Thomas J. DuBose
General Ramey's assistant and highest-ranking Air Force officer to assert that the weather balloon story was a coverup.
One of the founding generals of the Air Force, Thomas Jefferson DuBose, was General Roger Ramey's assistant at the time of the Roswell incident. He's famously pictured with the supposed debris from Roswell in General Ramey's office. General DuBose testified that the material photoed in the office is that of a weather balloon, but it is not what was recovered at the crash site.
In an interview about what was actually recovered, he said, "We didn't know what the hell it was. Nobody knew. But I can tell you this — it damn sure wasn't a weather balloon. ...McMullen said, Look, why don't you come up with something, anything you can use to get the press off our back? So we came up with this weather balloon story, which I thought was a hell of a good idea. Somebody got one and we ran it up a couple of hundred feet and dropped it to make it look like it crashed, and that's what we used... Now I imagine, privately, some people felt bad about doing things that way. But it worked. The story stuck." Later, General DuBose went on record asserting that the weather balloon was a coverup story. However, he never went as far as to state exactly what it was the government was covering up.
