision: Sources place the debris field on a ranch near Corona without a precise spot; the pin marks the village of Corona.

On 6 July Brazel drove to Roswell and told Sheriff George Wilcox, who called the air field. Home of the 509th Bomb Group, the only unit then able to deliver nuclear weapons, the base sent Major Jesse Marcel and Captain Sheridan Cavitt to the ranch. On 8 July press officer Walter Haut announced that the military had recovered a "flying disc" near Roswell. The field lay three miles south of downtown Roswell and later became Walker Air Force Base.

The debris was loaded onto a flight bound for Fort Worth Army Air Field in Texas. There, General Roger Ramey, Colonel Thomas DuBose and weather officer Irving Newton identified the material as pieces of a weather balloon, and media interest dissipated soon after. Today the airbase in this area, Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base Fort Worth, includes Carswell Field, about six miles west of downtown Fort Worth.

Location precision: The pin marks Carswell Field west of Fort Worth; the sources used here do not say that exact field hosted the 1947 press conference.

A portion of the material was flown on to Wright Field in Ohio, where Colonel Marcellus Duffy identified it as balloon equipment. Duffy had earlier experience with Project Mogul. Wright Field is now part of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, which includes both Wright and Patterson Fields. Legend later placed a crashed Roswell UFO in its Hangar 18, which is purported to be the repository of such a craft.

Location precision: Wright Field is today part of a large base; the pin marks Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, not a single building.

Founded by Glenn Dennis, the International UFO Museum and Research Center opened in September 1991 in a former 1930s movie theater in downtown Roswell. It centers on the 1947 incident, with a large library and a gift store of UFO souvenirs. The town's tourism rests on ufology, alien-themed iconography and a yearly UFO festival held since 1995. Around 90,000 tourists visit Roswell each year.

Visitor guidance: In downtown Roswell; check the museum's official site for hours.