The article below was published in the newspaper The Gallup Independent, Gallup, New Mexico, USA, page 4, on July 2, 1947.
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By Wallace Barnes
At least the real secret about those "silver saucers" that everybody is reporting flying in the sky is out. We hadn't intended to disclose it for a long time yet, but some folks are getting so panicky about mysterious new aerial weapons that it is time to calm them down. The fact is that our boys on the lazy E Calf Ranch, since that speed test with tumble weeds we reported a while back have sort of gone wild and have been experimenting with those weeds by the wholesale. To keep better track of them they got hold of a load of cast of tin foil and fastened sheets of it to the tumbleweed racing entries. At first they had the idea they could rig up the tinfoil as a sail which would enable said weeds to travel even faster than the 183.65 miles per hour world record they originally established. The sail idea was not an unqualified success, and did not affect the speed of the tumbleweeds. From all reports it appears that weeds from the Lazy E Calf Ranch have been flying all over the country in every direction. The shining sheets of tinfoil and the erratic fluctuation of the flying weeds are apparently responsible for the numerous descriptions of them as "discs" or "saucers". It looks like the Lazy E crew doesn't have enough work to do when the boys are able to spend time playing round in this fashion, and I'll have to drop in on them and check up on this. After all, they are supposed to raise calves instead of so much h---l.
This is certainly a quite rare and new explanation for flying saucers. And we learn that pieces of tinfoil are out there in the desert, as competitors to Mogul balloon trains radar targets...
