Declassified military documents show the crash was actually a secret spy balloon from Project Mogul.

In 1994, the US Air Force released a big report. It showed that the debris came from Project Mogul. This was a highly secret Cold War project. The military linked together long trains of balloons carrying special microphones. They floated these high in the sky to listen for the sound of Soviet atomic bomb tests. One of these balloon trains went missing nearby just before the crash.