It was soon after we had written a finis to the Case of the
Scoutmaster that I went into Washington to give another briefing on
the latest UFO developments. Several reports had come in during early
August that had been read with a good deal of interest in the
military and other governmental agencies. By late August 1952 several
groups in Washington were following the UFO situation very closely.
The sighting that had stirred everyone up came from Haneda AFB, now
Tokyo International Airport, in Japan. Since the sighting came from
outside the U.S., we couldn't go out and investigate it, but the
intelligence officers in the Far East Air Force had done a good job,
so we had the complete story of this startling account of an
encounter with a UFO. Only a few minor questions had been unanswered,
and a quick wire to FEAF brought back these missing data. Normally it
took up to three months to get routine questions back and forth, but
this time the exchange of wires took only a matter of hours.
Several months after the sighting I talked to one of the FEAF
intelligence officers who had investigated it, and in his estimation
it was one of the best to come out of the Far East.
The first people to see the UFO were two control tower operators who
were walking across the ramp at the air base heading toward the tower
to start the midnight shift. They were about a half hour early so
they weren't in any big hurry to get up into the tower--at least not
until they saw a large brilliant light off to the northeast over
Tokyo Bay. They stopped to look at the light for a few seconds
thinking that it might be an exceptionally brilliant star, but both
men had spent many lonely nights in a control tower when they had
nothing to look at except stars and they had never seen anything this
bright before. Besides, the light was moving. The two men had lined
it up with the corner of a hangar and could see that it was
continually moving closer and drifting a little off to the right.
In a minute they had run across the ramp, up the several hundred
steps to the tower, and were looking at the light through 7x50
binoculars. Both of the men, and the two tower operators whom they
were relieving, got a good look at the UFO. The light was circular in
shape and had a constant brilliance. It appeared to be the upper
portion of a large, round, dark shape which was about four times the
diameter of the light itself. As they watched, the UFO moved in
closer, or at least it appeared to be getting closer because it
became more distinct. When it moved in, the men could see a second
and dimmer light on the lower edge of the dark, shadowy portion.
In a few minutes the UFO had moved off to the east, getting dimmer
and dimmer as it disappeared. The four tower men kept watching the
eastern sky, and suddenly the light began to reappear. It stayed in
sight a few seconds, was gone again, and then for the third time it
came back, heading toward the air base.
This time one of the tower operators picked up a microphone, called
the pilot of a C-54 that was crossing Tokyo Bay, and asked if he
could see the light. The pilot didn't see anything unusual.
At 11:45P.M., according to the logbook in the tower, one of the
operators called a nearby radar site and asked if they had an
unidentified target on their scopes. They did.
The FEAF intelligence officers who investigated the sighting made a
special effort to try to find out if the radar's unidentified target
and the light were the same object. They deduced that they were
since, when the tower operators and the radar operators compared
notes over the telephone, the light and the radar target were in the
same location and were moving in the same direction.
For about five minutes the radar tracked the UFO as it cut back and
forth across the central part of Tokyo Bay, sometimes traveling so
slowly that it almost hovered and then speeding up to 300 miles an
hour. All of this time the tower operators were watching the light
through binoculars. Several times when the UFO approached the radar
station--once it came within 10 miles--a radar operator went outside
to find out if he could see the light but no one at the radar site
ever saw it. Back at the air base the tower operators had called
other people and they saw the light. Later on the tower man said that
he had the distinct feeling that the light was highly directional,
like a spotlight.
Some of the people who were watching thought that the UFO might be a
lighted balloon; so, for the sake of comparison, a lighted weather
balloon was released. But the light on the balloon was much more
"yellowish" than the UFO and in a matter of seconds it had traveled
far enough away that the light was no longer visible. This gave the
observers a chance to compare the size of the balloon and the size of
the dark, shadowy part of the UFO. Had the UFO been 10 miles away it
would have been 50 feet in diameter.
Three minutes after midnight an F-94 scrambled from nearby Johnson
AFB came into the area. The ground controller sent the F-94 south of
Yokohama, up Tokyo Bay, and brought him in "behind" the UFO. The
second that the ground controller had the F-94 pilot lined up and
told him that he was in line for a radar run, the radar operator in
the rear seat of the F-94 called out that he had a lock-on. His
target was at 6,000 yards, 10 degrees to the right and 10 degrees
below the F-94. The lock-on was held for ninety seconds as the ground
controller watched both the UFO and the F-94 make a turn and come
toward the ground radar site. Just as the target entered the "ground
clutter"--the permanent and solid target near the radar station
caused by the radar beam's striking the ground--the lock-on was
broken. The target seemed to pull away swiftly from the jet
interceptor. At almost this exact instant the tower operators
reported that they had lost visual contact with the UFO. The tower
called the F-94 and asked if they had seen anything visually during
the chase--they hadn't. The F-94 crew stayed in the area ten or
fifteen more minutes but couldn't see anything or pick up any more
targets on their radar.
Soon after the F-94 left the area, both the ground radar and the
tower operators picked up the UFO again. In about two minutes radar
called the tower to say that their target had just "broken into three
pieces" and that the three "pieces," spaced about a quarter of a mile
apart, were leaving the area, going northeast. Seconds later tower
operators lost sight of the light.
The FEAF intelligence officers had checked every possible angle but
they could offer nothing to account for the sighting.
There were lots of opinions, weather targets for example, but once
again the chances of a weather target's being in exactly the same
direction as a bright star and having the star appear to move with
the false radar target aren't too likely--to say the least. And then
the same type of thing had happened twice before inside of a month's
time, once in California and once in Michigan.
As one of the men at the briefing I gave said, "It's incredible, and
I can't believe it, but those boys in FEAF are in a war--they're
veterans--and by damn, I think they know what they're talking about
when they say they've never seen anything like this before."
I could go into a long discourse on the possible explanations for
this sighting; I heard many, but in the end there would be only one
positive answer--the UFO could not be identified as something we knew
about. It could have been an interplanetary spaceship. Many people
thought this was the answer and were all for sticking their necks out
and establishing a category of conclusions for UFO reports and
labeling it spacecraft. But the majority ruled, and a UFO remained an
_unidentified_ flying object.
On my next trip to the Pentagon I spent the whole day talking to
Major Dewey Fournet and two of his bosses, Colonel W. A. Adams and
Colonel Weldon Smith, about the UFO subject in general. One of the
things we talked about was a new approach to the UFO problem--that of
trying to prove that the motion of a UFO as it flew through the air
was intelligently controlled.
I don't know who would get credit for originating the idea of trying
to analyze the motion of the UFO's. It was one of those kinds of
ideas that are passed around, with everyone adding a few
modifications. We'd been talking about making a study of this idea
for a long time, but we hadn't had many reports to work with; but
now, with the mass of data that we had accumulated in June and July
and August, the prospects of such a study looked promising.
The basic aim of the study would be to learn whether the motion of
the reported UFO's was random or ordered. Random motion is an
unordered, helter-skelter motion very similar to a swarm of gnats or
flies milling around. There is no apparent pattern or purpose to
their flight paths. But take, for example, swallows flying around a
chimney--they wheel, dart, and dip, but if you watch them closely,
they have a definite pattern in their movements--an ordered motion.
The definite pattern is intelligently controlled because they are
catching bugs or getting in line to go down the chimney.
By the fall of 1952 we had a considerable number of well-documented
reports in which the UFO's made a series of maneuvers. If we could
prove that these maneuvers were not random, but ordered, it would be
proof that the UFO's were things that were intelligently controlled.
During our discussion Major Fournet brought up two reports in which
the UFO seemed to know what it was doing and wasn't just aimlessly
darting around. One of these was the recent sighting from Haneda AFB,
Japan, and the other was the incident that happened on the night of
July 29, when an F-94 attempted to intercept a UFO over eastern
Michigan. In both cases radar had established the track of the UFO.
In the Haneda Incident, according to the sketch of the UFO's track,
each turn the UFO made was constant and the straight "legs" between
the turns were about the same length. The sketch of the UFO's flight
path as it moved back and forth over Tokyo Bay reminded me very much
of the "crisscross" search patterns we used to fly during World War
II when we were searching for the crew of a ditched airplane. The
only time the UFO seriously deviated from this pattern was when the F-
94 got on its tail.
The Michigan sighting was even better, however. In this case there
was a definite reason for every move that the UFO made. It made a 180-
degree turn because the F-94 was closing on it head on. It
alternately increased and decreased its speed, but every time it did
this it was because the F-94 was closing in and it evidently put on
speed to pull out ahead far enough to get out of range of the F-94's
radar. To say that this motion was random and that it was just a
coincidence that the UFO made the 180-degree turn when the F-94
closed in head on and that it was just a coincidence that the UFO
speeded up every time the F-94 began to get within radar range is
pushing the chance of coincidence pretty hard.
The idea of the motion analysis study sounded interesting to me, but
we were so busy on Project Blue Book we didn't have time to do it. So
Major Fournet offered to look into it further and I promised him all
the help we could give him.
In the meantime my people in Project Blue Book were contacting
various scientists in the U.S., and indirectly in Europe, telling
them about our data, and collecting opinions. We did this in two
ways. In the United States we briefed various scientific meetings and
groups. To get the word to the other countries, we enlisted the
gratis aid of scientists who were planning to attend conferences or
meetings in Europe. We would brief these European-bound scientists on
all of the aspects of the UFO problem so they could informally
discuss the problem with their European colleagues.
The one thing about these briefings that never failed to amaze me,
although it happened time and time again, was the interest in UFO's
within scientific circles. As soon as the word spread that Project
Blue Book was giving official briefings to groups with the proper
security clearances, we had no trouble in getting scientists to swap
free advice for a briefing. I might add that we briefed only groups
who were engaged in government work and who had the proper security
clearances solely because we could discuss any government project
that might be of help to us in pinning down the UFO. Our briefings
weren't just squeezed in either; in many instances we would arrive at
a place to find that a whole day had been set aside to talk about
UFO's. And never once did I meet anyone who laughed off the whole
subject of flying saucers even though publicly these same people had
jovially sloughed off the press with answers of "hallucinations,"
"absurd," or "a waste of time and money." They weren't wild-eyed fans
but they were certainly interested.
Colonel S. H. Kirkland and I once spent a whole day briefing and
talking to the Beacon Hill Group, the code name for a collection of
some of the world's leading scientists and industrialists. This
group, formed to consider and analyze the toughest of military
problems, took a very serious interest in our project and gave much
good advice. At Los Alamos and again at Sandia Base our briefings
were given in auditoriums to standing room only crowds. In addition I
gave my briefings at National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics
laboratories, at Air Research and Development centers, at Office of
Naval Research facilities and at the Air Force University. Then we
briefed special groups of scientists.
Normally scientists are a cautious lot and stick close to proven
facts, keeping their personal opinions confined to small groups of
friends, but when they know that there is a sign on a door that says
"Classified Briefing in Progress," inhibitions collapse like the
theories that explain all the UFO's away. People say just what they
think.
I could jazz up this part of the UFO story as so many other
historians of the UFO have and say that Dr. So-and-So believes that
the reported flying saucers are from outer space or that Dr. Whositz
is firmly convinced that Mars is inhabited. I talked to plenty of Dr.
So-and-So's who believed that flying saucers were real and who were
absolutely convinced that other planets or bodies in the universe
were inhabited, but we were looking for proven facts and not just
personal opinions.
However, some of the questions we asked the scientists had to be
answered by personal opinions because the exact answers didn't exist.
When such questions came up, about all we could do was to try to get
the largest and most representative cross section of personal
opinions upon which to base our decisions. In this category of
questions probably the most frequently discussed was the possibility
that other celestial bodies in the universe were populated with
intelligent beings. The exact answer to this is that no one knows.
But the consensus was that it wouldn't be at all surprising.
All the briefings we were giving added to our work load because UFO
reports were still coming in in record amounts. The lack of newspaper
publicity after the Washington sightings had had some effect because
the number of reports dropped from nearly 500 in July to 175 in
August, but this was still far above the normal average of twenty to
thirty reports a month.
September 1952 started out with a rush, and for a while it looked as
if UFO sightings were on the upswing again. For some reason, we never
could determine why, we suddenly began to get reports from all over
the southeastern United States. Every morning, for about a week or
two, we'd have a half dozen or so new reports. Georgia and Alabama
led the field. Many of the reports came from people in the vicinity
of the then new super-hush-hush Atomic Energy Commission facility at
Savannah River, Georgia. And many were coming from the port city of
Mobile, Alabama. Our first thought, when the reports began to pour
in, was that the newspapers in these areas were possibly stirring
things up with scare stories, but our newspaper clipping service
covered the majority of the southern papers, and although we kept
looking for publicity, none showed up. In fact, the papers only
barely mentioned one or two of the sightings. As they came in, each
of the sighting reports went through our identification process; they
were checked against all balloon flights, aircraft flights, celestial
bodies, and the MO file, but more than half of them came out as
unknowns.
When the reports first began to come in, I had called the
intelligence officers at all of the major military installations in
the Southeast unsuccessfully trying to find out if they could shed
any light on the cause of the sightings. One man, the man who was
responsible for UFO reports made to Brookley AFB, just outside of
Mobile, Alabama, took a dim view of all of the proceedings. "They're
all nuts," he said.
About a week later his story changed. It seems that one night, about
the fourth night in a row that UFO's had been reported near Mobile,
this man and several of his assistants decided to try to see these
famous UFO's; about 10:00P.M., the time that the UFO's were usually
reported, they were gathered around the telephone in the man's office
at Brookley AFB. Soon a report came in. The first question that the
investigator who answered the phone asked was, "Can you still see it?"
The answer was "Yes," so the officer took off to see the UFO.
The same thing happened twice more, and two more officers left for
different locations. The fourth time the phone rang the call was from
the base radar station. They were picking up a UFO on radar, so the
boss himself took off. He saw the UFO in air out over Mobile Bay and
he saw the return of the UFO on the radarscope.
The next morning he called me at ATIC and for over an hour he told
me what had happened. Never have I talked to four more ardent flying
saucer believers.
We did quite a bit of work on the combination radar-visual sighting
at Brookley. First of all, radar-visual sightings were the best type
of UFO sightings we received. There are no explanations for how radar
can pick up a UFO target that is being watched visually at the same
time. Maybe I should have said there are no proven explanations on
how this can happen, because, like everything else associated with
the UFO, there was a theory. During the Washington National Sightings
several people proposed the idea that the same temperature-inversion
layer that was causing the radar beam to bend down and pick up a
ground target was causing the target to appear to be in the air. They
went on to say that we couldn't get a radar-visual sighting unless
the ground target was a truck, car, house, or something else that was
lighted and could be seen at a great distance. The second reason the
Brookley AFB sighting was so interesting was that it knocked this
theory cold.
The radar at Brookley AFB was so located that part of the area that
it scanned was over Mobile Bay. It was in this area that the UFO was
detected. We thought of the theory that the same inversion layer that
bent the radar beam also caused the target to appear to be in the
air, and we began to do a little checking. There was a slight
inversion but, according to our calculations, it wasn't enough to
affect the radar. More important was the fact that in the area where
the target appeared there were no targets to pick up--let alone
lighted targets. We checked and rechecked and found that at the time
of the sighting there were no ships, buoys, or anything else that
would give a radar return in the area of Mobile Bay in which we were
interested.
Although this sighting wasn't as glamorous as some we had, it was
highly significant because it was possible to show that the UFO
couldn't have been a lighted surface target.
While we were investigating the sighting we talked to several
electronics specialists about our radar-visual sightings. One of the
most frequent comments we heard was, "Why do all of these radar-
visual sightings occur at night?"
The answer was simple: they don't. On August 1, just before dawn, an
ADC radar station outside of Yaak, Montana, on the extreme northern
border of the United States, picked up a UFO. The report was very
similar to the sighting at Brookley except it happened in the
daylight and, instead of seeing a light, the crew at the radar
station saw a "dark, cigar-shaped object" right where the radar had
the UFO pinpointed.
What these people saw is a mystery to this day.
Late in September I made a trip out to Headquarters, ADC to brief
General Chidlaw and his staff on the past few months' UFO activity.
Our plans for periodic briefings, which we had originally set up
with ADC, had suffered a bit in the summer because we were all busy
elsewhere. They were still giving us the fullest co-operation, but we
hadn't been keeping them as thoroughly read in as we would have liked
to. I'd finished the briefing and was eating lunch at the officers'
club with Major Verne Sadowski, Project Blue Book's liaison officer
in ADC Intelligence, and several other officers. I had a hunch that
something was bothering these people. Then finally Major Sadowski
said, "Look, Rupe, are you giving us the straight story on these
UFO's?"
I thought he meant that I was trying to spice things up a little, so
I said that since he had copies of most of our reports and had read
them, he should know that I was giving them the facts straight across
the board.
Then one of the other officers at the table cut in, "That's just the
point, we do have the reports and we have read them. None of us can
understand why Intelligence is so hesitant to accept the fact that
something we just don't know about is flying around in our skies--
unless you are trying to cover up something big."
Everyone at the table put in his ideas. One radar man said that he'd
looked over several dozen radar reports and that his conclusion was
that the UFO's couldn't be anything but interplanetary spaceships. He
started to give his reasons when another radar man leaped into the
conversation.
This man said that he'd read every radar report, too, and that there
wasn't one that couldn't be explained as a weather phenomenon--even
the radar-visual sightings. In fact, he wasn't even convinced that we
had ever gotten such a thing as radar-visual sighting. He wanted to
see proof that an object that was seen visually was the same object
that the radar had picked up. Did we have it?
I got back into the discussion at this point with the answer. No, we
didn't have proof if you want to get technical about the degree of
proof needed. But we did have reports where the radar and visual
bearings of the UFO coincided almost exactly. Then we had a few
reports where airplanes had followed the UFO's and the maneuvers of
the UFO that the pilot reported were the same as the maneuvers of the
UFO that was being tracked by radar.
A lieutenant colonel who had been sitting quietly by interjected a
well-chosen comment. "It seems the difficulty that Project Blue Book
faces is what to accept and what not to accept as proof."
The colonel had hit the proverbial nail on its proverbial head.
Then he went on, "Everyone has a different idea of what proof really
is. Some people think we should accept a new model of an airplane
after only five or ten hours of flight testing. This is enough proof
for them that the airplane will fly. But others wouldn't be happy
unless it was flight-tested for five or ten years. These people have
set an unreasonably high value on the word 'proof.' The answer is
somewhere in between these two extremes."
But where is this point when it comes to UFO's?
There was about a thirty-second pause for thought after the
colonel's little speech. Then someone asked, "What about these recent
sightings at Mainbrace?"
In late September 1952 the NATO naval forces had held maneuvers off
the coast of Europe; they were called Operation Mainbrace. Before
they had started someone in the Pentagon had half seriously mentioned
that Naval Intelligence should keep an eye open for UFO's, but no one
really expected the UFO's to show up. Nevertheless, once again the
UFO's were their old unpredictable selves--they were there.
On September 20, a U.S. newspaper reporter aboard an aircraft
carrier in the North Sea was photographing a carrier take-off in
color when he happened to look back down the flight deck and saw a
group of pilots and flight deck crew watching something in the sky.
He went back to look and there was a silver sphere moving across the
sky just behind the fleet of ships. The object appeared to be large,
plenty large enough to show up in a photo, so the reporter shot
several pictures. They were developed right away and turned out to
be excellent. He had gotten the superstructure of the carrier in each
one and, judging by the size of the object in each successive photo,
one could see that it was moving rapidly.
The intelligence officers aboard the carrier studied the photos. The
object looked like a balloon. From its size it was apparent that if
it were a balloon, it would have been launched from one of the ships,
so the word went out on the TBS radio: "Who launched a balloon?"