In the last few months, as part of my effort to reconstruct what happened at Roswell, I have had a number of conversations with Irving Newton, the weather officer at Fort Worth Army Air Field who was called in by General Ramey to identify the unusual debris. The debris was already suspected to be part of some type of balloon device. Newton told me that he immediately recognized it as being from an ML-307 radar reflector. An ML-307 was a box kite-like device covered with a tough, paper-backed foil that was suspended below balloons or balloon arrays to facilitate radar tracking. According to Newton, most weather officers, much less the men at Roswell or Fort Worth, would not have been familiar with such a device. Newton had worked with the reflectors a couple of years earlier during the invasion of Okinawa in the Pacific. The devices were suspended below balloons, released to gather wind data for use in helping direct heavy naval artillery fire.
In one of my conversations with Newton, quite by chance, a new and important revelation came to light. He was describing the color of the symbols on one of the balsa sticks and mentioned how it was faint and had somewhat of a mottled appearance because of "the way that the dye had bled through onto the surface of the stick." This was a very important piece of information. The symbols that Newton saw on the debris in Ramey's office were on the surface of the stick, not on tape! The tape had apparently peeled away, probably because of several weeks' exposure to sunlight while it lay out in the desert. This serendipitous revelation immediately cleared up one of the biggest questions in my mind about the Roswell case -- how could Jesse Marcel, Sr., or Jesse Marcel, Jr., for that matter, not have recognized flower patterns on tape? The answer is now crystal clear. The symbols they saw were not on tape. What they saw were images of the original symbols from the dye that had bled through before the tape had peeled away. Jesse, Jr.'s testimony about the symbols definitely not being on tape was absolutely correct.