What Do You Suppose Happened At Roswell In 1947?

Per wikipedia:

In mid-1947, a United States Army Air Forces balloon crashed at a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico.[1] Following wide initial interest in the crashed "flying disc", the US military stated that it was merely a conventional weather balloon.[2] Interest subsequently waned until the late 1970s, when ufologists began promoting a variety of increasingly elaborate conspiracy theories, claiming that one or more alien spacecraft had crash-landed and that the extraterrestrial occupants had been recovered by the military, which then engaged in a cover-up.

In the 1990s, the US military published two reports disclosing the true nature of the crashed object: a nuclear test surveillance balloon from Project Mogul. Nevertheless, the Roswell incident continues to be of interest in popular media, and conspiracy theories surrounding the event persist. Roswell has been described as "the world's most famous, most exhaustively investigated, and most thoroughly debunked UFO claim". (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_UFO_incident)

Sounds credible to me, I see no need to dig deeper.

What I would like to know is- why was it first reported by the Air Force as a 'flying saucer'?

Nobody ever cites the clarification/retraction the paper ran a few days later: ARMY DEBUNKS ROSWELL FLYING DISK AS WORLD SIMMERS WITH EXCITEMENT https://priory-of-sion.com/biblios/links/roswell2.html

More on the story here: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/in-1947-high-altitude-balloon-crash-landed-roswell-aliens-never-left-180963917/

To speculate on an answer to your question, I'd guess the officer sent to investigate the wreckage of the weather balloon wasn't in on Project Mogul and didn't know what the wreckage was. He then made an unwise and premature quote. The Air Force clarified matters the next day. Case closed.

What does a weather balloon look like when it is deflated and laid out flat on the ground? I'm not dismissing the flying saucer thing, but one could speculate that any extraterrestrial smart enough to build a spacecraft would have certainly noticed a pattern of the damned things not flying very well once they encountered Earth's atmosphere, which would explain why there were so many reports of them crashing over the years (Black Forest, Germany 1936; Cape Girardeau, Missouri, April 1941; Roswell, New Mexico 1947, etc.) This is why flying things have wings, kids.

I don't know, maybe the U.S. Air Force thought that a flying saucer idea sounded "cool", so they built one...

https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a8699/declassified-americas-secret-flying-saucer-15075926/