Roswell witness tells his story

Retired air force veteran Milton Sprouse clearly remembers the summer day in 1947 when he returned to Roswell Army Air Field aboard the B-29 bomber Dave's Dream from a three-day maneuver in Florida.The Escondido resident, then a corporal and engine mechanic in the Army Air Forces could not believe what his ground crew was telling him: a UFO had crashed in the New Mexico desert, on a ranch 70 miles away.The story made the front page of the Roswell Daily Record: "RAAF Captures Flying Saucer" read the headline.According to the July 8 story, "the intelligence office of the 509th Bombardment group at Roswell Army Air Field announced ... that the field has come into possession of a flying saucer."The craft supposedly had been recovered after the ranch owner notified the sheriff's department, who sent Maj. Jesse Marcel and a team to investigate. "Marcel and a detail from his department went to the ranch and recovered the disk" the story stated. "After the intelligence officer here had inspected the instrument it was flown to higher headquarters."The next day, the paper retracted the story, claiming that the recovered object was a weather balloon -an account the government stuck with until 1995. It was then announced that the weather ballon story had been fabricated to cover up Project Mogul, a top-secret project involving two-dozen high-altitude neoprene balloons designed to detect Russian nuclear explosions.According to Sprouse, five of his crew were called to the site to collect the remaining debris and load it onto a flatbed truck.

Sprouse was ordered to stay with Dave's Dream in case the military should suddenly need the craft."I had reservations of what all they were telling me, because each one of them told something different" he said. "I thought, 'I don't know.' ... Later on, when it all started coming out in piecemeal, you could put it together and tell what they said was true."As years passed, Sprouse grew more comfortable talking about the Roswell Incident.