Well, they gotta start somewhere...this from the New York Times...
FORT BLISS, El Paso, Tex., May 29—A wild German V-2 rocket, launched from the Army's White Sands proving ground in New Mexico, fell tonight near the Mexican town of Juarez, just across the border from El Paso, alarming residents of this area. No casualties were reported. The rocket was launched from the desert firing site at Tularosa Basin, forty-four miles from El Paso. It soared into the night sky, but, instead of arching northward into the desert, it backtracked, roared southward over El Paso and fell with a loud explosion somewhere south of the Rio Grande. The rocket, twenty-eighth in a series of test firings that the Army has been conducting during the past year, had been scheduled to have been fired at 11 A. M. today, but various mechanical difficulties postponed the firing until 4 P. M. A party of Army officers, headed by Lieut. Gen. Leonard T. Gerow, commandant of the Army's Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., and including Maj. Gen. John L. Homer, commanding the Army's Anti-Aircraft Artillery and Guided Missile Center at Fort Bliss, was on hand to watch the spectacular take- off. The giant forty-six-foot rocket, weighing more than fourteen tons fully loaded at take-off, sputtered and sparked and shot irregular flames out of its Venturi burner, but refused to budge from its launching platform. The twenty-five-ton thrust of the powerful rocket motor which lifts the giant missile, the largest rocket man has yet built, did not operate, and not even the first propulsion was fully effective. The "shoot" was called off. General Gerow took off in his plane for Fort Leavenworth and General Homer and this correspondent returned to Fort Bliss, on the outskirts of El Paso. At about 7:20 P. M., the fort and the towns of El Paso and Juarez were shaken by a great explosion. Investigation revealed that the rocket, which normally blasts out a crater seventy-five feet wide and thirty-six feet deep, had landed somewhere near Tepyac Cemetery, about two and one-half miles from the center of Juarez, long a favorite resort city for tourists. Lieut. Col. Harold R. Turner, commanding officer at White Sands, the nation's principal proving ground and experimental center for giant rockets, revealed that the V-2 had been fired at 7:15 P. M. after considerable trouble. The proving ground personnel had seen that the flight was not entirely normal but expected the rocket to fall somewhere in the vast desert reservation. It was the first rocket of the twenty-eight fired which actually "backtracked" or soared in the wrong direction, although one rocket some weeks ago fell not far from the town of Alamagordo.
1947...
