On 8 July 1947 the army airfield at Roswell issued a press release saying it had recovered a "flying disc". Hours later the statement was withdrawn and the debris called a weather balloon. It would have been forgotten if participants had not started telling it differently in the late 1970s; by the 1990s Roswell was shorthand for cover-up. In 1994 the Air Force admitted the balloon was not meteorological but part of Project Mogul, listening for Soviet nuclear tests — a truth forty-seven years late, which by then convinced nobody.