The following links are for the official UFO documents from various intelligence agencies with regards to the UFO reporting of their time.Its interesting to see the various stances and attitudes from the intelligence communities but one thing is for sure, behind the official scenes, away from the ridiculing main stream media and all the inadequate scientific investigation's, the REAL official line on the UFO phenomena was one of real concern,(cases of intelligently controlled unknown objects with superior technology ENTERING AND LEAVING restricted air space at WILL), history has a way of revealing the truth some how and some declassified UFO documents are starting to do just that;
I have included just a few links to these docs below for there are more to ponder on if one cares to do so.
The memo, dated the 21st of September 1957, concerns the radar detection of a UFO over the state of New York. It mentions interest in UFO at the very high level Intelligence Advisory Committee (IAC), and what is possibly electromagnetic interference with multiple radars coincident with detection of a UFO. - (Posted 27-September-1998)
4602d AISS Unit History - CUFON Document Sampler No.1 http://www.cufon.org/cufon/1957cia.htm
A sampler of items from the unit history of the 4602nd Air Intelligence Service Squadron, Ent Air Force Base, Colorado Springs, Colorado,(includes all UFO-related items). Broken into 7 parts, chose the link below to download all 7 parts.
4602smpl.zip (Posted ____ ) http://www.cufon.org/cufon/5004aiss.htm
5004th AISS Unit History - CUFON Document Sampler No.3
A sample of items from the unit history of the 5004th Air Intelligence Service Squadron, attached to the Alaskan Air Command. Contains ALL UFO-related items from the unit history 1952 - 1959 (Posted ____ )
Air Force Letter (AFL) 200-5 (HTML)
AFL 200-5 (PDF)
Air Force Letter AFL 200-5, UFO reporting requirements preceding AFR 200-2
(Posted 27-MAR-1992)
(.PDF version Posed 06-March-2004) http://www.cufon.org/cufon/AFL200-5.htm
The famous Air Force Regulation 200-2 (AFR 200-2). This version dated 12 August 1954 is after the 4602d Air Intelligence Service Squadron (4602d AISS) was brought in to assist ATIC with preliminary and field UFO investigations. (Posted _____ )
afr200-2.zip http://www.cufon.org/cufon/afr200-2.htm
Reporting Vital Sightings from Aircraft, another of the Intelligence regulations governing reporting in accordance with Joint Army-Navy-Air Force Publication 146 (JANAP 146).
Two versions are presented: 2-July-1952 and 13-May-1955. (Posted 17-Dec-2000)
Here we have a case that is of immense importance to the reality that these kind of cases involving the military and the pedigree of its military witnesses involved are credible and so fart reaching that media coverage is naturally small in comparison to the hoaxes that are swallowed up by the media and ridiculer's to provide their food for their" nothing to see hear so move along"justifications on the UFO situation on a global scale;
Subject: The Fort Monmouth / Sandy Hook, NJ Incidents, September 10, 1951
Special Report Number 1: Project Grudge
A Special Report on visual and radar UFO sightings at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey on 10th and 11th September 1951
Document date: 1951-12-28
Department: Air Technical Intelligence Center, Wright-Patterson AFB
Author: ATIC
Document type: Report
pages: 9
"The incident had started two days before, on September 10, at 11:10 AM, when a student operator was giving a demonstration to a group of visiting brass at the radar school. He demonstrated the set under manual operation for a while, picking up local air traffic, then he announced that he would demonstrate automatic tracking, in which the set is put on a target and follows it without help from the operator. The set could track objects flying at jet speeds.
The operator spotted an object about 12,000 yards southeast of the station, flying low toward the north. He tried to switch the set to automatic tracking. He failed, tried again, failed again. He turned to his audience of VIPs, embarrassed.
"It's going too fast for the set," he said. "That means it's going faster than a jet!"
A lot of very important eyebrows lifted. What flies faster than a jet?
The object was in range for three minutes and the operator kept trying, without success, to get into automatic track. The target finally went off the scope, leaving the red-faced operator talking to himself.
The radar technicians at Fort Monmouth had checked the weather - there wasn't the slightest indication of an inversion layer.
Twenty-five minutes later the pilot of a T-33 jet trainer, carrying an Air Force major as passenger and flying at 20,000 feet over Point Pleasant, New Jersey, spotted a dull silver, disk-like object far below him. He described it as 30 to 50 feet in diameter and as descending toward Sandy Hook from an altitude from a mile or so. He banked the T-33 over started down after it. As he shot down, he reported, the object stopped its descent, hovered, then sped south, making a 120-degree turn, and vanished out to sea.
The Fort Monmouth Incident then switched back to the radar group. At 3:15 PM, they got an excited, almost frantic call from headquarters, to pick up a target high and to the north - which was where the first "faster-than-a-jet" object had vanished - and to pick it up in a hurry. They got a fix on it and reported that it was traveling slowly at 93,000 feet. They also could see it visually as a silver speck.
What flies 18 miles above the Earth?
The next morning two radar sets picked up another target that couldn't be tracked automatically. It would climb, level off, climb again, go into a dive. When it climbed it went almost straight up.
The two-day session ended that afternoon when the radar tracked another unidentified slow-moving object and tracked it for several minutes.
Edward J. Ruppelt, Captain
Head of Project Blue Book
"What we have here is almost the perfect case, and there is certainly more to the story than we presently have on file. This page is simply the Directory for the Fort Monmouth and Sandy Hook documents. My more-detailed commentary serves as a synopsis and evaluation for the incidents that caused a major stir at the Pentagon."
My brief comments on the case;
Our thanks to everyone who did all the research on this monumental case. Especially to Mike Hall who provided all the original documentation, to both Wendy Connors & Mike Hall for the historical update, and to Robert Swiatek of FUFOR for the Ruppelt notes not used in his book. Without our research efforts, which resulted from the T-33 pilot reports to the media, all we had was the GRUDGE Report and this final statement by Capt. Ruppelt: "The UFO that the student radar operator had assumed to be traveling at a terrific speed because he couldn't lock on to it turned out to be a 400-mile-an-hour conventional air-plane.
He had just gotten fouled up on his procedures for putting the radar set on automatic tracking. The sighting by the two officers in the T-33 jet fell apart when Metscher showed how they'd seen a balloon." Brad Sparks analysis proves that the T-33 was NOT chasing a balloon. (See below).
This updated version is the result of the acquisition of better copies of the documents, and the subsequent locating of new ones. Our thanks here goes to William Wise of the Project Blue Book Archive, whose valuable and painstaking work has allowed us to find better and smaller jpegs of the documents to replace the bulky and "lossy" gif files I scanned in years ago. Finally our thanks to Dan Wilson whose tedious job it is to find these documents on the BB site and generate reports on various aspects of each case.
Here we have the photo analyse of the UAP/UFO that was taken by a Woman and man, this scientific analyse of these photos was to through up a conclusion that this UAP was indeed unknown;Below is some text of the analyse ,the complete text and conclusions can be found in the link provided;
Sixteen medium and high resolution, digital photos were taken on Sunday, February 14, 2010 at 1717 hrs. local time at 33 47.8’ south; 69 53.35’ W (about 45 miles SE of Santiago, Chile) high in the Andes Mountains.
They were received by the author on May 28, 2010 from the Comite de Estudios de Fenomenos Aereos Anomalos (CEFAA) for analysis and comment. This paper describes the results of various photo-optical measurements made on several of these photographs showing the solar disc, cumulus clouds, reddish clouds at a higher altitude, and an angularly small and unusual image that appeared in one photograph.
These analyses showed that (1) There was a symmetrical, apparently solid object (hereafter referred to as an unidentified aerial phenomena: UAP) with several interesting surface details present in one photograph, (2)
No evidence was found for a digital cut-and-paste operation (a hoax), (3) The UAP was not visible in any of the other photographs taken of the same location in the sky, (3) The location of the UAP was indicated to be on or near a Chilean commercial airway and might possibly have posed a threat to flight safety under certain operational conditions, and (4) The identity of this UAP remains unidentified at this time.
It is significant that if this object had mass, was within normal flight altitudes, and remained for any length of time in this location it could have been a hazard to commercial flight operations. Anytime an object of this size and high visibility is in the area where airplanes are flying it can distract the cockpit crew from carrying out their normal duties.
If the object is near by or approaching the airplane the pilot must decide whether to change his heading and/or altitude toavoid a possible collision. Because the present UAP was partially hidden by a reddish cloud layer it must have been higher than this cloud layer by some amount. Its altitude cannot be determined.
If the photographer had noticed the reddish UAP in Figure 2 wouldn’t she have tried to obtain more photographs of it? Why then didn’t she center the location of the UAP in the camera’s field of view in the following photos? Since she didn’t it tends to support her statement that she didn’t see the UAP at all.
Mention also must be made (for the sake of completeness) of the occurrence of the huge 8.8 magnitude earthquake 17 of February 27, 2010 (at 0334:14 hrs. local time) that was centered at 35 deg 54’ 32” South,; 72 deg 43’ 59” W. This was only thirteen days after this photo was taken. The estimated depth of the temblor’s epicenter was 22 miles. The horizontal distance between the photographer’s location at the El Yeso reservoir and the surface location of the earthquake’s epicenter18 is approximately 225 miles! In summary, although this UAP could not be positively identified it presented a number of highly intriguing details that deserve further research.
NARCAP IR-2, 2010; Page 1 R. F. Haines;
International Air Safety Case Report;Photo analyses of Digital Images Taken on February 14, 2010 at 1717 Hours above the Andes Mountains in Central Chile
Richard F. Haines
July 2, 2010;
Abstract ;
Sixteen medium and high resolution, digital photos were taken on Sunday, February 14, 2010 at 1717 hrs. local time at 33 47.8’ south; 69 53.35’ W (about 45 miles SE of Santiago, Chile) high in the Andes Mountains. They were received by the author on May 28, 2010 from the Comite de Estudios de Fenomenos Aereos Anomalos (CEFAA) for analysis and comment.This
paper describes the results of various photo-optical measurements made on several of these photographs showing the solar disc, cumulusclouds,reddish clouds at a higher altitude, and an angularly small and unusual image that appeared in one photograph.These analyses showed that;
(1) There was a symmetrical, apparently solid object (hereafter referred to as an unidentified aerial phenomena: UAP) with several interesting surface details present in one photograph,
(2) No evidence was found for a digital cut-and-paste operation (a hoax),
(3) The UAP was not visible in any of the other photographs taken of the same location in the sky,
(3) The location of the UAP was indicated to be on or near a Chilean commercial airway and might possibly have posed a threat to flight safety under certain operational conditions, and (4) The identity of this UAP remains unidentified at this time.
The Social Setting and Photographer Mr. and Mrs. X. X. and their twenty-plus, year-old daughter were in the AnddesMountains for a Sunday picnic (driving on a gravel road) when they arrived near the El Yeso reservoir seen in the background of Figure 1.
This high resolution photograph clearly portrays the barren landscape having little vegetation because of the extreme cold of winter, lack of top soil, high altitude, high solar energy flux, and the over-flooding that takes place. Mrs. X. said she took the sky photographs because they were, “unusually pretty.”The family has not sought publicity;
1;
This investigation was conducted as part of a joint agreement between NARCAP and the Comite de Estudios de Fenomenos Aereos Anomalos (CEFAA), an official organization within the D.G.A.C. of Chile. All data was provided by CEFAA.
2;
The family lived in Chile but were Venezuelan citizens. Both parents are professionals and their daughter is a student.
3;
Personal correspondence from Jose Lay, CEFAA, June 10, 2010.
NARCAP IR-2, 2010 Page 2 R. F. Haines;
International Air Safety Case Report money from these photographs. They indicated that nothing unusual was sensed during the time the photographs were taken nor were any unusual noises heard.
It was not until viewing the photographs later on a computer monitor that the UAP was noticed by family members. They showed the photos to friends among whom was a (male) investigator of UAP He arranged for the images to be made available to CEFAA.
The Photographic Series;
Five “pre-main sequence” photographs were taken at the reservoir site before the photograph was taken that contained the UAP image. For the first three frames (nos. 211 – 213) the camera was aimed horizontally and showed a broad valley with steep hills on both sides and the family’s car crossing a wooden bridge over a river.
In the next two (nos. 215- 216) frames the camera was aimed upward into the bright blue sky with a very bright sun and a grouping of cumulus clouds between it and the top of hills to the west of the photographer. This paper presents the six photographs in the “main sequence” (Figures 1, 2, 7 – 10). In addition, five “post-main sequence” photos were received on June 22, 2010.
In the first three of them the camera was aimed horizontally and showed the El Yeso reservoir surrounded by steep mountain hillsides. The last two photos were of a yellow cactus plant.It is assumed that Mrs. X, who took all of the following “main sequence” photos, obtained them from this same approximate location. Sunlight enters (generally) from the right side of
Figure 1 at an elevation of 39 degrees above the horizon at 1717 hrs., the approximate time these photos were taken.The measured slope angle of the darkest, mid-distance mountainside on the right side of the valley seen here is about 40 degrees so that this mountainside would soon be in shadow as the sun descended.
NARCAP IR-2, 2010 Page 3 R. F. Haines
International Air Safety Case Report;
Camera and Lens. An inexpensive Canon Powershot A580 compact digital still camera with 8.0 megapixels capacity was used. It employs a 1/2.5 inch CCD array with a 3:4 aspect ratio. It is assumed that the photographer used an automatic exposure control, i.e., she did not manually
adjust the shutter speed or f stop for each exposure. If this is correct an exposure of about 1/2 ,000 sec. at f8 or 1/500 sec at f22 would be reasonable. The effective focal length of the lens varied from 5.8 to 23.2 mm. (4x digital zoom) and the aperture varied from f = 2.6 to 5.5.
Normal range of focus was from 1.5 feet to optical infinity.
It is clear that Mrs. X changed the zoom setting of the lens several times during this series of photos and was quite familiar with the camera’s operation. There is no image blur in any of the main sequence photos studied here which suggests that she had very good eye-hand stability and that the shutter “speed” was fast.Unfortunately, there is no available information about the zoom setting of the lens for any photograph. As can be noted by comparing each photograph, some zoom adjustments were made within this main sequence.
This is unfortunate because it makes it more difficult to determine the angular field of view of any photograph.It also isn’t known whether the photographer reset the white balance, exposure compensation, or light metering controls on the camera for any of these photographs. When the camera was aimed directly at the sun the CCD exposure controls tried to respond but did not possess sufficient dynamic range; this caused details elsewhere in the image to become extraordinarily dark.As will be noted below, the details of the UAP image only became evident when the entire frame was lightened and its contrast increased.
Astronomical and Weather Data for Photo Site;
Weather data was received from CEFAA on June 23, 2010 and consisted of the atmospheric lapse rate data for station SCSN Santo Domingo (12 UTC; February 14 and 15, 2010),
GOES
Infrared Satellite cloud imagery for Chile, winds aloft and air temperature. The GOES imagery clearly shows the clouds that were photographed at El Yeso reservoir. Winds ranged from about 10 to 30 kts out of the west at altitudes ranging from 2,980 to 5,820 m MSL.The sun was at 39.47 degrees elevation and 281.8 degrees azimuth (CW from true north) at 1717 hrs.
The photographer said that she took a new photograph approximately every 40 to 45 seconds so that all six took place over about 4.5 minutes time.If this is accurate the position of the sun would have moved only 1.1 degrees arc across the sky in those 4.5 minutes;
the sun’s position is a particularly useful spatial reference point. Local sunset was at approximately 2037 hrs and solar noon occurred at 1357 hrs at an altitude of 70.1 degrees. With the sun at 282 degrees azimuth the approximate azimuth of the UAP was estimated to be 276 degrees, using the camera’s view finder’s angular width as a reference.
A comparison of the present photographs of the white cumulus clouds shows clear variations from frame to frame. However, basic cloud groups can still be made out relative to the sun’s
The Santo Domingo weather station is about 100 miles due west of the photographer’s location.
www.srrb.noaa.gov/highlights/sunrise/azel.html NARCAP IR-2, 2010 R. F. Haines
International Air Safety Case Report position. If the photographer was at an altitude of about 2,600 m (8,530 feet MSL)
a CEFAA meteorologist indicated that these cumulus clouds would have been from 3,000 m to 6,000 m MSL. Discovering the altitude and nature of the reddish parallel clouds seen in Figure 2 is more problematic but very important.Clouds and Cloud layers. There are two types of clouds visible in this series of photographs.
The brightest white are clearly Cumulus which are common above the Andes Mountains in this season.We are more interested in the second type of cloud seen near the UAP image (see Figure 2, 3, and 11) that appears more reddish and striated. They are very likely cirrus or possibly cirrocumulus and lie at an altitude of between 15,000 and 25,000 feet AGL.
This range of altitudes becomes important because a portion of the UAP appears to be occluded by these clouds making a rough assessment possible of the size of the UAP. These calculations are presented below.
Photoanalysis Results;
Figure 2 is the primary photograph that was studied; it contained the UAP. It consisted of a 1.26 MB file (1741 x 1306 x 8) at 96 dpi resolution. Figure 3 is the same full frame as Figure 2 increased in brightness and contrast, and divided into sixteen numbered, equal-area rectangles as shown.Specific image details are located by area number and approximate location within each area.For example, the sun is in the lower left corner of area eleven and the reddish UAP is in the upper left-corner of area six.
Author Edward J. Ruppelt, head of Project Blue Book;
Edward J. Ruppelt, head of Project Blue Book picture here with other members of Project Blue Book;
Edward J. Ruppelt (July 17, 1923 in Iowa – September 15, 1960) was a United States Air Force officer probably best known for his involvement in Project Blue Book, a formal governmental study of unidentified flying objects.
He is generally credited with coining the term "unidentified flying object", to replace the terms "flying saucer" and "flying disk" - which had become widely known - because the military thought them to be "misleading when applied to objects of every conceivable shape and performance. For this reason the military prefers the more general, if less colorful, name: unidentified flying objects. UFO (pronounced Yoo-foe) for short."[1]
Ruppelt was the director of Project Grudge from late 1951 until it became Project Blue Book in March 1952; he remained with Blue Book until late 1953. UFO researcher Jerome Clark writes, "Most observers of Blue Book agree that the Ruppelt years comprised the project's golden age, when investigations were most capably directed and conducted. Ruppelt himself was open-minded about UFOs, and his investigators were not known, as Grudge's were, for force-fitting explanations on cases." [2]
The case of the Lubbock lights is very rich and frustrating at the same time. It is explained, but the explanation has been kept secret.
For the true story, see the original account by Captain Ed Ruppelt, head of Project Blue Book, to learn the entire story in probably its only honnest account, for project reports extracts, see here. http://ufologie.patrickgross.org/htm/lubbock5102.htm
One of the photographs taken by Carl Hart that can be seen everywhere. It has been reverted.
A photograph taken by Carl Hart. The lights revealed brighter on film than to the naked eyes according to this witness.
This picture of the Lubbock lights has been sometimes introduced as taken by Coast Guards. I do not believe this is true, Blue Book indicates that only four photographs exist, all taken by Carl Hart, who said took five pictures but could only produce four of them.
A composite of the Carl Hart pictures used by Ed Ruppelt in the analysis and the presentation of the case during several Blue Book UFO briefings.
One of the Lubbock lights enlarged picture, which leaked out to the archives of the NICAP private UFO investigation group, who had many members from the US Air Force.
Here we have the below text from a one Author Edward J. Ruppelt, head of Project Blue Book, the below is from his memoirs on this fascinating UFO case from 1974.
The Lubbock Lights, unabridged:
When four college professors, a geologist, a chemist, a physicist, and a petroleum engineer, report seeing the same UFO's on fourteen different occasions, the event can be classified as, at least, unusual. Add the facts that hundreds of other people saw these UFO's and that they were photographed, and the story gets even better. Add a few more facts - that these UFO's were picked up on radar and that a few people got a close look at one of them, and the story begins to convince even the most ardent skeptics.
This was the situation the day the reports of the Lubbock Lights arrived at ATIC. Actually the Lubbock Lights, as Project Blue Book calls them, involved many widespread reports. Some of these incidents are known to the public, but the ones that added the emphasis and intrigue to the case and caused hundreds of hours of time to be spent analyzing the reports have not been told before. We collected all of these reports under the one title because there appeared to be a tie-in between them.
The first word of the sightings reached ATIC late in September 1951, when the mail girl dropped letters into my "in" basket. One of the letters was from Albuquerque, New Mexico, one was from a small town in Washington State, where I knew an Air Defense Command radar station was located, and the other from Reese AFB at Lubbock, Texas.
I opened the Albuquerque letter first. It was a report from 34th Air Defense at Kirtland AFB. The report said that on the evening of August 25, 1951, an employee of the Atomic Energy Commission's super secret Sandia Corporation and his wife had seen a UFO. About dusk they were sitting in the back yard of their home on the outskirts of Albuquerque. They were gazing at the night sky, commenting on how beautiful it was, when both of them were startled at the sight of a huge airplane flying swiftly and silently over their home. The airplane had been in sight only a few seconds but they had gotten a good look at it because it was so low. They estimated 800 to 1,000 feet. It was the shape of a "flying wing" and one and a half times the size of a B-36. The wing was sharply swept back, almost like a V. Both the husband and wife had seen B-36's over their home many times. They couldn't see the color of the UFO but they did notice that there were dark bands running across the wing from front to back. On the aft edge of the wings there were six to eight pairs of soft, glowing, bluish lights. The aircraft had passed over their house from north to south.
The report went on to say that an investigation had been made immediately. Since the object might have been a conventional airplane, air traffic was checked. A commercial airlines Constellation was 50 miles west of Albuquerque and an Air Force B-25 was south of the city, but there had been nothing over Albuquerque that evening. The man's back ground was checked. He had a "Q" security clearance. This summed up his character, oddballs don't get "Q" clearances. No one else had reported the UFO, but this could be explained by the fact the AEC employee and his wife lived in such a location that anything passing over their home from north to south wouldn't pass over or near very many other houses. A sketch of the UFO was enclosed in the report.
I picked up the letter from Lubbock next. It was a thick report, and from the photographs that were attached, it looked interesting. I thumbed through it and stopped at the photos. The first thing that struck me was the similarity between these photos and the report I'd just read. They showed a series of lights in a V shape, very similar to those described as being on the aft edge of the "flying wing" that was reported from Albuquerque. This was something unique, so I read the report in detail.
On the night of August 25, 1951, about 9:20 P.M., just twenty minutes after the Albuquerque sighting, four college professors from Texas Technological College at Lubbock had observed a formation of soft, glowing, bluish green lights pass over their home. Several hours later they saw a similar group of lights and in the next two weeks they saw at least ten more. On August 31 an amateur photographer had taken five photos of the lights. Also on the thirty first two ladies had seen a large "aluminum colored," "pear shaped" object hovering near a road north of Lubbock. The report went into the details of these sightings and enclosed a set of the photos that had been taken.
This report, in itself, was a good UFO report, but the similarity to the Albuquerque sighting, both in the description of the object and the time that it was seen, was truly amazing.
I almost overlooked the report from the radar station because it was fairly short. It said that early on the morning of August 26, only a few hours after the Lubbock sighting, two different radars had shown a target traveling 900 miles per hour at 13,000 feet on a northwesterly heading. The target had been observed for six minutes and an F-86 jet interceptor had been scrambled but by the time the F-86 had climbed into the air the target was gone. The last paragraph in the report was rather curt and to the point. It was apparently in anticipation of the comments the report would draw. It said that the target was not caused by weather. The officer in charge of the radar station and several members of his crew had been operating radar for seven years and they could recognize a weather target. This target was real.
I quickly took out a map of the United States and drew in a course line between Lubbock and the radar station. A UFO flying between these two points would be on a northwesterly heading and the times it was seen at the two places gave it a speed of roughly 900 miles per hour.
This was by far the best combination of UFO reports I'd ever read and I'd read every one in the Air Force's files.
The first thing I did after reading the reports was to rush a set of the Lubbock photos to the intelligence officer of the 34th Air Division in Albuquerque. I asked him to show the photos to the AEC employee and his wife without telling them what they were. I requested an answer by wire. Later the next day I received my answer: "Observers immediately said that this is what they saw on the night of 25 August. Details by airmail." The details were a sketch the man and his wife had made of a wing around the photo of the Lubbock Lights. The number of lights in the photo and the number of lights the two observers had seen on the wing didn't tally, but they explained this by saying that they could have been wrong in their estimate.
The next day I flew to Lubbock to see if I could find an answer to all of these mysterious happenings.
I arrived in Lubbock about 5:00 P.M. and contacted the intelligence officer at Reese AFB. He knew that I was on my way and had already set up a meeting with the four professors. Right after dinner we met them.
If a group had been hand-picked to observe a UFO, we couldn't have picked a more technically qualified group of people. They were:
Dr. W. I. Robinson, Professor of Geology.
Dr. A. G. Oberg, Professor of Chemical Engineering.
Professor W. L. Ducker, Head of the Petroleum Engineering Department.
Dr. George, Professor of Physics.
This is their story:
On the evening of August 25 the four men were sitting in Dr. Robinson's back yard. They were discussing micro meteorites and drinking tea. They jokingly stressed this point. At nine twenty a formation of lights streaked across the sky directly over their heads. It all happened so fast that none of them had a chance to get a good look. One of the men mentioned that he had always admonished his students for not being more observant; now he was in that spot. He and his colleagues realized they could remember only a few details of what they had seen. The lights were a weird bluish green color and they were in a semicircular formation. They estimated that there were from fifteen to thirty separate lights and that they were moving from north to south. Their one wish at this time was that the lights would reappear. They did; about an hour later the lights went over again. This time the professors were a little better prepared. With the initial shock worn off, they had time to get a better look. The details they had remembered from the first flight checked. There was one difference; in this flight the lights were not in any orderly formation, they were just in a group.
The professors reasoned that if the UFO's appeared twice they might come back. Come back they did. The next night and apparently many times later, as the professors made twelve more observations during the next few weeks. For these later sightings they added two more people to their observing team.
Being methodical, as college professors are, they made every attempt to get a good set of data. They measured the angle through which the objects traveled and timed them. The several flights they checked traveled through 90 degrees of sky in three seconds, or 30 degrees per second. The lights usually suddenly appeared 45 degrees above the northern horizon, and abruptly went out 45 degrees above the southern horizon. They always traveled in this north-to-south direction. Outside of the first flight, in which the objects were in a roughly semicircular formation, in none of the rest of the flights did they note any regular pattern. Two or three flights were often seen in one night.
They had tried to measure the altitude, with no success. First they tried to compare the lights to the height of clouds but the clouds were never near the lights, or vice versa. Next they tried a more elaborate scheme. They measured off a base line perpendicular to the objects' usual flight path. Friends of the professors made up two teams. Each of the two teams was equipped with elevation measuring devices, and one team was stationed at each end of the base line. The two teams were linked together by two-way radios. If they sighted the objects they would track and time them, thus getting the speed and altitude.
Unfortunately neither team ever saw the lights. But the lights never seemed to want to run the course. The wives of some of the watchers claimed to have seen them from their homes in the city. This later proved to be a clue.
The professors were not the sole observers of the mysterious lights. For two weeks hundreds of other people for miles around Lubbock reported that they saw the same lights. The professors checked many of these reports against the times of the flights they had seen and recorded, and many checked out close. They attempted to question these observers as to the length of time they had seen the lights and angles at which they had seen them, but the professors learned what I already knew, people are poor observers.
Naturally there has been much discussion among the professors and their friends as to the nature of the lights. A few simple mathematical calculations showed that if the lights were very high they would be traveling very fast. The possibility that they were some natural phenomena was, of course, discussed and seriously considered. The professors did a lot of thinking and research and decided that if they were natural phenomena they were something altogether new. Dr. George, who has since died, studied the phenomena of the night sky during his years as a professor at the University of Alaska, and he had never seen or heard of anything like this before.
This was the professors' story. It was early in the morning when we returned to Reese AFB. I sat up a few more hours unsuccessfully trying to figure out what they had seen.
The next day I again met the intelligence officer and we went to talk to Carl Hart, Jr., the amateur photographer who had taken the pictures of the lights. Hart was a freshman at Texas Tech. His story was that on the night of August 31 he was lying in his bed in an upstairs room of the Hart home. He, like everyone else in Lubbock, had heard about the lights but he had never seen them. It was a warm night and his bed was pushed over next to an open window. He was looking out at the clear night sky, and had been in bed about a half hour, when he saw a formation of the lights appear in the north, cross an open patch of sky, and disappear over his house. Knowing that the lights might reappear as they had done in the past, he grabbed his loaded Kodak 35, set the lens and shutter at f 3.5 and one tenth of a second, and went out into the middle of the back yard. Before long his vigil was rewarded when the lights made a second pass. He got two pictures. A third formation went over a few minutes later and he got three more pictures. The next morning bright and early Hart said he took the roll of unexposed film to a friend who ran a photo finishing shop. He explained that he did all of his film processing in this friend's lab. He told the friend about the pictures and they quickly developed them.
I stopped Hart at this point and asked why he didn't get more excited about what could be the biggest news photos of the century. He said that the lights had appeared to be so dim that he was sure he didn't have anything on the negatives; had he thought that he did have some good pictures he would have awakened his friend to develop the negatives right away.
When he developed the negatives and saw that they showed an image, his friend suggested that he call the newspaper. At first the paper wasn't interested but then they decided to run the photos. I later found out that they had done some checking of their own.
We went with Hart into his back yard to re-enact what had taken place. He described the lights as being the same dull, glowing bluish green color as those seen by the professors. The formation was different, however. The lights Hart saw were always flying in a perfect V. He traced the path from where they appeared over some trees in the north, through an open patch of sky over the back yard, to a point where they disappeared over the house. From the flight path he pointed out, the lights had crossed about 120 degrees of open sky in four seconds. This 30-degree-per-second angular velocity corresponded to the professors' measured angular velocity.
We made arrangements to borrow Hart's negatives, thanked him for his information, and left.
Armed with a list of names of other observers of the mysterious lights, the intelligence officer and I started out to try to get a cross-section account of the other UFO sightings in the Lubbock area. All the stories about the UFO's were the same; various types of formations of dull bluish green lights, generally moving north to south. A few people had variations. One lady saw a flying venetian blind and another a flying double boiler. One point of interest was that very few claimed to have seen the lights before reading the professors' story in the paper, but this could get back to the old question, "Do people look up if they have no reason to do so?"
We talked to observers in nearby towns. Their stories were the same. Two of them, tower operators at an airport, reported that they had seen the lights on several occasions.
It was in one of these outlying towns, Lamesa, that we talked to an old gentleman, about eighty years old, who gave us a good lead. He had seen the lights and he had identified them. Ever since he had read the story in the papers he had been looking. One evening he and his wife were in their yard looking for the lights. All of a sudden two or three appeared. They were in view for several seconds, then they were gone. In a few minutes the lights did a repeat performance. The man admitted he had been scared. He broke off his story of the lights and launched into his background as a native Texan, with range wars, Indians, and stage coaches under his belt. What he was trying to point out was that despite the range wars, Indians, and stagecoaches, he had been scared. His wife had been scared too. We had some difficulty getting back to the lights but we finally made it. The third time they came around, he said, one of the lights emitted a sound. It said, "Plover." The old gentleman had immediately identified it as a plover, a water bird about the size of a quail. Later that night, and on several other occasions, they had seen the same thing. After a few more hair-raising but interesting stories of the old west Texas, we left.
Our next stop was the federal game warden's office in Lubbock. We got the low-down on plovers. We explained our interest and the warden was very helpful. He had been around west Texas all of his life so he was familiar with wildlife. The oily white breast of a plover could easily reflect light, but plovers usually didn't travel in more than pairs, or three at the most. He had never seen or heard of them traveling in a flock of fifteen to thirty but, of course, this wasn't impossible. Ducks, yes, but probably not plovers. He did say that for some unknown reason there were more than the usual number of plovers in the area that fall.
I was anxious to get the negatives that Hart had lent us back to the photo lab at Wright Field, but I had one more call to make. I wanted to talk to the two ladies who had seen a strange object hovering near their car, but I also wanted to write my report before I left Lubbock. Two Air Force special investigators from Reese AFB offered to talk to the ladies, so I stayed at the air base and finished my report.
That night when the investigators came back, I got the story. They had spent the whole day talking to the ladies and doing a little discreet checking into their backgrounds.
The two ladies, a mother and her daughter, had left their home in Matador, Texas, 70 miles northeast of Lubbock, about twelve thirty P.M. on August 31. They were driving along in their car when they suddenly noticed "a pear shaped" object about 150 yards ahead of them. It was just off the side of the road, about 120 feet in the air. It was drifting slowly to the east, "less than the speed required to take off in a Cub airplane." They drove on down the road about 50 more yards, stopped, and got out of the car. The object, which they estimated to be the size of a B-29 fuselage, was still drifting along slowly. There was no sign of any exhaust blast and they heard no noise, but they did see a "porthole" in the side of the object. In a few seconds the object began to pick up speed and rapidly climb out of sight. As it climbed it seemed to have a tight spiraling motion.
The investigation showed that the two ladies were "solid citizens," with absolutely no talents, or reasons, for fabricating such a story. The daughter was fairly familiar with aircraft. Her husband was an Air Force officer then in Korea, and she had been living near air bases for several years. The ladies had said that the object was "drifting" to the east, which possibly indicated that it was moving with the wind, but on further investigation it was found that it was moving into the wind.
The two investigators had worked all day and hadn't come up with the slightest indication of an answer.
This added the final section to my now voluminous report on the Lubbock affair.
The next morning as I rode to the airport to catch an airliner back to Dayton I tried to put the whole puzzle together. It was hard to believe that all I'd heard was real. Did a huge flying wing pass over Albuquerque and travel 250 miles to Lubbock in about fifteen minutes? This would be about 900 miles per hour. Did the radar station in Washington pick up the same thing? I'd checked the distances on the big wall map in flight operations just before leaving Reese AFB. It was 1,300 miles from Lubbock to the radar site. From talking to people, we decided that the lights were apparently still around Lubbock at 11:20 P.M. and the radar picked them up just after midnight. They would have had to be traveling about 780 miles per hour. This was fairly close to the 900-mile-per-hour speed clocked by the two radars. The photos of the Lubbock Lights checked with the description of what the AEC employee and his wife had seen in Albuquerque. Nobody in Lubbock, however, had reported seeing a "flying wing" with lights. All of this was swimming around in my mind when I stepped out of the staff car at the Lubbock airport.
My plane had already landed so I checked in at the ticket counter, picked up a morning paper, and ran out and got into the airplane. I sat down next to a man wearing a Stetson hat and cowboy boots. I soon found out he was a retired rancher from Lubbock.
On the front page of the paper was an account of a large meteor that had flashed across New Mexico, west Texas and Oklahoma the night before. According to the newspaper account, it was very spectacular and had startled a good many people in Lubbock. I was interested in the story because I had seen this meteor. It was a spectacular sight and I could easily understand how such things could be called UFO's. My seat partner must have noticed that I was reading the story of the meteor because he commented that a friend of his, the man who had brought him to the airport, had seen it. We talked about the meteor. This led to a discussion of other odd happenings and left a perfect opening for him to bring up the Lubbock Lights. He asked me if I'd heard about them. I said that I had heard a few vague stories. I hoped that this would stave off any detailed accounts of stories I had been saturated with during the past five days, but it didn't. I heard all the details all over again.
As he talked on, I settled back in my seat waiting for a certain thing to happen. Pretty soon it came. The rancher hesitated and the tone of his voice changed to a half proud, half apologetic tone. I'd heard this transition many times in the past few months; he was going to tell about the UFO that he had seen. He was going to tell how he had seen the bluish green lights. I was wrong; what he said knocked me out of my boredom.
The same night that the college professors had seen their formation of lights his wife had seen something. Nobody in Lubbock knew about the story, not even their friends. He didn't want anyone to think he and his wife were crazy. He was telling me only because I was a stranger. Just after dark his wife had gone outdoors to take some sheets off the clothesline. He was inside the house reading the paper. Suddenly his wife had rushed into the house, as he told the story, "as white as the sheets she was carrying." As close as he could remember, he said, this was about ten minutes before the professors made their first sighting. He stopped at this point to tell me about his wife, she wasn't prone to be "flighty" and she "never made up tales." This character qualification was also standard for UFO storytellers. The reason his wife was so upset was that she had seen a large object glide swiftly and silently over the house. She said it looked like "an airplane without a body." On the back edge of the wing were pairs of glowing bluish lights. The Albuquerque sighting! He said he didn't have any idea what his wife had seen but he thought that it was an interesting story.
It was an interesting story. It hit me right between the eyes. I knew the rancher and his wife couldn't have possibly heard the Albuquerque couple's story, only they and a few Air Force people knew about it. The chances of two identical stories being made up were infinitesimal, especially since neither of them fitted the standard Lubbock Light description. I wondered how many other people in Lubbock, Albuquerque, or any where in the Southwest had seen a similar UFO during this period and hesitated to mention it.
I tried to get a few more facts from the rancher but he'd told me all he knew. At Dallas I boarded an airliner to Dayton and he went on to Baton Rouge, never knowing what he'd added to the story of the Lubbock Lights.
On the way to Dayton I figured out a plan of attack on the thousands of words of notes I'd taken. The best thing to do, I decided, was to treat each sighting in the Lubbock Light series as a separate incident. All of them seemed to be dependent upon each other for importance. If the objects that were reported in several of the incidents could be identified, the rest would merely become average UFO reports. The photographs taken by Carl Hart, Jr., became number one on the agenda.
As soon as I reached Dayton I took Hart's negatives to the Photo Reconnaissance Laboratory at Wright Field. This laboratory, staffed by the Air Force's top photography experts, did all of our analysis of photographs. They went right to work on the negatives and soon had a report.
There had originally been five negatives, but when we asked to borrow them Hart could only produce four. The negatives were badly scratched and dirty because so many people had handled them, so it was difficult to tell the actual photographic images from the dust spots and scratches. The first thing that the lab did was to look at each spot on the negatives to see if it was an actual photographic image. They found that the photos showed an inverted V formation of lights. In each photo the individual image of a light was badly blurred due to motion of the camera, but by careful scrutiny of each blurred image they were able to determine that the original lights that Hart had photographed were circular, near pinpoint sources of light. Like a bright star, or a distant light bulb. Next they made enlargements from the negatives and carefully plotted the position of each light in the formation.
In each photograph the individual lights in the formation shifted position according to a definite pattern.
One additional factor that was brought out in the report was that although the photos were taken on a clear night no images of the stars could be found in the background. This proved one thing, the lights, which were overexposed in the photograph, were a great deal brighter than the stars, or the lights affected the film more than the light from the stars.
This was all that the photos showed. It was impossible to determine the size of each image of the group, speed, or altitude.
The next thing was to try to duplicate what Hart said he had done. I enlisted the aid of several friends and we tried to photograph a moving light. When we were talking to Hart in Lubbock, he had taken us to his back yard, where he had shot the pictures. He had traced the flight path of lights across the sky. We had him estimate the speed by following an imaginary flight of lights across the sky. It came out to about four seconds. We had a camera identical to the one that Hart had used and set up a light to move at the same speed as the UFO's had flown. We tried to take photographs. In four seconds we could get only two poor shots. These were badly blurred, much worse than Hart's, due to the one-tenth-of-a-second shutter speed. We repeated our experiment several times, each time with the same results. This made a lot of people doubt the authenticity of Hart's photos.
With the completed photo lab report in my hands, I was still without an answer. The report was interesting but didn't prove anything. All I could do was to get opinions from as qualified sources as I could find. A physiologist at the Aeromedical Laboratory knocked out the timing theory immediately by saying that if Hart had been excited he could have easily taken three photos in four seconds if we could get two in four seconds in our experiment. Several professional photographers, one of them a top Life photographer, said that if Hart was familiar with his camera and was familiar with panning action shots, his photos would have shown much less blur than ours. I recalled what I heard about Hart's having photographed sporting events for the Lubbock newspaper. This would have called for a good panning technique.
The photographs didn't tally with the description of the lights that the professors had seen; in fact, they were firmly convinced that they were of "home manufacture." The professors had reported soft, glowing lights yet the photos showed what should have been extremely bright lights. Hart reported a perfect formation while the professors, except for the first flight, reported an unorderly group. There was no way to explain this disagreement in the arrangement of the lights. Of course, it wasn't impossible that on the night that Hart saw the lights they were flying in a V formation. The first time the professors saw them they were flying in a semicircle.
The intensity of the lights was difficult to explain. Again I went to the people in the Photo Reconnaissance Laboratory. I asked them if there was any possible situation that could cause this. They said yes. An intensely bright light source which had a color far over in the red end of the spectrum, bordering on infrared, could do it. The eye is not sensitive to such a light, it could appear dim to the eye yet be "bright" to the film. I asked them what kind of a light source would cause this. There were several things, if you want to speculate, they said, extremely high temperatures for one. But this was as far as they would go. We have nothing in this world that flies that appears dim to the eye yet will show bright on film, they said.
This ended the investigation of the photographs, and the investigation ended at a blank wall. My official conclusion, which was later given to the press, was that "The photos were never proven to be a hoax but neither were they proven to be genuine." There is no definite answer.
The emphasis of the investigation was now switched to the professors sighting. The meager amount of data that they had gathered seemed to be accurate but it was inconclusive as far as getting a definite answer was concerned. They had measured two things, how much of the sky the objects had crossed in a certain time and the angle from one side of the formation to the other. These figures didn't mean a great deal, however, since the altitude at which the formation of lights was flying was unknown. If you assumed that the objects were flying at an altitude of 10,000 feet you could easily compute that they were traveling about 3,600 miles per hour, or five to six times the speed of sound. The formation would have been about 1,750 feet wide. If each light was a separate object it could have been in the neighborhood of 100 feet in diameter. These figures were only a guess since nobody knew if the lights were at, above, or below 10,000 feet. If they had been higher they would have been going faster and have been larger. If lower than 10,000 feet, slower and smaller.
The only solid lead that had developed while the Reese AFB intelligence officer and I were investigating the professors' sightings was that the UFO's were birds reflecting the city lights; specifically plover. The old cowboy from Lamesa had described something identical to what the professors described and they were plover. Secondly, whenever the professors left the vicinity of their homes to look for the lights they didn't see them, yet their wives, who stayed at home, did see them. If the "lights" were birds they would be flying low and couldn't be seen from more than a few hundred feet. While in Lubbock I'd noticed several main boulevards lighted with the bluish mercury vapor lights. I called the intelligence officer at Reese AFB and he airmailed me a city map of Lubbock with the mercury-vapor-lighted streets marked. The place where the professors had made their observations was close to one of these streets. The big hitch in this theory was that people living miles from a mercury-vapor-lighted boulevard had also reported the lights. How many of these sightings were due to the power of suggestion and how many were authentic I didn't know. If I could have found out, it would have been possible to plot the sightings in Lubbock, and if they were all located close to the lighted boulevards, birds would be an answer. This, however, it was impossible to do.
The fact that the lights didn't make any perceivable sound seemed as if it might be a clue. Birds or light phenomena wouldn't make any sound, but how about some object of appreciable size traveling at or above them speed of sound? Jet airplanes don't fly as fast as the speed of sound but they, make a horrible roar. Artillery shells, which are going much faster than aircraft, whine as they go through the air. I knew that a great deal of the noise from a jet is due to the heated air rushing out of the tail pipe, but I didn't know exactly how much of the noise this caused. If a jet airplane with a silent engine could be built, how much noise would it make? How far could it be heard? To get the answer I contacted National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics Laboratory at Langley AFB, a government agency which specializes in aeronautical research. They didn't know. Neither they nor anybody else had ever done any research on this question. Their opinion was that such an aircraft could not be heard 5,000 or 10,000 feet away. Aerodynamicists at Wright Field's Aircraft Laboratory agreed.
I called the Army's Ballistic Research Laboratories at Aberdeen Proving Grounds, Maryland, to find out why artillery shells whine. These people develop and test all kinds of shells so they would have an answer if anybody did. They said that the majority of the whine of an artillery shell is probably caused by the flat back end of the shell. If a perfectly streamlined shell could be used it would not have any perceivable whine.
What I found out, or didn't find out, about the sound of an object moving at several times the speed of sound was typical of nearly every question that came up regarding UFO's. We were working in a field where there were no definite answers to questions. In some instances we were getting into fields far advanced above the then present levels of research. In other instances we were getting into fields where no research had been done at all. It made the problem of UFO analysis one of getting opinions. All we could do was hope the opinions we were getting were the best.
My attempts to reach a definite conclusion as to what the professors had seen met another blank wall. I had no more success than I'd had trying to reach a conclusion on the authenticity of the photographs.
A thorough analysis of the reports of the flying wings seen by the retired rancher's wife in Lubbock and the AEC employee and his wife in Albuquerque was made. The story from the two ladies who saw the aluminum colored pear shaped object hovering near the road near Matador, Texas, was studied, checked, and rechecked. Another blank wall on all three of these sightings.
By the time I got around to working on the report from the radar station in Washington State, the data of the weather conditions that existed on the night of the sighting had arrived. I turned the incident folder over to the electronics specialists at ATIC. They made the analysis and determined that the targets were caused by weather, although it was a borderline case. They further surmised that since the targets had been picked up on two radars, if I checked I'd find out that the two targets looked different on the two radarscopes. This is a characteristic of a weather target picked up on radars operating on different frequencies. I did check. I called the radar station and talked to the captain who was in charge of the crew the night the target had been picked up.
The target looked the same on both scopes. This was one of the reasons it had been reported, the captain told me. If the target hadn't been the same on both scopes, he wouldn't have made the report since he would have thought he had a weather target. He asked me what ATIC thought about the sighting. I said that Captain James thought it was weather. Just before the long-distance wires between Dayton and Washington melted, I caught some comment about people sitting in swivel chairs miles from the closest radarscope. . . . I took it that he didn't agree the target was caused by weather. But that's the way it officially stands today.
Although the case of the Lubbock Lights is officially dead, its memory lingers on. There have never been any more reliable reports of "flying wings" but lights somewhat similar to those seen by the professors have been reported. In about 70 per cent of these cases they were proved to be birds reflecting city lights.
The known elements of the case, the professors' sightings and the photos, have been dragged back and forth across every type of paper upon which written material appears, from the cheapest, coarsest pulp to the slick Life pages. Saucer addicts have studied and offered the case as all conclusive proof, with photos, that UFO's are interplanetary. Dr. Donald Menzel of Harvard studied the case and ripped the sightings to shreds in Look, Time, and his book, Flying Saucers, with the theory that the professors were merely looking at refracted city lights. But none of these people even had access to the full report. This is the first time it has ever been printed.
The only other people outside Project Blue Book who have studied the complete case of the Lubbock Lights were a group who, due to their associations with the government, had complete access to our files. And these people were not pulp writers or wide-eyed fanatics, they were scientists, rocket experts, nuclear physicists, and intelligence experts. They had banded together to study our UFO reports because they were convinced that some of the UFO's that were being reported were interplanetary spaceships and the Lubbock series was one of these reports.
The fact that the formations of lights were in different shapes didn't bother them; in fact, it convinced them all the more that their ideas of how a spaceship might operate were correct.
This group of scientists believed that the spaceships, or at least the part of the spaceship that came relatively close to the earth, would have to have a highly swept back wing configuration. And they believed that for propulsion and control the craft had a series of small jet orifices all around its edge. Various combinations of these small jets would be turned on to get various flight attitudes. The lights that the various observers saw differed in arrangement because the craft was flying in different flight attitudes.
(Three years later the Canadian Government announced that this was exactly the way that they had planned to control the flying saucer that they were trying to build. They had to give up their plans for the development of the saucer like craft, but now the project has been taken over by the U.S. Air Force.)
This is the complete story of the Lubbock Lights as it is carried in the Air Force files, one of the most interesting and most controversial collection of UFO sightings ever to be reported to Project Blue Book. Officially all of the sightings, except the UFO that was picked up on radar, are unknowns.
Personally I thought that the professors' lights might have been some kind of birds reflecting the light from mercury vapor street lights, but I was wrong. They weren't birds, they weren't refracted light, but they weren't spaceships. The lights that the professors saw - the backbone of the Lubbock Light series - have been positively identified as a very commonplace and easily explainable natural phenomenon.
It is very unfortunate that I can't divulge exactly the way the answer was found because it is an interesting story of how a scientist set up complete instrumentation to track down the lights and how he spent several months testing theory after theory until he finally hit upon the answer. Telling the story would lead to his identity and, in exchange for his story, I promised the man complete anonymity. But he fully convinced me that he had the answer, and after having heard hundreds of explanations of UFO's, I don't convince easily.
With the most important phase of the Lubbock Lights "solved" - the sightings by the professors- the other phases become only good UFO reports.
Here is a heads up on a free e-book that cam be down loaded for reading,this book is well put together and contains reports of various UFO encounters by those professionals who take to our skies ,pilots , the accounts from these sources are well worth a study as they shed a light on this UFO subject that is much needed i feel.Nothing can beat or substitute a UFO encounter that evolves professional sources like pilots
Here we have a very good investigation of video footage that captured a UAP UFO apparently following a Japanese commercial airliner, when the level of investigative work contained in this case is prevalent then it opens up a much better scientific perspective in trying to determine just what are these occasional UAP/UFOs that have not only been caught on video but radar too, intelligent design and movement when detected rules out atmospheric natural explanations that Dr James E MacDonald the atmospheric and meteorite physicist so often discovered in the cases he investigated.
Analysis of Digital Video Aerial Event of October 23, 2004 at Osaka Japan;
"Richard F. Haines Chief Scientist and William Puckett Research Associate National Aviation Reporting Center On Anomalous Phenomena April 2007
Abstract;
This paper summarizes the results of analyses of a video taken on October 23, 2004 approximately 50 km ESE of Itami International Airport, Osaka., Japan at about 1730 hrs by Mr. K. Amamiya while using a hand-held, Hi-8 digital camera. He was recording the over-flight of a commercial jet aircraft enroute to the airport. Unexpectedly a small, intense, yellow-orange-white silent light (hereafter referred to as unidentified aerial phenomena – UAP) appeared in the lower right-hand corner of the camera's digital display but was not seen visually.
It traveled on an apparently linear path toward the upper left of the display at a relatively constant angular rate of travel; it remained visible for three minutes and then faded out.
We discovered that:
(1) the UAP was nearer to the camera than the aircraft.
(2) the UAP was at least as intense as the wing tip lights on the B777-300 aircraft and did not appear to fluctuate in intensity to any great degree,
(3) the calculated average height of the UAP was on the order of five feet and its image size tended to increase slightly during the first five seconds of the video,
(4) the calculated angular velocity of the UAP was about 1.25 deg/sec. during the early part of the video,
(5) it is likely that the UAP was emitting radiation in the near infrared since it was not visible to the naked eye,
(6) the number of UAP imaged varied from one to three,
and (7) the aircraft involved most likely was Japan Airlines flight 1521 from Tokyo. The real significance of this case lies in its aviation safety potential since no such unidentified object or energetic phenomenon should be flying in the vicinity of commercial air lanes. If this phenomenon was visible it might have been seen by the pilots causing some unplanned emergency operation or other disruptive response. This UAP remains unidentified at this time.
Background Information;
Whenever an airborne object flies near an airplane or an airport and cannot be identified or communicated with it constitutes a potential threat to flight safety. The UAP in the present instance was within the controlled air space of two airports: Kansai and Itami International Airports , at Osaka , Japan . The UAP that was captured on digital video was very nearly on the approach path to runway 32 at Itami airport.
Flight crews who cannot identify or communicate with any nearby object may react to their presence in inappropriate ways. A collision is possible in such instances. As will be seen, it is not likely that the flight crew onboard the jet airplane saw the present UAP that approached them from their right-rear direction.
On November 16, 2004 the first author received an e-mail from Mr. Kiyoshi Amamiya (K.A.) in Japan with four attached jpeg (compressed) digital images. One of them showed a two-engine jet airplane seen against an evenly illuminated sky with a small orange-white object near its left wingtip. The other images were enlargements of this UAP that consisted of two small, self-luminous objects near each other. Nine initial questions were sent to K.A. the same day.
A package was received from him on December 2, 2004 containing a Hi-8 video cassette and a 3” by 4” color print of the airplane and UAP. A request was then sent to all National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena (NARCAP) Research Associates on December 6, 2004 requesting their possible assistance;
William Puckett replied the next day; he possessed needed hardware as well as valuable technical expertise as a professional meteorologist. Several other NARCAP Research Associates also indicated interest in seeing the tape and providing further assistance.
The second author was sent the video tape and immediately transferred it to a VHS analog tape for viewing and also to a CD for other analyses. A list of thirty more questions was sent to K.A. on December 14, 2004 . By December 22, 2004 the available UAP and airplane images had been measured in various ways as described below and the witness provided answers to all thirty questions as well as other useful information.
Local Geographic, Meteorological, and Related Features
This video event took place very near the town of Tenri City, about fifty km ESE of Itami airport (see footnote 1). Mr. K.A. stood in a farm field to take this video (Figure; photo taken early in 2005). The region is flat with low hills generally rising to the east and west. Note also that in this recreation the camera's line of sight was elevated approximately ten degrees arc above the local horizon to capture the passing air-plane.
Figure 2 illustrates both the witness's location and the approximate flight path of the jet airplane arriving from Tokyo . Mr. K.A. said that he began video taping the jet airplane on a magnetic bearing of about 220 deg and finished taping along a bearing of about 260 deg arc (see footnote 2).
Airplane's Flight Path . Mr. K.A. provided us with official flight path data he obtained from his country's aviation officials. The airplane, identified as one arriving from Tokyo (see footnote 3), used two final navigation beacons called VHF Omni-Directional Range (VOR); they were “Ise” and “Yamato” found on aviation charts. Only Yamato is shown in Figure 2. Established on a heading of 276 deg. and approaching Yamato VOR from Ise farther east, the jet turned 48 degrees right to a final heading of 324 deg that ended at the airport runway. This afforded an almost straight-in approach to runway 320 as shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2. Chart of Approximate Flight Path of B-777 Jet,
Japan Airlines Flight 1521
The airport surface is at an altitude of fifty feet above sea level at (Lat. 34.7855N; Long 135.4382 E.). Both of its runways are parallel and oriented 140 and 320 degrees magnetic. Runway 32 right is shortest and is normally used by narrow body aircraft and 32 left by wide body aircraft because of its length and also noise abatement requirements.
Overview of UAP Video Imagery : Figure 3 shows the jet aircraft at time 00:08 (all values are elapsed time (ET) in minutes: seconds from start of video). Over the course of the next twenty eight (28) seconds the airplane did not change its aspect angle (shape) significantly. It only diminished in overall angular size (by approximately 4 %). This is consistent with an airplane travelling diagonally away from the camera on a linear path that lies approximately forty (40) degrees behind the side (elevation) view.
This finding is significant in that it shows that the airplane had already completed most (or all) of its right-hand turn at the Yamato VOR (see Figure 2 and Figure 6) and was flying on the final 324 deg. approach radial from Itami airport. Figure 4 shows a Japan Airlines B777-300 in flight.
Overview of UAP Video Imagery
: Figure 3 shows the jet aircraft at time 00:08 (all values are elapsed time (ET) in minutes: seconds from start of video). Over the course of the next twenty eight (28) seconds the airplane did not change its aspect angle (shape) significantly. It only diminished in overall angular size (by approximately 4 %). This is consistent with an airplane travelling diagonally away from the camera on a linear path that lies approximately forty (40) degrees behind the side (elevation) view.
This finding is significant in that it shows that the airplane had already completed most (or all) of its right-hand turn at the Yamato VOR (see Figure 2 and Figure 6) and was flying on the final 324 deg. approach radial from Itami airport. Figure 4 shows a Japan Airlines B777-300 in flight.
The witness aimed his video camera at the UAP soon after it passed the air-plane.
This caused the jet to appear to leave the visual field rapidly. The evenly illuminated sky made it difficult to discern the airplane's fuselage markings and also prevented any meaningful analysis of camera motion after the airplane had left the frame. Only UAP motion relative to the moving airplane could be determined with any precision.
Figure 4. Japan Airlines B777 in flight;
Weather and Astronomical Information .
The meteorological conditions at Osaka 's Itami International Airport [Latitude: 34.785528 Degrees North; Longitude: 135.4382 22 Degrees East; Elevation: 50 Ft (15 m) ASL ; Time zone: UTC + 9] for: 17:30 hrs. Japan Standard Time were:
Temperature: 63 Degrees F
Dew point: 46 Degrees F
Relative Humidity: 55%
Wind: 030 Degrees (NNE) at 6 mph
Wind at 5,000 Ft: 060 Degrees (ENE) at 10 knots (11.5 mph)
Sky: Scattered Cloud (1/4 to 1/2 cloud cover)
Ceiling: Unlimited (No ceiling)
No significant weather observed (visibility 7 miles)
The area was under the influence of a high pressure system. This assessment is based on the 850 millibar (MB) chart (Figure 5). A solid arrow points to Osaka . This chart is for 1200 UTC on Saturday 23 October, 2004 and shows the entire northern hemisphere with the north pole at the center and ten degree latitude circles. It shows that the 850 MB pressure [height of 1,590 meters (5,215 feet)] was located near Osaka and was the highest in the region.
Figure 5. 850 Millibar Pressure Gradients for Northern Hemisphere
The sun had set at 1713 hrs JST on October 23, 2004 (at Osaka ). The time recorded on the video was 1730 hrs. Later Mr. K.A. discovered a six minute error in the camera's time setting such that the actual time of the incident was 1724. He also stated that the sky was clear with no rain, fog, or mist present and winds very light when he took the video; he said “… about thirty minutes had passed, after sunset.” (see footnote 4) The Moon was in the SE sky (132 degrees azimuth) at an elevation of approximately 23 degrees at the time. If the witness' s assertion is correct concerning the azimuth angles through which he aimed his camera the UAP could not have been the Moon. The UAP was also angularly smaller and more intense than the Moon. No bright planets were visible. Mercury had just set (1737 JST ) and Neptune and Uranus, both very faint, were located in the southeastern sky.
The above information is consistent with the homogeneously illuminated sky seen in the video; i.e., there are no useful spatially fixed details with which to determine objective motion either of the UAP or camera.
General Information about the Airplane : The airplane was positively identified by its outline shape as a B777-300: 73.79 m (242.09 ft.) long with a wing span of 60.93 m (199.8 ft.) and tail height of 18.52 m. (60.7 ft.) (see footnote 5) Its fuselage is painted white with the large, dark, block letters JAL (cf. Fig. 4).
Video image analyses showed the presence of the large but very faint block letters of JAL's logo located one third of the distance between the nose of the fuselage and the wing's insertion into the fuselage. The airplane was very likely Japan Airlines flight 1521 scheduled to land at Itami at 1730 from Tokyo 's Haneda Airport 278 miles away.
A second possibility could be flight 1520 scheduled to land at 1735, also from Tokyo . Edges of the solid red vertical stabilizer of all JAL aircraft was not discernible in this darkly shaded video image.
It should be noted that because the aircraft was generally flying obliquely away from the camera's position (Fig. 6) neither its length or wing-span measurements from these photographs are accurate.
If the horizontal angles on Figure 2 are approximately correct then the airplane's longitudinal axis would have been rotated through an angle of about 130 deg arc as is illustrated near time 00.39 in Fig. 6. The present measurements are only to indicate the relative change in image size over time.
1. Since September 1994 all international flights to Osaka land at Kansai Airport forty km SW of Osaka in Osaka Bay . Further airport details are found at:
www2s.biglobe.ne.jp/~ito-nori/j_airline/jal_dom.html
2. At our request Mr. K.A. returned to the original site and obtained these bearings using a type HB-3 High Eye Point, Compass Glass accurate to about 0.5 degree arc. Of course the bearing angles he provided are only rough estimates because this was a reconstruction from memory and without any fixed object present in the sky.
3. Itami Airport serves eight airlines. However, it was discovered that the jet airplane in the video was a Japan Airlines B777 and that flight 1521 was scheduled to land at 1730 hrs (when the video was taken). cf. www.jal.co.jp/en/inter/time/dom/09/hndosa.html
4. Correspondence received January 31, 2005 . Video frame times are cited here.
5. www.geocities.com/Cape Canaveral/Lab/8803/tech_wb.htm . This dimension is measured from the ground with the fuselage level and supported on its landing gear.
technical report index TR9 part 1 TR9 part 2 TR9 part 3
link;
Analysis of Digital Video Aerial Event of October 23, 2004 at
Osaka , Japan;
Here we have a multitude of declassified UFO documents from senator Barry Goldwater. Interesting reading.These documents are all in downloadable pdf formats from the link provided.
Senator Barry Goldwater UFO Files;
The collection of letters include many letters that talk about his attempt to get access to the “blue room” at Wright Patterson Air Force Base where he was told by his long time friend General Curtis Lemay that he couldn’t go in and Goldwater certainly couldn’t go in either. The collection also contains letters with UFO researchers such as Ron Regehr, Dr. Steven Greer, Dr. James McDonald, Lee Graham, and Don Berliner. There is also a key letter written to Goldwater by Marie Galbraith who directed the “best Available Evidence” report that was prepared for Laurance Rockefeller in 1996.
Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater’s collection of 143 pages of UFO letters has now been posted. Goldwater, a USAF reserve General, who also sat as the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee had a long standing interest in the UFO subject.
The collection of letters include many letters that talk about his attempt to get access to the “blue room” at Wright Patterson Air Force Base where he was told by his long time friend General Curtis Lemay that he couldn’t go in and Goldwater certainly couldn’t go in either.
The collection also contains letters with UFO researchers such as Ron Regehr, Dr. Steven Greer, Dr. James McDonald, Lee Graham, and Don Berliner. There is also a key letter written to Goldwater by Marie Galbraith who directed the “best Available Evidence” report that was prepared for Laurance Rockefeller in 1996.
Three documents not pulled from the collection have been added to give context to the documents in the Blue Room section of documents. One was a section of an April 25, 1988 New Yorker magazine article where Goldwater is quoted as saying that he was getting 100 calls a year from people asking him to look into the Blue Room rumor. The second two documents consist of a FOIA (and reply) made by researcher Bill Moore to WPAFB on the Blue Room. Missing (to be added shortly) is a “Blue Room Radar Scope” document that Bill Moore obtained from the Falcon that was attached to the FOIA.
Also to be added in the near future is a reply to Lee Graham from Goldwater in 1996. Many UFO related letters were filed under people names instead of the UFO files so more records will be added as researchers learn of the collection and add letters.
A second collection of Goldwater UFO related letters will also be posted shortly. These letters contain Goldwater correspondence with famous people rumored to have been involved in UFOs. These people include General Curtis LeMay who was involved in the Blue Room event, Bobby Ray Inman who was rumored to have headed up the UFO back-engineering efforts for the US government (and who Goldwater promised to set up a meeting in 1994 for Dr. Greer), Edward Teller, and former carter CIA Director Stansfield Turner. Although the letters are interesting none deal with the UFO subject.
Declassification!
Military UFO Records Released: The Spanish Experience*
Investigation in Spain is inevitably associated with Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos, who, alone or with collaborators, has authored a series of outstanding books which reflect more than twenty years of dedicated work. His 1987 Enciclopedia de los encuentros cercanos con ovnis (with Juan Antonio Fernández Peris) is probably the best-documented collection of close encounter cases in print.
Ballester Olmos's attention remains chiefly directed at strongly evidenced UFO sightings, as opposed to abductions, where every local case he has investigated proved to be either a hoax or capable of some alternative explanation.
During recent years his main activity has been co-operating with the Spanish government in the release of official documents. In 1995 he published a book containing his findings to date, Expedientes Insólitos, and here he presents some notable cases from the military archives.
Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos can be contacted at Aptdo. de Correos 12140, 46080 Valencia, Spain (phone: +34 96 179 627, fax: +34 96 179 2600)
In the history of UFO research in Spain from 1947 to 1997, one event is of out-standing importance: the release by the Spanish Ministry of Defence of previously secret Air Force UFO archives, a process which started in 1992. I was privileged to play a part throughout this process which has made the official files literally an open book which anyone may read.
No Secret Lasts Forever
Friday, 8 November 1996. 13.30 hours.Torrejón Air Force Base, near Madrid. Lieutenant Colonel Enrique Rocamora walks briskly along the corndors of the Aerial Operative Command (MOA) heading for the commander-in-chief's bureau. This is no routine dispatch: he carries with him the proposal for declassification of the last UFO file waiting for release.
It was during 1990-1991 that I started to induce the Air Force to review the classified matter policy applied in 1979 to UFO information (before that it has been considered Confidential). Step by step I watched the process proceed. In May 1991 the Air Safety Section, responsible for matters concerning UFOs and custodian of the UFO files, submitted a memo proposing to declassify the archives.
In March 1992 the Joint Chiefs of Staff decided to downgrade the classification level imposed on UFO documents, leaving to the Air Force Chief of Staff the authority to fully declassify them.
The documents transferred to MOA comprised 62 files of UFO reports covering the period 1962 to 1991; procedures and memos shaping official Air Force policy on UFOs, 1968 to 1991; and UFO information requests from civilians addressed to the Air Force over the same period.
MOA's Intelligence Section took on the declassification task. The actual workload was handed to Lieutenant Colonel Angel Bastida. An open-minded individual and the prototype of the 21st century military man, Bastida formulated a new procedure detailing the involvement and investigation of UFO reports by the Air Force, and an analysis of all available historical information with arguments favouring full disclosure of existing and future UFO files. Incidentally~ Bastida also authored the best paper ever written by the military on the Air Force and the UFO problem
In September 1992, the first files were declassified. They were cases from 1962, 1967 and 1968. By the time Bastida moved to another military post he had declassified 22 files. His successor, Lieutenant Colonel Enrique Rocamora - a strong and sharp staff officer - declassified a further 53 files. The process was carried out as speedily as possible, given the fact that declassifying secret UFO files was only one part of these officers' work.
Sightings: Strange and Less Strange;
The military UFO reports contain descriptions of several different kinds of seemingly anomalous phenomena. They include examples of lights or uncorrelated radar echoes which seem to defy a rational explanation. My colleagues and I are painstakingly analysing all pieces of information to determine if these cases can be solved, or whether they become true UFOs. The entire files are available to who-ever may contribute his/her know-how to this endeavour.
In the majority of cases, investigation, whether by the Air Force or by independent civilian ufologists, has revealed a misinterpretation of some kind. These cases show us, on the one hand, what kinds of anomalous features may occur; and on the other, how easily people, puzzled by the sighting of unexpected luminous phenomena in the sky, can jump to erroneous conclusions.
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24 November 1974: Alarm in a Radar Squadron
Grand Canary is one of the seven Spanish islands in the Atlantic Ocean which form the Canary archipelago. At about 19.30 hours on 24 November 1974, Air Force Lieutenant Colonel E.L. and his daughter were driving by the North Freeway, when they saw a bright white light in the sky leaving a short trail, travelling at great speed and disappearing a few seconds later. His statement described it as a meteorite or bolide flying horizontally in a northwest direction at some 1,000 metres.
Fifteen minutes later, at 19.45, an Iberia Fokker-27 took off from Tenerife airport en route to Las Palmas (Grand Canary Islands). On a clear night, it was flying over a stratus cloud layer to its flight level of 2,000 metres and turning northwest when the pilots sighted a powerful lightjust in front of them, in a flight corridor typically used by regular air traffic from Las Palmas to Tenerife. Iberia captain Saura called Canary Flight Control to tell them they were passing 'traffic proceeding from Las Palmas'.
By now the light had descended to 1,800 metres, the standard flight level for airplanes. Captain Saura was surpnsed to be told there was no reported flight at that position. He insisted that he had it in sight, well silhouetted against the stratus layer, at a range of some 25 km, and he asked for a check from the military radar.
The radar operator on Grand Canary duly reported that he had only the Fokker's echo on screen: he saw no other traffic. At this point, the airliner's crew realised to their amazement that the light had been stationary at 'three o'clock' for more than a minute: any normal aircraft should have sailed past by now. Full of curiosity, the Fokker's pilot started to change course in the direction of the light. As he did so, the light seemed to shift rapidly away from the aircraft, emitting intermittent orange and yellow flashes as it vanished.
By now, the radar station had been placed in 'alert' situation, and their personnel started to scrutinise the skies with special care and attention. At 20.20 hours an echo was detected at 20º (NNE), 56 km distant, approaching directly towards the radar site at 500 knots; they were unable to determine its altitude.
The trace disappeared when it entered the 'blind cone' (vertical) of the antennae, and did not reappear. Out of doors, a light of more than 1st magnitude was sighted, fixed in the firmament (according to one witness), slowly moving around the site (according to another), while a third declared it to be nothing more than a star.
At 20.30 hours, radar detected a trace at radial 356º (north), 58 km away, which correlated with Iberia flight 281 Madrid to Tenerife. At the same time, it recorded an uncorrelated track at 326º (northwest), 74 km away, heading south. After changing direction, it remained stationary unhl passed by IB-281, where-upon it suddenly vanished. No other traffic was scheduled at that time and location.
Taken together, these observations seem to indicate that a mysterious luminous object was hanging above two of the Canary Islands for more than an hour. However, it is also legitimate to divide the complex series of events into several individual occurrences:
(1) a meteor-like sighting of brief duration,
(2) a light in the clouds which a nearby military radar system did not recognise, but which disappeared as soon as the pilot altered his angle of vision,
(3) in an excited environment (radar operators were requested to search for UFOs with extreme care), they detected a first echo which mysteriously disappeared without a trace, another trace in the proximity of a commercial aircraft (not seen opncally by the aircrew), and finally a fixed light in the celestial vault not different from a star.
In summary: a case offering radar traces which are not confirmed visually, and visual sightings which are not confirmed by radar.
No final conclusion has been adopted to date by the research team.
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23 December 1985: a UFO in the Log Book
The merchant vessel Manuel Soto, owned by Transmediterránea Co., was sailing on December 23, 1985 from Las Palmas (Grand Canary island) to Arrecife (Lanzarote Island). At 03.10 hours, the third officer on duty observed in the horizon by the bow what seemed to be the rising of a heavenly body. He identified it as the star Antares.
Checked ten minutes later, however, the light's position did not correspond either with Antares or any other star or planet. The officer took measurements of the altitude and azimuth of the light, which remained stationary until 03.25 when it suddenly began to move quickly. Other members of the crew came to see what was happening.
The light approached the ship, passing directly over the vessel two minutes later. As it did, all the witnesses could perceive the object's profile, which did not resemble that of a typical aeroplane or helicopter. The object had a very intense white light on its central part, a weaker red light near it, and another white light - not as strong - set apart. The separation between the lights made the witnesses think the object was flying low, but they could hear no sound.
The shipping company passed the log book entry to the Spanish Navy. The Navy Staff submitted it to the Air Force, but Canary Islands Air Command reported that their investigations showed no UFO observed on that date. No further investigation was made.
And so this second sighting from the Canary Islands also remains unidentified. Sadly, nothing was reported about how the object was lost out of sight. In prinaple, the behaviour of the object - approaching from the horizon, flying at a constant altitude and speed - is consistent with that of an aircraft. Nevertheless, lack of additional detail - including the actual silhouette of the craft - prevents us from developing any specific hypothesis.
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8 December 1980: Aircraft on Fire?
A brief file reports - just two telephone messages - received in the Cádiz Maritime Captaincy General from merchant vessel Conquistador and fishing ship Besugo. At 20.50 hours on December 8, 1980 the first ship was navigating 35º27'N/ 7º50' W bearing northeast, when it reported a disintegrating object over the vessel at some 20º altitude which was sighted by the captain and the radio operator.
Additionally, at 20.45 hours, personnel from the second ship, sailing in position 33º 52' N/ 8º 55' W, observed a fiery phenomenon in a north direction at sea level. Their impression was that it might be a passenger plane with a fire on its left engine.
In isolation, those two incidents off the Morocco coast might never have received an explanation. However, consulting our files we discovered that a significant flap of 'UFO sightings' originated at that time in southwest Spain. Thousands witnessed a series of incandescent objects flying in a group passing slowly overhead. The general trajectory of the luminous trail was southwest to northeast.
As described, the phenomenon is absolutely compatible with a meteor shower or a space junk re-entry: the second alternative can be discarded as no decay is known to have occurred at that date, so meteors seem the preferred explanation.
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25 December 1980 Jet Propulsion UFO
On 25 December 1980, at 22.05 hours, an Air Force captain was driving along the Tudela-Arguedas road when he saw an unknown flying object with a large central body with a 'powerful jet propulsion system'. In addition, he saw a few more tiny luminous objects manoeuvring in formation with the large one. He estimated their altitude at some 1,000 metres, course 20º (north-northeast): the speed was similar to a commercial airplane. He saw it disappear behind the mountains, leaving a smoke trail much wider than that of a plane.
In the absence of any supplementary information, this would have been simply another unidentified. But there was a thick dossier in my archives to put this event into its proper perspective. That night, a giant, fiery phenomenon was sighted over Spain and other European countries a few minutes past 21.00 GMT (one hour later in Spain) skyrocketing on a rough south-to-north course.
North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) reported the re-entry into the atmosphere of the rocket used in the launch of Soviet satellite Cosmos 749. It was travelling from southwest to northeast on an arc that would have taken it over Portugal, Spain, France and southern England. There is little doubt that this is what the officer witnessed.
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19 August 1982: a Rotating Flying Saucer
A civilian witness reported an unusual experience on 19 August 1982, at 22.30 hours, seen from an apartment block faang the sea in the summer resort village of Blanes (Gerona). He was with seven other people, who also watched the aerial show in astonishment. The first witness was on the terrace when he heard the sound of an aircraft and just above him he saw a circle of lights blinking regularly. Through binoculars he distinguished the shape of a 'cylindrical disc' which was rotating clockwise: he estimated its size as twice that of a DC-4 airplane.
Speed and altitude were constant, then it made a turn so he could see it both from underneath and from the top. It had seven or eight illuminated 'windows'. The sighting lasted around three minutes. Then and there he made some drawings of what he thought he had seen and some days later he sent a letter to Air Force Headquarters with a full description of the events and some impressive sketches.
The official report presents no conclusion at all as no investigation was ever conducted. However, a review of newspapers for August and September 1982 disclosed similar sightings in many towns of eastern and northern Spain. Not only that, the press, confirmed by Barcelona Air Control, reported that advertising aircraft carrying luminous publicity panels were active during that summer in such locations, giving rise to surprise observations and misinterpretations with UFOs. Again, we may be confident that this was what the witness saw at Blanes.
Facts and Figures;
The Spanish declassification process imposes no restriction as to date. Over the years, several current incidents, whether reported to the Air Force by civilian witnesses or by military personnel, were declassified immediately after investigation - an example which other countries would do well to follow.
Since 1992, a number of UFO observations have been added to the MOA archives, both old and new, so that the original 62 files have now become 75. They amount to 1,900 pages, which anyone can read (and copy) in the Library of the Air Force Headquarters in Madrid.
The files cover a total of 97 separate events between the years 1962 to 1995, which averages about three cases per year. But we find that certain years - 1968 (23),1969 (7), 1975 (7),1977 (6), 1978 (8), 1979 (9) and 1980 (7) - seem to deviate markedly from the mean. However, examination often reveals simple down-to-earth explanations.
The 1968-69 wave was clearly due to a press release by the Ministry of Air asking the public to report UFO sightings, combined with the highly visible night-time appearance of the planet Venus, plus giant meteorological balloons carried by wind from France. 1975 is conspicuous only because one file includes several cases originating with a single and unreliable informant. A 1977 file, likewise, describes a succession of contactee-type stories allegedly expenenced during a three-month period. The 1978 peak is due to a photographic fraud which involved several dates.
1979 contains some good cases, but we notice that half of them occurred in November: for this we can look to the media impact of the incident of 11 November when the crew of a Supercaravelle reported strange lights. Finally, 1980 shows a chance accumulation of varied events, totally unrelated to one another. In short, none of the fluctuations constitutes a real 'wave' of true UFOs.
The reports reveal 20 radar detections, 15 scrambles or launches of jet interceptors, 10 close encounters, 13 instances where photographic material exists, and 28 civilian pilot witnesses (figures not mutually exclusive). Apart from the Air Force, other official bodies making reports included the Navy (9 reports), the Civil Guard (7), the Army (5) and the Police (3).
If we look at time of day data, the following table appears:
It is somewhat dismaying to find that, contrary to what we might expect, UFOs follow the same time-of-day distribution as IFOs.
As soon as files were declassified, a multidisciplinary team of experts, coordinated by myself, rushed to analyse the information. The research is not finished, as some reports present complex problems which make analysis difficult. The absence of inquiry at the time, the absence of corroboration, and insufficient information add to the complications. Nonetheless, our investigative efforts proved fruitful and we have been able to draw an array of general conclusions.
IFOs comprise 85% of the total. They break down to:
Astronomical explanations - the most frequent error stimulus: four out of ten observational mistakes involve Venus, other planets and stars, meteors and fireballs, or even the Moon.
Hoaxes explain two out of ten reports.
Meteorological balloons emerge as misperception culprits in one in ten cases (mostly from the French CNES programmes of 1967-1970).
The Miscellaneous cluster includes a variety of reasons for misinterpretation: three of every ten IFO cases are due to rockets and missiles, aircraft, reflections and temperature inversions, space junk re-entries, false radar echoes, fireworks or light projectors.
These proportions are consistent with those found in other samples, for example by Allan Hendry in 7he UFO Handbook. This suggests a world-wide pattern.
Nevertheless, 15% of the reports released by the Air Force remain to be resolved. One case (January 1,1975, Burgos) defies every explanation and anses as a true anomaly. Nine others present outstanding abnormal features and they are tunder further study. Finally, five cases have insufficient data to be evaluated.
Chronology;
My role in this process has had two well-defined stages. During 1990 and 1991 my task was to meet with the Air Force's Public Relations commanding officer and with the Colonel in charge of the Air Safety Section, seeking to convince them that UFO information poses no threat to National Security; that keeping UFO reports secret gives a false image that the State is concealing 'special knowledge'; that restriction of access to UFO files from students is hardly compatible with a truly democratic nation. I pointed out parallels such as the US precedent in freeing the Blue Book files, the initiative of the Australian Air Force, and GEPAN/SEPRA in France.
One of my objectives was to get all official UFO reports to a centralised location before declassification began, and in 1991 I persuaded Colonel Álvaro Fernández Rodas - an intelligent, well prepared officer - to ask all Air Regions to submit any UFO information they had on file. By this means the archives grew from 55 to 62 files.
That was a useful start: but what was the next step? One day in June 1992 I was approached by Lieutenant Colonel Bastida. It happened by chance while I was visiting a General in the Air Force Headquarters, and that evening I had my first meeting with the man from MOA.
I found that he was aware of my UFO work and I could feel he respected it. In fact, he had used my books as a guideline for designing case summaries, procedures and methodology involving statistics and a computer catalogue of UFO cases. This meeting was the first in a long series: mutual communication between civilian and military 'ufology' became a reality.
This relationship continued with Rocamora, Bastida's successor. Frequent visits and other contacts permitted me to:
- Closely monitor the declassification process, including incoming new material, and ensure that any information on record was made public totally uncensored (except for witness names).
- Stimulate an official search by Air Force bases, radar stations, etc. for both past and recent cases: this led to more than 25 additional case sources (to be released shortly).
- Obtain the declassification of policy documents, directives and instruction texts prepared by the Air Force over the twenty-five year period.
For myself, as a civilian investigator, the achieving of these goals has been a dream come true. It would not have been possible, however, without a progressive attitude within the Air Force, and the determination of a group of military men to achieve one of the major targets of the ufological community in any country: to have the 'secret' stamps removed from the Air Force's UFO reports.
Acknowledgements: The author wishes to recognise the able assistance and cooperation of Mr. Joan Plana, Vice-president CEI (Barcelona) and expert in deffence issues, and the author's co-worker since 1988. Thanks also to Sra. Carmen Romero Asensio, for a professional word-processing of a difficult hand-written text.
General Curtis Lemay Some UFO cases unexplainable;
Here we have a very respectable and highly decorated General admitting that some UFO cases that the Air Force investigated ,probably involving "Project Blue Book", were unexplainable.He is one of a list of very credible and highly respected sources that where more than likely "in the know" due to their positions who have publicly stated their views and belief's on UFOs due to their privy of classified information regarding UFOs.
Gen. Curtis E. LeMay;
"Let's say that you are a skeptic-the same sort of grimly determined Doubting Thomas that I used to be. Would your skepticism still prevail if you could hear the dry steady voice of Gen. Curtis E. LeMay saying- as indeed I've heard him say:"
"Repeat again: There were some cases we could not explain. Never could."
Curtis Emerson LeMay (November 15, 1906 – October 1, 1990) was a general in the United States Air Force and the vice presidential running mate of American Independent Party presidential candidate George Wallace in 1968.
He is credited with designing and implementing an effective, but also controversial, systematic strategic bombing campaign in the Pacific theater of World War II. During the war, he was known for planning and executing a massive bombing campaign against cities in Japan. After the war, he headed the Berlin airlift, then reorganized the Strategic Air Command (SAC) into an effective instrument of nuclear war.
LeMay and UFOs;
The April 25, 1988 issue of The New Yorker carried an interview with retired Air Force Reserve Major General and former U.S. Senator from Arizona, Barry Goldwater, who said he repeatedly asked his friend General LeMay if he (Goldwater) might have access to the secret "Blue Room" at Wright Patterson Air Force Base, alleged by numerous Goldwater constituents to contain UFO evidence. According to Goldwater, an angry LeMay gave him "holy hell" and said, "Not only can't you get into it but don't you ever mention it to me again."
quote;
The noted writer-co-author with Gen. Curtis E. Lemay of "Mission with LeMay. My Story" tells of the strange personal sighting that convinced him that UFOs are real.
Well, to begin with, I saw one.
But for some years previously, I had believed that Unidentified Flying Objects must exist. I'd heard the calm testimoney of too many experienced pilots and other observers, not to believe.
Let's say that you are a skeptic-the same sort of grimly determined Doubting Thomas that I used to be. Would your skepticism still prevail if you could hear the dry steady voice of Gen. Curtis E. LeMay saying- as indeed I've heard him say:
"Repeat again: There were some cases we could not explain. Never could."
When I first spotted the UFO it was hanging motionless in the sky.
I looked at my wristwatch. 6:07 p.m.
The date was January 4, 1954, a Monday. The place: My own beach on the Gulf of Mexico about five miles from downtown Sarasota, Fla., on an island called Siesta Key.
On viewing the UFO, I felt a great wave of thankfulness. By golly, I thought, at last it's here. Now I don't just have to believe. Now I know.
It looked like the top third of an apricot. The sun had fallen below the horizon a few minutes before, and earth and Gulf were now in shadow. But that object in the sky still gleamed brightly. I assumed that the orange coloration came from the sun's reflection on a curved surface of metal or some similar substance, rather than from any light radiating from the critter's interior. Also, there seemed to be some sort of rim around the bottom.
It was at too great a distance: I couldn't tell whether there were any windows or ports. And, both on the right and left sides of the curved body, dark shadows came up to claim the surface and accentuate a brilliant sheen on that portion of the curve nearest me.
I noted the position, and approximate height above some pines. I nailed the thing to its relationship with the tallest two trees: It was directly above them. Later I used instrumental aid to determine the exact height at which the object had hovered above the horizon. Eleven degrees up. As for a compass reading, the bearing would have been anywhere from 187 to 192 degrees.
As for true altitude and size, there was nothing to do but guess and wonder. The UFO had to be somewhere out over the Gulf of Mexico. Since I didn't know its size I couldn't establish any true altitude. Nor could I do more than guess at its distance from me.
The thing was motionless. It moved neither to right nor left, for a matter of minutes. It did not appear to become any larger; hence it was not advancing. It did not appear to become any smaller; hence it was not receding.
The instant after I had checked the time, on first viewing the object, I began to yell for my wife. I bellowed her name several times. No use. The house was less than 100 yards from where I stood, but she and some friends, who had been visiting us through the New Year's holiday, and the hi-fi turned on and didn't hear me.
On the next property an old man stepped onto the beach, Dr. Gillespie who had rented the place for the season. I headed for him as fast as I could move.
"Doctor! Doctor! Look!" I pointed as I ran. He stared, turned, gazed toward the sea. When I reached him he was looking a little too far to the west, and I put my arm around his shoulders and turned him more toward the south.
"Above the trees! Don't you see it?"
"I see it," he said, "but I can't make out just what it is. Doesn't that look like-? Isn't it two airplanes refueling in midair?"
"If it's two airplanes refueling in midair, aren't they headed in opposite directions?"
The doctor chuckled. "Guess they are."
"But, Doctor, that thing's absolutely motionless. It doesn't move to right or left."
"I guess you're right."
At that moment the object took off. It started with unbelievable speed, moving on a diagonal line, ascending as it receded into the southwest.
I didn't take my eyes off the thing. It was really traveling. I had never seen anything hurtle so rapidly except a meteorite. I have messed around with the Air Force for a good long generation and have poked my nose into two wars.
I know of no aircraft which mght move with such terrific speed through our atmosphere. Then it was gone.
The time was 6:11 p.m.
Did anyone else on Siesta Key happen to see that thing?
Damned if I know.
Next morning I drove to MacDill Air Force base at Tampa to report the incident to Col. Michael McCoy, who was then commanding the bomb wing.
At MacDill, I found Mike McCoy in his office, and proceeded to sit down and tell him the whole story. I drew some sketches, too. When I was through, Mike sat tugging at his red-gray moustache.
Well, what do we do, Mack? Send a report to Project Blue Book at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base?"
"No," I said, "I guess not."
"You saw it, didn't you?"
"Yes. But if we send in this report some character will come along and tell me patiently that what I saw was the planet Venus or the planet Mars or the star so-and-so, or a Navy balloon, or a conventional aircraft; or that maybe I was the victim of an illusion induced by hysteria."
"Exactly," said Colonel McCoy. "That's what they're always saying. Let's just forget it."
"I won't forget it," I told him. "I'll remember it."
Recently Curt LeMay and I were discussing UFOs while I worked with him on his autobiography (Mission with LeMay-My story, by General Curtis E. LeMay with Mackinlay Kantor, Doubleday, 1965).
Let me quote a few lines from what General LeMay had to say about UFOs.
"Some natural phenomenon might usually account for those which had been seen and reported and thus explain them. However, we had a number of reports from reputable individuals (well-educated, serious-minded folks-scientists and flyers) who surely saw something.
"Many of the mysteries might be explained away as weather balloons, stars, reflected lights, all sorts of odds and ends. I don't mean to say that, in the unclosed and unexplained or unexplainable instances, those were actually flying objects. All I can say is that no natural phenomenon could be found to account for them.
"Repeat again: There were some cases we could not explain. Never could."
It's 12 years since I saw my first UFO. Maybe it will be my only one. I've never seen the shine of one since. But I'm always watching.
Are you up-to-date on UFOs?
Almost 10,000 UFO sightings have been reported to the Air Force since 1947, when it set up Project Blue Book, the official U. S. Agency that analyzes and evaluates flying saucer reports. There have also been sightings unreported to the project.
Not one has ever given any indication that it was a space vehicle under intelligent control, according to the Air Force, although the Air Force cannot account for the origin of many UFOs.
Maj. Hector Quintanilla Jr., chief of the project, says, "We have determined in the vast majority of cases what the stimulus of the sighting was-stars that seem to move, operational and experimental aircraft, satellites, balloons, or just plain hoaxes." But he concedes that the origin of at least 672 UFOs has not been accounted for. The Air Force has no reason to believe that any of the UFOs unaccounted for came from another planet.
"There's no question that the people who spot UFOs see something," says Dr.Allen Hynek, chairman of Northwestern University's Dearborn Observatory and the Air Force's chief scientific consultant on UFOs. "But the majority of cases we can't explain result from the fact that we don't have anything tangible that can be measured scientifically. (I)"
"I'd like to see just one piece of a UFO," Quintanilla says. His office at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, has received all kinds of materials purporting to be pieces of flying saucers. But analysis of the samples has always shown them to be of earthly origin.
"We're certainly not trying to hold anything back," Quintanilla says. "The Air Force would have a lot of technical knowledge to gain from examining a real UFO."
UFOs are reported by people from all walks of life. "We accept every report as valid," Quintanilla says, "unless there is evidence to substantiate a report as a hoax."
Eighty percent of the cases are easily solved. "We have all the resources of the federal government at our disposal and much of private industry also," Quintanilla says.
One case still "bugs" Quintanilla. In the late afternoon of April 24, 1964, Patrolman Lonnie Zamora of Soccorro, N.M., was chasing a speeding car on U.S. 85 when he heard an explosion. He immediately turned off the road and saw a white, egg shaped vehicle, like a car standing on end. One or two men he believed to be occupants of the vehicle were standing alongside.
Then smoke and flame began to sprout from the bottom of the thing and Zamora ran behind his car to shield himself. The vehicle rose to about 20 feet, hovered for several seconds, and then flew off.
There were no other witnesses, but Air Force investigators found a great deal of physical evidence they could not explain-burnt vegetation and indentations in the ground.
Quintanilla thought the UFO might have been an experimental lunar- landing vehicle. "I've spent a lot of sleepless nights over that case," he says. "It has been well investigated and analyzed by experts. But it's still a mystery.(II)"
Scientists and UFOs;The Hynek Revelations;
If nothing else that can change the mind sets or perceptions of most of the scientific establishments of today regarding a serious and ongoing scientific investigation into the UFO situation then Dr Hynek"s interview below is to be taken as a historical eye opener.One can even see the justifications that a serious ongoing 50 year inadequate scientific investigation's into UFOs has taken place and has had serious consequences for a better understanding of those UFO cases that defy current scientific understanding
For those who already know the history of Dr Hynek and his involvement with the USAF investigation's into the UFO situation at that time namely "blue book" one can see the real significance and importance of his change of mind based on his scientific investigation's he carried out with what he said in his interview below.
Dr. Josef Allen Hynek (May 1, 1910 – April 27, 1986) was a United States astronomer, professor, and ufologist.[1] He is perhaps best remembered for his UFO research. Hynek acted as scientific adviser to UFO studies undertaken by the U.S. Air Force under three consecutive names: Project Sign (1947–1949), Project Grudge (1949–1952), and Project Blue Book (1952 to 1969). For decades afterwards, he conducted his own independent UFO research, developing the Close Encounter classification system, and is widely considered the father of the concept of scientific analysis of both reports and, especially, trace evidence purportedly left by UFOs.[2]
Skeptics often use the "science word" as a way to deny any reality to the UFO phenomenon. However, although no large scale and publicized real scientific effort has been devoted to the study of UFOs, science has a lot to say that might be disturbing to the skeptic.
This interview shows that there are highly respected scientist that do not accept that the research about the UFO phenomenon continues to be ridiculed. Dr. Hynek says:
"The famous "swamp gas" case; which came later on finally pushed me over the edge. From that point on, I began to look at reports from a different angle; which was to say that some of them could be true UFOs."
For over two decades, from 1948 to 1969, Dr. J. Allen Hynek was a consultant in astronomy to the United States Air Force. The subject of his advice, however, was not the fledgling space program or even the moon and stars above, but Unidentified Flying Objects. On this occasion his investigation changed his opinion; which was a total skepticism.
In 1973 he founded the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) and was the Director and editor of its journal, the "International UFO Reporter."
AN INTERVIEW WITH DR. J. ALLEN HYNEK
CLOSE ENCOUNTER WITH DR. J. ALLEN HYNEK:
By Dennis Stacy
An Interview With The Dean 1985
Re-Edited for CUFON by Dale Goudie 1991
STACY: Dr. Hynek, as a scientist, you go back as far with UFO phenomenon as probably anyone alive today. Exactly how did that relationship begin?
HYNEK: That's an easy story to tell. In the spring of 1948, I was teaching astronomy at Ohio State University, in Columbus. One day three men, and they weren't dressed in black (I), came over to see me from Wright Patterson Air Force Base in nearby Dayton.
They started out by talking about the weather, as I remember, and this and that, and then finally one of them asked me what I thought about flying saucers. I told them I thought they were a lot of junk and nonsense and that seemed to please them, so they got down to business. They said they needed some astronomical consultation because it was their job to find out what these flying saucer stories were all about.
Some were meteors, they thought, others stars and so on, so they could use an astronomer. What the hell, I said, it sounded like fun and besides, I would be getting a top secret security clearance out of it, too. At that time, it was called Project Sign (II), and some of the personnel at least were taking the problem quite seriously.
At the same time a big split was occurring in the Air Force between two schools of thought. The serious school prepared an estimation of the situation which they sent to General Vandenburg, but the other side eventually won out and the serious ones were shipped off to other places. The negatives won the day, in other words.
My own investigations for Project Sign added to that, too, I think, because I was quite negative in most of my evaluations. I stretched far to give something a natural explanation, sometimes when it may not have really had it. I remember one case from Snake River Canyon, I think it was, where a man and his two sons saw a metallic object come swirling down the canyon which caused the top of the trees to sway.
In my attempt to find a natural explanation for it, I said that it was some sort of atmospheric eddy. Of course, I had never seen an eddy like that and had no real reason to believe that one even existed. But I was so anxious to find a natural explanation because I was convinced that it had to have one that, naturally, I did in fact, it wasn't until quite some time had passed that I began to change my mind.
STACY: Was there ever any direct pressure applied by the Air Force itself for you to come up with a conventional explanation to these phenomena?
HYNEK: There was an implied pressure, yes, very definitely.
STACY: In other words, you found yourself caught, like most of us, in a situation of trying to please your boss?
HYNEK: Yes, you might as well put it that way, although at the same time I wasn't going against my scientific precepts. As an astronomer and physicist, I simply felt a priori that everything had to have a natural explanation in this world. There were no ifs, and or buts about it. The ones I couldn't solve, I thought if we just tried harder, had a really proper investigation, that we probably would find as answer for. My batting average was about 80 per cent and I figured that anytime you were hitting that high, you were doing pretty good.
That left about 20 per cent unsolved for me, but only about three or four per cent for the Air Force, because they used statistics in a way I would never have allowed for myself. For example, cases labeled as insufficient information they would consider solved! They also had some other little tricks. If a light were seen, they would say, "aircraft have lights, therefore, probable aircraft." Then, at the end of the year, when the statistics were made up, they would drop the "possible" or "probable" and simply call it aircraft.
STACY: What began to change your own perception of the phenomenon?
HYNEK: Two things, really. One was the completely negative and unyielding attitude of the Air Force. They wouldn't give UFOs the chance of existing, even if they were flying up and down the street in broad daylight. Everything had to have as explanation. I began to resent that, even though I basically felt the same way, because I still thought they weren't going about it in the right way.
You can't assume that everything is black no matter what. Secondly, the caliber of the witnesses began to trouble me. Quite a few instances were reported by military pilots, for example, and I knew them to be fairly well-trained, so this is when I first began to think that, well, maybe there something to all this.
The famous "swamp gas" case which came later on finally pushed me over the edge. From that point on, I began to look at reports from a different angle, which was to say that some of them could be true UFOs.
STACY: As your own attitude changed, did the Air Force's attitude toward you change, too?
HYNEK: It certainly did, quite a bit, as a matter of fact. By way of background, I might add that the late Dr. James E. McDonald, a good friend of mine who was then an atmospheric meteorologist at the University of Arizona, and I had some fairly sharp words about it. He used to accuse me very much, saying you're the scientific consultant to the Air Force, you should be pounding on generals' doors and insisting on getting a better job done. I said, Jim, I was there, you weren't you don't know the mindset. They were under instruction from the Pentagon, following the Robertson Panel of 1953, that the whole subject had to be debunked, period, no question about it. That was the prevailing attitude.
The panel was convened by the CIA, (III), and I sat in on it, but I was not asked to sign the resolution. Had I been asked, I would not have signed it, because they took a completely negative attitude about everything. So when Jim McDonald used to accuse me of a sort of miscarriage of scientific justice, I had to tell him that had I done what he wanted, the generals would not have listened to me. They were already listening to Dr. Donald Menzel and the other boys over at the Harvard Astronomy Department as it was.
STACY: Did you think you would have been shown the front door and asked not to come back?
HYNEK: Inside of two weeks I imagine. You're familiar with the case of Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler from the history of astronomy? Brahe had the observations and didn't know what to do with them, and Kepler, who was nearsighted and couldn't make the observations, did.
So essentially, I played Kepler to the Air Force's Tycho Brahe. I knew the Air Force was getting the data and I wanted a look at it, so I made very full use of the copying machines at Wright-Patterson. I kept practically a duplicate set of records because I knew that someday that data would be worth something. Toward the end, however, I was barely speaking with Major Quintanilla who was in charge (IV).
We had started as really good friends and then things got very bad because he had one lieutenant who was such a nincompoop, it seemed to me. Everything had to be "Jupiter or Venus" or this or that. You have no idea what a closed mind, what a closed attitude it was. I kept doggedly on, but I can safely say that the whole time I was with the Air Force we never had anything that resembled a really good scientific dialogue on the subject.
STACY: They weren't really interested in an actual investigation of the subject then?
HYNEK: They said they were, of course, but they would turn handsprings to keep a good case from getting to the "attention of the media". Any case they solved, they had no trouble talking to the media about. It was really very sad.... I think their greatest mistake in the early days, however, was not turning it over to the universities or some academic group. They regarded it as an intelligence matter and it became increasingly more and more embarrassing to them.
After all, we paid good tax dollars to have the Air Force guard our skies and it would have been bad public relations for them to say, yes there's something up there, but we're helpless. They just couldn't do that, so they took the very human action of protecting their own interests. What they said was that we solved 96 per cent of the cases and that we could have solved the other four per cent if we had just tried harder.
STACY: Was it the famous Michigan sightings of 1966, explained away as "swamp gas" that finally did lead the Air Force to bring in a reputable university?
HYNEK: Yes, that, as you know, became something of a national joke and Michigan was soon being known as the "Swamp Gas State." Eventually, it resulted in a Congressional Hearing called for by then state Congressman, Gerald Ford, who of course later went on to become President. The investigation was turned over to the Brian O'Brien Committee who did a very good job. Had their recommendations been carried out, things might have turned out much better than they did.
The recommended that UFOs be taken away from the Air Force and given to a group of universities, to study the thing in a as wide a way as possible. Well, they didn't go to a group, they went to a university and a man they were certain would be very hard-nosed about it, namely, Dr. Edward Condon at the University of Colorado. That was how the Condon Committee and eventually the Report came to be.
STACY: Were you ever called on to testify before, or advise the Committee?
HYNEK: In the early days they called on me to talk to them, to brief them, but that was the extent of it. They certainly didn't take any of my advice.
STACY: By 1968, the generally negative Condon Report was made public and the Air Force used its conclusions to get out of the UFO business. Were you still an official advisor or consultant at that time?
HYNEK: Oh, yes, I was with the Air Force right up until the very end, but it was just on paper. No one had cut the chicken's head off yet, but the chicken was dead. The last days at Blue Book were just a perfunctory shuffling of papers.
STACY: In terms of the UFO phenomenon itself, what was going on about this time?
HYNEK: Well, as you know, the Condon Report said that a group of scientists had looked at UFOs and that the subject was dead. The UFOs, of course, didn't bother to read the report and during the Flap of 1973, they came back in force.
FOOTNOTES:
I have added some footnotes in the interviews to clarify some points:
UFO Sightings Statistics Displays;Part one;
The next several posts we will deal with the UFO sightings statistics from around the world,these various maps ect will show various patterns from various countries including "exceptional months".That there is a constant wax and waning or "waves" and "flaps" of sightings is evident from these world sighting statistics.As usual links are provided for a deeper study;
UFO sightings counts, scaled at the left, are shown for every month, over 50 years.
Exceptional months are circled in green. July 1947 is right off the screen, October 1954 nearly so. The violet curve is a 6-month moving-average to show trends over the years.
Venus-Earth and Mars-Earth distances show as grey and red quasi-periodic curves, scaled at the right in Astronomical Units [AU]. One AU is the mean distance from Earth to the Sun. Planets are closest to Earth at the tops of each curve.
Note the slump of inactivity between 1958 and 1964, and also thru the 1980s. A much deeper and longer slump ( not shown ) occurred between the "great airship" sightings of 1885-1910 and the modern era displayed here.
1947 UFO Sightings show as white dots here While all 1947 events are displayed, the vast majority took place in July alone.
The size and suddenness of this wave was unprecedented. Terms like "great airship" and "ghost rockets" fell by the wayside. The Flying Saucer age began with a bang.
Note the string of sightings extending southeast from Washington State. Other groups and alignments contrast with large vacant areas.
New Mexico and southern Idaho are full of UFO reports, but very few came from upstate New York, or western Pennsylvania.Note the band of relative inactivity around the 100th Meridian.
UFO Sightings Statistics Displays;Part three;
European UFOs: All years < française >
Here are Europe's sighting statistics
UFO Sightings Map: Europe;
This map shows UFO sightings for all dates in Europe, recently refreshed and brightened to 4 pixels each.
Place-name "tags" show in dark green characters, e.g. GER for Germany.
Sightings densities for each country depend heavily upon the activities of their respective UFO groups, journals and investigators.
Note the disproportionate sightings densities for Britain and France, compared to Germany, Holland and points east.
Cultural factors aside, the simple fact is that Larry Hatch can't read German, Dutch, Polish etc., introducing a definite cultural bias.
Europe: 1954 Sightings Only < française >
UFO Map: Europe 1954
White marks show UFO sightings for all of 1954, but almost all of those were from September to November. Of those, the vast majority were in France, in October.
One French cartoon depicted townspeople laughing at the village idiot. The Caption read:
"He's the one who didn't see the flying saucers!"
By late October, activity had shifted into Italy (green spots) and elsewhere in Europe.
Note this 1954 daily histogram
This is the largest single UFO wave on record here. There was some activity in South America, but 1954 was a relatively slow year in North America.
[ version française ]
Europe: 1973 Sightings Only < française >
UFO Map: Europe 1973
Out of 723 *U* UFO listings worldwide for 1973, 223 were in Europe, mostly in the West.
Immediately following the American wave of October 1973, European activity doubled in December, with some 50 *U* reports for that one month alone.
For the entire year, sightings are most common in France (82), Britain (54), Spain/Portugal (23) and Italy (21).
One man in Belgium was terrified by a "flying steeple 'ovni' with windows." Seven people reported a flying flower pot with antennas. A witness in Vilvoorde, Belgium reported a little man with a "metal detector" scanning his enclosed garden. This odd figure walked vertically up and over a tall stone fence as if immune to gravity.
France / Belgium: All Years < française >
UFO Map: France & Belgium
French and Belgian UFOs are particularly well reported and documented. France is second only to the United States for filtered sightings in the *U* Database.
The greatest wave in UFO history took place in France in 1954, with 472 *U* records for that year alone. Most of these took place in October, with a subsequent spill-over into adjacent countries.
The next busiest years were 1974 (226) and 1975 (123). While Britain had 26 "Airship" sightings in 1909, none were reported in France at all.
French sightings tend to occur in rural areas, on Mondays, and during the month of October. Until recent years, urban reports were relatively rare.
Cette meme page: Version française
See same map : Colored by Years
UFO Sightings Statistics Displays;Part four;
Britain / Ireland: All Years;
UFO Map: Britain & Ireland;
This map shows UFO sightings for all years in Britain and Ireland. British sightings are well noted due to the good work of UFO groups there.
The same may be said of France, Belgium and Denmark.
The busiest single day in Britain per *U* data was 04 JAN 1988 with 12 records. Those were mostly in the Yorkshire area, between Leeds and York.
There were 26 "airship" reports in 1909 alone. Some other busy years were 1994 (93 listings), 1977 (66), 1973 (55)44, and 1988 (48).
British UFO sightings are slightly more common on Mondays and Fridays. January and August are the busiest months. Unlike some countries, British sightings tend to occur in residential areas.
UFO Sightings Map:
Australia & New Zealand /Australia / New Zealand, All years
*U* logs 649 ufo sightings in Australia; 194 in New Zealand, a representative sampling at best.
In Australia, the busiest years were 1954 (50), 1978 (44) and 1996 (38). The 1954 flap came in January, nine months before the French deluge. New Zealand was dead slow between a Great Airships flap in 1909 and sudden activity in 1952 through 1957. 1977-1978 was also busy.
May is the busiest month in Australia. In New Zealand, the Summer months of November December and January are busiest by far. Weekends show more sightings in both countries.
See these new national studies of
Australia UFO Sightings
New Zealand UFO Sightings
South America: All years
UFO Map: South America
As of March 2006, *U* lists 1229 UFO sightings in South America with 563 in Brazil, followed by Argentina (306), Venezuela (115), Chile (90), Peru (66), and Uruguay (36). Other nations logged fewer than 20 sightings each.
The busiest UFO year in S. America was 1968 with 136 events .. 49 of these in July alone. Reports from That month came mainly from northern Argentina, central Chile and the southern coasts of Brazil.
15 other countries in South and Central America provided no reports at all in July of 1968.
Other busy years in South America were 1969 (80 cases), 1965 (69), 1954 (65) 1967 and 1992 (55 each).
Like the population, UFO sightings tend toward coastal areas in South America. Argentina is the major exception, with many sightings across its width, even in sparsely populated western ranching and mining areas.
The small busy island at the far North is Puerto Rico. At the opposite extreme, scientific stations in the Palmer Peninsula of Antarctica provided some interesting UFO reports.
Central America Centro America [español]
To call attention to Central American reports, boundaries and coastlines are in orange, and USA UFO sightings were excluded.
One might imagine the difficulties of gathering a credible list of sightings where culture, politics, language and beliefs snarl every attempt at a complete picture. Even Cuba shows some sightings, while other countries are virtually blank.
UFO Sightings shown here reflect a definite English-language bias. The Panama Canal stands out, and the oil fields of Venezuela. Vast seas south of Central America are totally vacant.
Green arrows indicate the Mexican Air Force instrumented detection of 5 March 2004, East of Ciudad del Carmen in Campeche State, possibly oil flares.
Asia-Pacific UFO Report: All years
UFO Map: Asia Pacific Region;
*U* lists 310 UFO sightings for the Asian Mainland, 228 of those in China. 213 events in the Asia Pacific region include 120 in Japan.
On the Asia mainland, the busiest years were 1980 (36 listings), 1981 (29), 1979 (24) and 1952 (24). Busiest months were July, Sept, Oct and Aug. The busiest weekdays were Thursday (47), Friday (41) and Saturday (35).
For the Asia Pacific area, busiest years were 1952 (22), 1957 (16) and 1979 (11). Busiest months were March and July. The slowest months were Jan, Febr and Sept. The busiest weekday was Sunday, slowest was Saturday.
Note the alignment of reports from the Central Philippine Sea, North-East to Southern Alaska. Each of those had a different year and source.
This database lists only 228 UFO sightings in China and 120 for Japan, and cannot claim to be comprehensive. Only translations in English, French or Spanish were used. Most Chinese data came "UFOs over Modern China" by Paul Dong, books by Timothy Good, Lumieres dans la Nuit (Paris), FSR and others.
Most Japanese reports came the Don Berliner Project Bluebook study, FSR, Loren Gross' booklets for 1952, Apro Bulletin, Dominique Weinstein's Airborne sightings catalog and MUFON UFO Journal.
The diagonal string of sightings Northeast of Taiwan are mostly in the Ryukyu Islands, Okinawa, and sightings at sea. As in Japan, many were made by military personnel.
There has been various speculations ect on where or not Steven Spielberg got his ideas and inspiration from actual UFO reports for his film Close Encounters of The Third Kind, well a look at the small UFO reports from various witnesses around the world and the fact that NICAP Site Coordinator Francis Ridge was invited by the press to view the motion picture Close Encounters of the Third Kind" before it was officially released, is a sign that this was probably the case;
Close Encounters of the Third Kind;
Released 16 November 1977;
Map of sightings for 1977, courtesy of Larry Hatch's "U" Database (Pending)
Created: August 15, 2007; Updated 3 July 2009;
This is currently a 24-page chronology of UFO incidents and events for 1977. Our thanks for these chronologies must go to our documentation team: Richard Hall (the original 1977 chronology from UFOE II), William Wise (Project Blue Book Archive), Dan Wilson (archive researcher), Brad Sparks (Comprehensive Catalog of Project Blue Book Unknowns), and Jean Waskiewicz (online NICAP DBase [NSID]).
The latest entries were provided by A-Team member Mike Swords. You will note the many foreign reports that we are now being able to access. Our special thanks to Dan Wilson for getting those to us. As more come in, this page will be updated.
This is the year that the MADAR Project got its real test. Go to July 10th and listen to the datatape recording! There were seven detections of magnetic anomalies by the Multiple Anomaly Detection and Automated Recording system at my Mt. Vernon, Indiana facility, within a six week period! There were UFO sightings within 60 miles NW and 85 miles SW at the same time MADAR was triggered.
Finally, in November, I was invited by the press to view the motion picture Close Encounters of the Third Kind" before it was officially released.
Francis Ridge;
NICAP Site Coordinator;
The 1977 UFO Chronology:
Jan.-May, 1977; UK
Miniwave of UFO sightings, including round and triangular objects (NICAP UFOE II, Section VIII).
Jan. 1, 1977; Creysseilles, France
1:30 AM. A pink glowing sphere hovered in the sky for six minutes, then flew away to the east toward the Mezayon Valley.
Jan. 1, 1977; Chabeiul, Drome, France
7:50 PM. A lenticular metallic disc with flames coming from the bottom made a 180-degree turn and flew off toward the south. The witness's eyes were sore from the glare of the light.
Jan. 1, 1977; Valence, France
8:00 PM. Mr. and Mrs. Perez had a close encounter with a ten-meter long ovoid object that chased their car. They also complained of eye pain and conjunctivitis as a result of the encounter, and a watch of theirs had stopped working. The UFO made a reappearance 40 minutes later.
Jan. 1, 1977; Eyragues,Bouches-Rhone Department, France
10:00 PM. A luminous hemisphere-shaped object, about .65 meters in diameter, maneuvered and glowed among trees. Broken branches were found later in the area.
Jan. 4, 1977; Carapito Beira Alta, Portugal
12:30 a.m. A man was training his German shepherd dog in a pine grove when the animal suddenly became agitated and sat next to him. He then saw hovering 10 meters from the ground a dark metallic domed object that was emitting a beeping sound. Near the object was a very tall, heavy set figure, human like. The object suddenly emitted a silvery lighting flash and disappeared, and so did the bulky figure. ##
The witness suffered from severe headaches soon after the incident, and his dog died with no obvious cause of death in August of the same year. (Source: Albert S. Rosales, Humanoid Contact Database 1977, case # 106, citing Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos & Fernandez Peri, Enciclopedia De Los Encuentros Cercanos con Ovnis).
Jan. 16, 1977; Moscow, Russia
On a clear and cloudless morning a giant flying saucer appeared over the southwestern part of Moscow, Russia. It was photographed as it hovered for more than an hour. It had a grayish-blue surface, but was distinctly visible against the blue sky. (Source: Paul Stonehill, The Soviet UFO Files, p. 69).
Jan.18, 1977; Bussieres-Saint-Georges, France
1:00 AM. A UFO witness was thrown into some bushes when three glowing balls of light flew overhead at one a.m. The witness had 75 minutes of missing time, and the incident was followed by many days of persistent headaches. (Source: Lumieres dans la Nuit, issue 317).
Jan. 21, 1977; St. Bernard Parish, LA
Boat brightly illuminated by round glowing object, abnormal silence, heat, boat held back as if by invisible force, light beam, time loss (NICAP UFOE II, Section VI).
Jan. 21, 1977; St. Bernard Parish, LA
8:45 PM. Two hunters spotted an extremely bright light which seemed to appear from nowhere. The light moved over them and just hovered. There was no sound coming from the light source, but the men could feel heat emitting from it. The light moved slowly toward a fire station located close by and appeared to hover for about 30 minutes. Finally it moved over to the Shell Oil Plant for awhile and then disappeared as quickly as it had come. (Reference: UFO INVESTIGATOR, February 1977, page 4)
Jan. 21, 1977; St. Bernard Parish, LA
Night. Two adult males were doing some [mildly] illegal poaching along the Dike Canal, one guy in a boat and the other moving parallel on the shore. They were not in close approximation when the man in the boat saw a bright red light in the sky. Suddenly the light seemed right around him as the boat was engulfed in the glow which extended to the surrounding landscape. It was too bright to see through to make out any shape behind it, and the only thought that the poacher had was that this was the game warden and he'd been busted. But there was no noise, so no helicopter, and the light flew away into the woods. His partner was already back at their camp, and saw none of this. When the boatman paddled back to camp, his story was met with derision.
The two both got into the boat and began to go down the canal, this time using the outboard motor as power. The light reappeared and moved in on them. The boatman's hair was felt "standing on end" with fright. Worse, although the motor was running, the boat was not moving--seemingly held in place by whatever this was. Then the light quickly left and "the boat lurched forward with great force, as if what was holding it back released the motor's power once again. Both men were thrown but neither fell out".
The light again flew at low level into the trees and continued on for some distance until they lost it. They estimated that the light was about 15-25 feet in diameter, mainly circular [though hard to see], of a "diamond texture" [by which they apparently mean that it appeared faceted with diamond shapes], and strikingly fast only when it moved toward them.
Both men reported "nausea, stomach aches, and fever, for a period of two days following". They intuitively connected this with the incident but the researcher did remark that it was flu season. Neither witness was interested in UFOs and neither used the terms UFOs or flying saucers during the interviews. Normal checking revealed no balloons nor aircraft in the area at the time.
(Submitted by Mike Swords. Source: NICAP Report file by Dr. Ted Peters, February 7, 1977; "Mysterious hovering light observed by Yscloskey men", St.Bernard News, January 26, 1977; "Mysterious hovering light still a mystery", St.Bernard News, February 9, 1977; Ted Peters in the MUFON Journal #111, February 1977 [ in this article it is claimed that an anonymous phonecaller, claiming to be a night guard on duty, said that he saw the thing too].
Jan. 27, 1977; Prospect, KY
1:05 AM. A teenager spotted a rectangular, orange-red object coming down to near his jeep. His jeep's radio failed 15 seconds into the sighting. He felt compelled to watch the object, which stayed in the vicinity only a short time. Later under hypnosis, however, he related being taken inside the object and examined by three strange creatures who were shaped like machines. The electrical system on his jeep went haywire the day after the sighting. (Source: Mark Rodeghier, UFO Reports Involving Vehicle Interference, case 406, citing CUFOS; IUR,2,4)
Feb. 3, 1977; Tasmania, Australia
9:30 PM. Several children at a youth camp at Seven-Mile Beach observed a stationary, dome-shaped object hovering near the beach. The object then moved behind some trees, partially obscuring it. On the dome was a row of windows through which at least two of the children reported seeing a thin humanoid figure with a round head.
It seemed to be moving back and forth behind the window. One child described the object as similar to two plates placed edge to edge, with flashing yellow white lights along the edge and a red light on top of the dome. The object disappeared from view behind the trees. (Source: David F. Webb & Ted Bloecher, HUMCAT: Catalogue of Humanoid Reports, case 1977-68, citing Tasmanian UFO Investigation Centre).
Feb. 4, 1977; Basford, Staffordshire, England
2:25 AM. An automobile club patrolman sighted a luminous orange object at some distance from his car. His two-way radio had heavy static while the object was in view. There was simultaneous radio interference at the Stafford police headquarters. (Source: Mark Rodeghier, UFO Reports Involving Vehicle Interference, case 407, citing Northern UFO Network News, 1977)
Feb. 7, 1977; Newcastle-under-Lyme, England
12:30 PM. School students from a school saw a gray flattened cigar-shaped object moving slowly through the sky, surrounded by a vapor or mist. It changed color to orange, then to green, and flew off toward the east-southeast. The sighting lasted 10 minutes. (Sources: Northern Network files, case report dated March 1, 1977; Awareness, July 1977, p. 20).
Feb.10, 1977; Tucson, AZ
7:30 PM. From a window in her house Ms. Lois Stovall saw a luminous object in the sky approach her house from the north. She and her grandmother, Mrs. Alice Buckner, went out to the yard for a better view and saw it hovering over a small tree less than 50 feet away. It was capsule shaped with a cylindrical vertical axis, and transparent on the side facing them with dark vertical bars. Through the transparent surface they could see a flame-like light and a human-shaped figure, gray all over gray, that looked puffed up like a balloon. It had ridges or rings running round the appendages, like the Michelin Man.
She could not see any hands or feet. This figure in an inflated suit was about four feet tall and was standing crouched over in a space only barely big enough for him. The light was coming from between his feet. Mrs. Buckner walked directly beneath the object and tried to touch it but it was hovering two feet too high. She could see there was a faceplate in the being's suit, and she could barely make out some sort of face behind it.
The object began to ascend, and soon passed out of sight to the south. Ms. Stovall saw three helicopters with glowing red cabin lights flying very low over the adjacent school grounds. The investigators were unable to find any plausible source for these mystery aircraft.
Mrs. Dessie Turner, a neighbor, also saw the object while it hovered, and estimated that it was 6.5 feet high and 2.5 feet in diameter. She thought she could see a shadowy figure inside. She also saw the helicopters. (Sources: David F. Webb & Ted Bloecher, HUMCAT: Catalogue of Humanoid Encounters, case 1977-8, citing Coral Lorenzen, APRO; Coral & Jim Lorenzen, APRO Bulletin).
Feb. 17, 1977; Pembrokeshire, Wales
During the day a teacher and two canteen workers at Broad Haven school watched a silvery yellow cigar-shaped object glide over a field emitting a loud humming sound. Before it left the area, a human-like figure was seen briefly to step out of the object and then go back inside. (Source: Albert S. Rosales, Humanoid Contact Database 1977, case # 1386, citing J. A. Brooks, Ghosts and Legends of Wales).
Feb. 24, 1977; Langenargen, Lake Constance, Germany
Humanoid encounter (NICAP UFOE II, Section XII).
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Spring, 1977; Lumberton, OH
Alleged skirmish between U.S. military forces and a landed (or disabled) alien craft. (Case B-13 in Status Report II, Leonard Stringfield; SYMPAP, 1978,77)
March 5, 1977; McNatt, MO
11:00 PM. Lonnie Stites and his wife, Deborah, were driving their pickup truck around a bend in the road when "the whole area lit up like a football field light was turned on, and a very bright light was shined on our windshield." He saw a man of normal height or slightly smaller stature standing alongside the road.
He was human looking, but dressed in green coveralls with square glasses and a tight green cap over his ears. He was "waving us down." Up on the hill was another figure carrying what appeared to be "a ball of electricity about the size of a basketball." The second figure was walking away from an object that looked like a water tank, about 10 feet across and 10 to 15 feet tall, with red lights going around it.
The UFO was about 50-60 feet from them. Mrs Stites said that she saw two people on the hillside carrying "basketball sized lights," and that the UFO at one point flew over the truck. They turned the truck around and drove away in great fear. (Source: David F. Webb & Ted Bloecher, HUMCAT: Catalogue of Humanoid Reports, case 1977-11, citing Monte Blue Skelton & Bob Pratt).
March 6, 1977; Sylmar, CA
1:05 AM. Mr. Kiese, a security guard, age 18, witnessed an orange, domed disc-shaped UFO descend into the field near his factory's security gate. The UFO either landed or hovered close to the ground for five minutes, but no noticeable landing traces were found at the site. (Source: Ann Druffel, MUFON UFO Journal, March 1978, p. 12).
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March 6, 1977: Evansville, IN
5:55 PM. Four witnesses, 5-mins. Two objects, three minutes apart. First one big enough to hold an 18-wheeler. (Ridge files)
March 7, 1977; Winchester, Hampshire, England
9:00 PM. Mrs. Jane Bowles was driving with a friend, Mrs. Ann Strickland, along a country road when their car stopped and a brilliant glow "like a white sun" lit up the area around them. An oval object was observed that was luminous and making a humming sound.
A man emerged from the UFO, one similar in appearance to the one involved in Mrs. Bowles earlier close encounter. He was human like with long hair, a beard, and pink eyes. He approached, holding out his hands, and touched Mrs Bowles. His hands were warm to the touch like a human's. The man looked at Mrs. Strickland and then spoke in an unknown language.
He gave something to Mrs. Bowles which she would not divulge, and then he returned to the UFO, which ascended into the sky with a hum and high-pitched noise. The women returned to Winchester, and Mrs. Bowles observed that her hands were red and swollen. She had to remove her wedding ring and she found the skin underneath raw. (Source: David F. Webb and Ted Bloecher, HUMCAT: Catalogue of Humanoid Encounters, case 1977-12, citing Lionel Beer, BUFORA).
March 8, 1977; Gatchelville, PA
7:30 PM. Nine independent witnesses watched a red ball of light maneuver against the wind. Holes were found burnt in the ground at a possible landing site. (Sources: Allan Hendry, The UFO Handbook, p. 120; Larry Hatch, U computer database, case 11471).
March 9, 1977; Nelson, North Lancashire, UK
3:10 AM. A cigar-shaped, metallic object appeared in the sky, so the two witnesses stopped their car for a better look. The UFO had lights at either end that were changing color and the entire object was surrounded by a gray mist. The witnesses heard a sound they described as being like the tide coming in and going out. As the object came quite close, their car's engine stopped and the headlights dimmed. After five minutes, the object flew off and the car could be restarted. Both of the witnesses came down with headaches shortly after the sighting. (FSR, Vol. 23, No. 2, (NICAP UFOE II, Section VI).
March 12, 1977; south of Syracuse, NY
9:05 PM. The pilot and first officer of an United Airlines DC-10 observed a round bright white object. The object had strong effects on the autopilot and the three compasses. (Reference: UNIDENTIFIED AERIAL PHENOMENA EIGHTY YEARS OF PILOT SIGHTINGS Catalog of Military, Airline, Private Pilots Sightings from 1916 to 2000 Dominique F. Weinstein)
March 13, 1977; Pen-Y-Cwm, Pembrokeshire, Wales
9:00 PM. Stephen Taylor, age 17, was walking home from a visit to his girlfriend's house when he saw an orange, luminous, pear-shaped UFO in the sky. He walked to a friend's house to tell him but was not believed. About half a mile further on he noticed that he could not see the lights of farmhouses to his right. Looking closer, he saw that they were obscured by a large dome-shaped object, dark in appearance, about 30 to 40 feet in diameter and 40 feet high, that was resting in the adjacent field. Around its underside there was a dim glow of light.
As he watched he heard footsteps, and looking around only a few yards away was a figure "like a skinny human six-foot tall." The being looked "like an old man" with high cheekbones, and had large round eyes resembling those of a fish. Over its mouth was a box like device with a tube leading over the shoulder. It was wearing a one-piece suit that looked semi-transparent.
Taylor took a swing at the figure and ran for home. On arrival he found his dog acted strangely toward him, snarling and barking, and had to be put outdoors. The dog behaved normally the next day. (Source: David F. Webb and Ted Bloecher, HUMCAT: Catalogue of Humanoid Reports, case 1977 -13, citing Randall Jones Pugh, BUFORA).
March 15, 1977; West Jacksonport, Door County, WI
8:30 PM. Mrs. Joan Le Clair and four other local people saw a UFO hovering over some nearby trees. Mrs. Le Clair looked through binoculars and could see an elongated object, green on top and bottom, with a red band around the center. "There appeared to be another compartment on the bottom of this disc, and I could see windows in this lower part. There appeared to be a figure inside the object." After three minutes the UFO sped away. Other observers of the UFO failed to see the windows or the occupant. (Sources: Sturgeon Bay Advocate, March 17, 1977; David F. Webb & Ted Bloecher, HUMCAT: Catalogue of Humanoid Reports, case 1977-14 (A1715), citing Thomas Heiman).
March 20, 1977; Pebble Beach, CA
On this night a husband and wife were in a pair of sleeping bags by the seashore when they saw a bright disc-shaped object come from the ocean straight towards them. The woman had a brief recollection of seeing several tall humanoids without mouths, who communicated with her telepathically and showed her a book.
She later recalled that the craft was flat, streamlined, and black in color. A beam of light was shone on the couple and apparently took them inside the UFO. The eyes of the aliens were reportedly black and shiny but rounded towards the nose and did not blink. The aliens were about six and a half to seven feet, thin, with delicate bodies, and very long fingers.
They wore skintight one-piece diver outfits like wetsuits. Their heads were completely hairless. The inside of the craft resembled a doctor's office: it was very bright white and warm. The wife was made to lie on a very cold table, where she was strapped down and observed many instruments, one of which made a buzzing sound. The woman had been involved in previous close encounter incidents. (Source: Albert S. Rosales, Humanoid Contact Database 1977, citing WBS Newsletter, special edition # 4)
March 21, 1977; Los Angeles, CA
8:50 PM. Two witnesses on a flight at 1500', two UFOs at 1/2-mile range,15 seconds duration. (Haines printout)
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March 23, 1977; Farmland, IN
5:40 AM. Snowy morning. Blue lights were ahead which lady thought was a snow plough. One blinking light of unknown shape flew across in; front of her then suddenly 6 to 12 blue lights took up position 2 to 3 feet in front of her slowly traveling car. The car was illuminated with a blue light and static came on radio. When the lights dived a red light came on as if breaking. The small lights all flew off together and out of sight over a field. Next day at spot in road her car radio went dead. (Worley files)
March 29, 1977; Pacific Ocean W. of California
3:22 PM. A document has been located and scanned, and details from the observer are in the directory linked above. This involves UFOs tracked by B-1 bomber. (Jan Aldrich)
April 4, 1977; Tucson, AZ
1:30 AM. A 52-year-old woman was watching jackrabbits by moonlight on the Veterans Administration Hospital grounds when she heard a whirring noise and looked up to see a luminous white UFO coming down for a landing. It was ellipsoidal in shape with fuzzy contours, and landed approximately 30 to 40 feet away.
The top of the object was a soft luminous pink, and something like a horizontal periscope or boom protruded form the right side. The object was about 40 to 50 feet in diameter and about 20 feet high. The whirring ceased when it landed, but she saw no landing gear. Then a human like figure, well over six-foot tall with very broad shoulders, walked toward her from the UFO. She had not seen him emerge through a door in the craft.
He wore a silvery one-piece uniform that was tight-fitting, like a frogman's wetsuit, and he had on mitten-like gloves. He spoke to her, saying "I am Onleel, I want to talk with you, come with me." She saw only his eyes and no other facial features. The eyes were large and dark. The voice was probably telepathic and it seemed to come from his eyes. She felt compelled to obey. The next thing she remembers she is inside the ship, with no recollection of how she got onboard.
April 4, 1977; Gorham, Coos County, NH
8:15 PM.. Susanne Fortier was walking on the lawn behind her house with her collie dog. We heard a sound like a "wind or whistle" and she then observed a small object land in the vicinity of the children's playhouse. It was about five feet in diameter, with eight "pods or legs", windows or doors all around it, and an antenna on top.
The interior was a bright red, and it contained six three-foot-tall occupants who had long slit-like eyes, ape like noses, and no hair. The skin of their faces seemed very wrinkled. They wore gloves. Mrs. Fortier could hear "a garble of voices" talking, like a bunch of CB voices, and felt a great deal of heat come from the craft. She watched it for about 15 minutes, after which it rose straight up and flew off to the south.
When she got back in the house she found her face and legs red from the heat. Her dog, which reacted noticeably to the object, would still not let her go near the area a month later. No traces were found at the landing site, which had been muddy. (Source: David F. Webb & Ted Bloecher, HUMCAT: Catalogue of Humanoid Reports, case 1977-15, citing investigator Mrs. Lorraine Duchesne, MUFON).
April 5, 1977: Deerfield, IL
2:17 PM. 1-1.5 mins. Pilot driving on I-94 northbound on a cold, cloudy day (overcast at 5,000') saw object coming toward him (southbound) first in distance then directly above him later on. Described as a silver mushroom three times the apparent size of the moon, moved silently toward Chicago against the wind. (IUR,2,5)
April 6, 1977; Ste. Dorothee, Quebec, Canada
7:00 PM. The witness, a woman in her thirties living on Rue Cleroux, Ste. was in her kitchen when she saw a strong light come in her back window. When she raised the blind she saw a disc-shaped object with a dazzling, pulsating white luminosity, about 35 feet in diameter. It was hovering several yards above a tree 35 feet tall. It bore a pulsating red luminous domed cupola on top without windows. Around its lower periphery revolved yellow, green, blue, and red blinking lights. She heard a buzzing sound like a huge swarm of bees. After watching the UFO for perhaps 15 seconds, she ran to her bathroom and hid.
Two minutes later the noise and the light ceased. She went out on the street in front of her house where she found a 13-year-old boy, Jos Madison, pointing a carbine at the sky. The now silent disc-shaped UFO was hovering 100 feet up in a tilted position. Jos did not fire his gun, but called to his friend Alair Narby, also 13 years old. Jos's two sisters also joined them and watched the UFO, which was now moving from place to place above the houses by jumps too rapid to observe. It then stopped in place for more than five minutes, during which Mrs. Madison came out and also observed it.
Now after sunset, the UFO moved off toward the Nadon River, where it again dashed back and forth. The two boys followed it to the Nadon field by the river, in which there was a temporary pond formed by melted snow. They saw the UFO approach the river, flying very low, and it skimmed over the pond producing a loud sizzle of boiling water. It then landed behind a slight rise. It then emitted a very strident sharp sound.
After four or five minutes a humanoid being appeared, visible from the waist up because of the terrain. He had a helmeted head, shiny red and metallic shoulders, and was seen from the rear. He appeared in front of the object. Above his head was a red light, apparently floating in midair. He looked to the right and left, then bent down and was not seen again. Shortly afterward the disc rose, lit up, and at an altitude of about 65 feet resumed its erratic movements.
Darkness had fallen and the boys returned home, finally running because it seemed to them the UFO was following them. They temporarily suffered partial deafness, perhaps from the UFO's noise. At least three families on the block experienced total interference with their TV reception during this time. At the landing site different tracks and what appeared to be footprints were found. (Sources: Marc Leduc, UFO Quebec, April 1977, issue # 10; HUMCAT: Catalogue of Humanoid Reports, case 1977-74, citing Marc Leduc).
April 7, 1977; Milford Haven, Pembrokeshire, Wales
5:00 AM. Mr. Cyril John, age 64, a former local political leader, was up early for an early start to London when he noticed a light shining in his bedroom window. Looking out he observed two objects.
The first was a silvery-gray egg-shaped object with a bright orange-red light on top of it. It was about four feet across and was rocking gently in the air about 60 meters away. The second was a seven to eight foot tall humanoid figure, who floated in the air with arms out and legs bent back, like a "free fall parachutist." There was only about 35 feet between the man and the observer. No features could be seen on the figure's face, and it wore a uniformly silver-gray "boiler suit."
It remained motionless in the air for more than 25 minutes. Then both the being and the ovoid object began slowly moving off, gradually disappearing from view in the distance. (Source: David F. Webb and Ted Bloecher, HUMCAT: Catalogue of Humanoid Reports, case 1977-17 [A1719], citing Randall Jones Pugh, British UFO Research Association).
April 8, 1977; Cedar Springs, MI
2:00 AM. A domed disc-shaped object flew around two witnesses, hovering and flashing over some nearby trees. Ring ground marks were found on the ground. (Source: CUFOS files, report dated April 10, 1977).
April 12, 1977; Tucson, AZ
3:30 PM. Two young girls walking under a highway overpass by a canal in were following a path up a small hill when they saw a UFO hovering above some nearby brush. The craft was dark gray, metallic, and shaped like a drum. It had four to six long spider like legs hanging from its bottom. The UFO rose slowly and disappeared towards the southeast following a curved path. From out of some bushes beneath where the object had been hovering, a thin, human-like figure emerged.
It had long brown hair and was wearing a blue top and dark pants, but it also wore strange looking boots. Behind the thin figure five other shorter figures appeared. The group walked briskly away in single file, towards the desert and into the distance where they could no longer be seen. (Source: Albert S. Rosales, Humanoid Contact Database 1977, case # 1810, citing Virgilio Sanchez Ocejo, Destino, Vol. 27 # 3, quoting APRO).
April 19, 1977; Little Haven, Pembrokeshire, Wales
2:00 AM. The radio of hotel owner Rosa Gremville suddenly went dead. Moments later she heard a loud humming noise outside and looking out she was dazzled by a "huge moon lighting up the area, moving about like a seesaw." It descended and landed in a field 100 yards behind the hotel. "It was round, with flames coming from the top of a dome. There was a light on it, like a pulsating star."
Two creatures 8 or 9-feet tall emerged from the dome through the flames. They wore cream or silvery colored jumpsuits. She could see no facial features nor any hair on these creatures, even though see tried to discern what they looked like through a pair of binoculars. They looked as though they had hands, but she saw no fingers. "I though their feet were webbed." The figures walked around near the object for about 15 minutes.
Mrs. Gremville wanted to scream, but she had lost her voice. She went in search of another witness and when they returned the UFO and humanoid figures had gone. Burn marks were found on the ground at the site the next day. (Sources: David F. Webb and Ted Bloecher, HUMCAT: Catalogue of Humanoid Reports, case 1977-18; Randall Jones Pugh, FSR, August 1977, p. 6 for BUFORA).
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April 20, 1977; Herbrandston, Pembrokeshire, Wales;
Mark Marston, age 11, was looking for bird's nests in a hedge when "a red glow appeared in the sky 50 yards away." A few moments later a figure appeared and drifted through a closed gate at the other end of the field. It was dressed in a silver suit, like a diver, with a large helmet and a square, featureless face. It approached Mark rapidly, who turned and fled for home, screaming. (Source: David F. Webb and Ted Bloecher, HUMCAT: Catalogue of Humanoid Reports, case 1977, citing Randall Jones Pugh for BUFORA).
April 25, 1977; Pampa Lluscuma, Chile;
3:50 AM. Eight soldiers on a military patrol suddenly saw a bright light nearby. The soldiers' dog and horses remained still while the lights hovered nearby. The leader of the group, Corporal Armando Valdes, ordered the other soldiers to put out their campfire. The two large lights were about 800 meters away, and hovering close to the ground. Cpl. Valdes approached the lights, ordering them to identify themselves.
At this point a bright light enveloped Valdes and he vanished in plain view of the others. The others began frantically searching for him but they were unable to find him. At around 4:15 a.m. Valdes suddenly reappeared. He had a strange look on his face and he emitted a sinister laugh, asking several times where his mother was. Then he said, again in a very sinister sounding voice, "you will never know who we are and where we come from."
The others noticed that he appeared to have a week's growth of beard, whereas he had been clean-shaven just an hour ago, and his digital watch indicated the impossible date of April 30. He was almost in hysterics and one of the soldiers had to slap him, at which point he fainted. One of the other soldiers, Raul Salinas, who had been standing a few meters back of the others, noticed a strange humanoid creature behind some nearby rocks.
He described it as half animal and half human; no facial features were visible, but it seemed to be wearing a helmet and was carrying a red light. Salinas was stunned to see the creature appear at several places simultaneously, he thought that maybe it could have been several humanoids. He did not mention this to the others at the time, since they were already scared, but the others did not see the humanoid or humanoids.
When Valdes woke up he could not remember where he had been. It is assumed the Chilean military conducted various medical tests on Valdes. (Source: Albert S. Rosales, Humanoid Contact Database 1977, case # 3062, citing Diego Contreras & Raul Nunez).
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