2.0 MiB
July 26 — 5:15 p.m. Air Defense Command radar detects a UFO over Williams, California. An F-94 jet interceptor is scrambled and locks onto the object with its radar. The crew sees a yellow-orange light. As confirmed by ground and airborne radar, the UFO plays tag with the F-94, alternately accelerating away when it gets close, then slowing down until it catches up again. (NICAP, “F-94 Intercept with ADC Detection”; Sparks, p. 158)
July 26 — 11:00 p.m. Three women in Oran, Algeria, notice a large, orange-red, luminous patch in the sky. It travels from east to west, halts, then vanishes. It is one of many UFOs seen in the province of Oran over several weeks. (ClearIntent, pp. 120–121)
July 27 — 10:40 a.m. Bowling Green State University biologist Charles H. Otis sees a “flotilla” of UFOs “seemingly floating along, making no sound” at 3724 Dexter Road, Ann Arbor, Michigan. He grabs a pair of 5x binoculars and studies them until they disappear. He counts 15 of them in a loose formation, moving slowly. One object leaves the formation and disappears in a burst of speed. The body of each seems to be elongated but split at the rear. A bright glow is visible in the front, and they have a bifurcated tail streaming out horizontally, never changing in length (UFOEv, pp. 50–51)
July 27 — 6:35 p.m. A group of eight pilots and engineers see a large, silvery object moving rapidly at a high altitude over Manhattan Beach, California. After it makes a turn, the UFO separates into 7 discs that form into groups, circle, and speed out of sight. Former Navy pilot and aircraft engineer J. E. Kempf says the formation looks like a “stack of coins.” (NICAP, “Large Object Separates into 7 Discs”; Sparks, p. 159; Michael D. Swords, “Intelligent Motions,” IUR 33, no. 1 (March 2010): 13, 15)
July 28 — Early morning. While napping between shifts as a heavy-equipment operator in the Nevada desert, Truman Bethurum is awakened by 8 small men who “seem to be of Latin extraction.” They take him to a nearby flying saucer where he meets the captain, a “gorgeous woman, shorter than any of the men, neatly attired, and also having a Latin appearance: coal black hair and olive complexion. She appeared to be about 42 years old,” although Bethurum learns that she is hundreds of years old. Her name is Aura Rhanes. Her ship is called a “scow,” and her crew is from the planet Clarion, a world that is always on the other side of the moon. He later tells this story and his later adventures in his 1954 book Aboard a Flying Saucer, ghostwritten by Mary Kay Tennison. (Truman Bethurum, Aboard a Flying Saucer, DeVorss, 1954; Clark III 192–194)
July 28 — USAF Maj. Gen. John A. Samford secretly orders a deemphasis on or elimination of human anecdotal UFO reports. Instead, they would be “going on instruments,” as worded in his briefing, so that he can close down Blue Book. Technological hurdles and budget limits greatly delay the plan, but Blue Book does transition into a propaganda debunking mission over the next 6 months. (Clark III 813)
July 28 — Late afternoon. Ruppelt and Maj. Ed Gregory arrive in Washington, D.C., dodging newspaper reporters at the Roger Smith Hotel. Blue Book receives an astonishing total of 50 UFO reports in a single day. UFO inquiries are jamming the Pentagon telephones. Air Force and CIA officials concede that the Soviet Union might take advantage of the confusion. (Ruppelt, pp. 166–167)
July 28 — According to the United Press, the Air Defense Command has alerted jet interceptor pilots to take off instantly in pursuit of any flying saucers. The International News Service amplifies this by quoting the Air Force that orders have been issued to shoot them down if they refuse to land. The Air Force refuses to confirm this, but USAF Deputy Press Officer Lt. Col. Moncel A. Monts states that “jet pilots are, and have been, under orders to investigate unidentified objects and to shoot them down if they can’t talk them down.” (“Air Force Alerted for ‘Discs’: Sightings over Washington Put Jets at Ready,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, July 28, 1952, p. 1; “Jets on 24- Hour Alert to Shoot Down ‘Saucers,’” San Francisco Examiner, July 29, 1952, p. 2; Shoot 49–50; David Rudiak, “1952 Flying Saucer ‘Shoot Down’ Stories,” Roswell Proof)
July 28 — In charge of jet interceptions over Washington, D.C., during the big UFO flap, USAF Director of Operations Gen. Roger M. Ramey issues an ambiguous public denial that the interceptors have been ordered to shoot down any saucers. However, newspaper articles and other documents say there was such an order. (David Rudiak, “Background on Gen. Roger M. Ramey,” June 4, 2013)
July 28 — President Truman, resting in Kansas City, Missouri, after the Democratic Convention, calls CIA Director Walter Bedell Smith and asks him to investigate the Air Force’s mishandling of the Washington National sightings. Smith later directs, through Deputy Director for Intelligence Loftus E. Becker, that a CIA/OSI group be put together to review the USAF UFO intelligence program at ATIC. Truman’s involvement is meant to be kept Top Secret and is not revealed until 1992. (Clark III 1012)
July 28 — Canadian researcher Wilbert B. Smith allegedly shows Rear Admiral Herbert B. Knowles a metallic piece from a saucer that was shot down near Washington, D.C. It is twice the size of a man’s thumb and has been loaned to him by the Air Force, but he must return it to the CIA (or another secret agency). (David Rudiak, “Wilbert B. Smith,” Roswell Proof; Frank Edwards, FS Serious Business, Bantam ed., 1966, pp. 48–49; Good Above, p. 188)
July 28 — UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill writes to William Sidney, Secretary of State for Air, and scientific adviser and friend Lord Cherwell, saying, “What does all this stuff about flying saucers amount to? What can it mean? What is the truth? Let me have a report at your convenience.” The response, dated August 9, begins: “The various reports about unidentified flying objects, described by the Press as ‘flying saucers,’ were the subject of a full Intelligence study in 1951” [presumably the report by the Flying Saucer Working Party]. (“Records Show Winston Churchill’s Interest in UFOs,” The Cosmic Report, December 12, 2020; Good Above, pp. 30, 448–449; UFOFiles2, pp. 43–44)
July 29 — 1:30 a.m. An Air Defense Command radar outside of Osceola, Wisconsin, picks up some unidentified targets.
Four F-51s from St. Paul, Minnesota, are scrambled, but the targets are moving around so quickly that it is impossible to vector in on a single target. The F-51 pilots see many lights; one pilot at 25,000 feet sees an object blaze across the nose of his airplane. Two other pilots vainly try to climb up to a hovering light that is in the same position as the radar targets. ATIC’s Robert M. Olsson and Wendell Swanson explain the radar incident as a temperature inversion and the visual sighting as a meteor. (NICAP, “Clusters of Small Targets and One Large Target”; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1952 July 21st–31st, Supplemental Notes, The Author, 2001, pp. 80–85; Sparks, p. 161)
July 29 — Early morning. CAA radar tracks 8–12 UFOs at a time traveling 100–120 mph in a 10-mile arc around Washington, D.C. When an Eastern Airlines pilot tries to check on the radar targets at the request of the CAA at 3:00 a.m., he sees nothing. The targets disappear from CAA radar when the airliner approaches then come back in behind him after he passes through the area. (“Air Force Debunks ‘Saucers’ As Just ‘Natural Phenomena,’” New York Times, July 30, 1952, pp. 1, 10)
July 29 — 10:00 a.m. President Truman tells his air force liaison, Robert B. Landry, to find out what is going on with UFOs. Landry calls ATIC and eventually reaches Ruppelt, who tells him that weather may have caused the radar targets, but there is no proof. He later learns that Truman is listening in. There is some evidence that Truman or Landry soon contact the National Security Council directly to find out how to proceed with the UFO problem. (Ruppelt, p. 167; Swords 170)
July 29 — 10:00 a.m. Several employees of Los Alamos Scientific Labs, New Mexico (including Robert B. Leachman, W. Schafer, E. T. Jurney), see a white object moving east to west with a gyrating motion. Two jet interceptors from Kirtland AFB in Albuquerque arrive 5 minutes later. The object disappears but reappears in front of the jets, makes a 360° turn, comes around in back, follows for 2 minutes, then disappears. (NICAP, “Jets Scrambled from Kirtland”; Hynek UFO Report, pp. 61–64; Sparks, p. 161)
July 29 — Four weather observers at Walker AFB [now closed] in Roswell, New Mexico, watch several high-speed discs through a theodolite. (Hynek UFO Report, pp. 114–115; Sparks, p. 161)
July 29 — An FBI memo from Victor P. Keay on “Flying Saucers” discusses a classified briefing about UFOs by Cmdr.
Randall Boyd Jr. of the Air Intelligence Estimates Division to Norman W. Philcox, an FBI liaison to the Air Force. The Air Force has “failed to arrive at any satisfactory conclusion” on UFOs. Reports are being received from all parts of the US and distant parts of the world. Boyd explains that USAF has made no progress in ascertaining the nature of UFOs, but it is filing them into three classifications: reports by civilians on the ground, reports by commercial or military pilots, and reports by pilots that are confirmed by radar or ground observations. He concludes by writing that it is “not entirely impossible that the objects sighted may possibly be ships from another planet such as Mars,” but he adds that “air intelligence is fairly certain that these objects are not ships or missiles from another nation in this world.” (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1952 July 21st–31st, Supplemental Notes, The Author, 2001, pp. 55–56; ClearIntent, pp. 175–177)
July 29 — Ralph L. Clark, acting assistant director of the CIA Office of Scientific Intelligence, sends a memo to OSI Deputy Director Robert Amory Jr., indicating that the agency will be looking into UFO matters a bit more thoroughly, even though it has been collecting cases for the past three years (since 1949): “a special study group has been formed to review the subject to date. D/CI [Walter Bedell Smith] will participate in this study with D/SI [H. Marshall Chadwell], and a report should be ready about 15 August.” It alludes to his meeting with CIA rocket consultant Frederick C. Durant and others the previous day. (Ralph L. Clark, “Recent Sightings of Unexplained Objects,” July 29, 1952, reprinted in “The CUFON 1952 CIA UFO-Related Document Sampler”; Good Above,
July 29 — Robert L. Farnsworth, president of the American Rocket Society, urges President Truman and defense officials to restrain the US armed forces from shooting at UFOs. He says that hostile action might alienate us from “beings of far superior powers.” (Robert L. Farnsworth, [Telegram to President Truman], July 28, 1952; “A Pro-Saucer Voice Heard,” New York Daily News, July 29, 1952, p. 2)
July 29 — An orange, oblong stationary object is observed at the airport in Macdonald, Manitoba, in the south- southwestern sky for 2 minutes. It seems to change into a group of small round lights. They all disappear together. (Jan Aldrich; Project Second Storey)
July 29 — 4:00 p.m. The Air Force holds its largest and longest press conference since the end of World War II. Maj.
Gen. John A. Samford, director of USAF intelligence, leads it. He is accompanied by Eighth Air Force Maj. Gen. Roger M. Ramey, director of operations and commander of the Eighth Air Force; USAF Col. Donald L. Bower, Technical Analysis Division, Air Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC), Wright-Patterson AFB, Dayton, Ohio; Project Blue Book head Capt. Edward J. Ruppelt; USAF Capt. Roy L. James, ATIC radar specialist; and Burgoyne L. Griffing, electronics branch, ATIC. Samford says that the Air Force has been monitoring US air space since 1947. Approximately 20% of UFO reports come from “credible observers of relatively incredible things,” which keeps the Air Force concerned. He explains that the Washington, D.C., sightings earlier in July were caused by “weather phenomena” that caused radar beams to bend and pick up objects on the ground. James offers more technical explanations about temperature inversions that cause radar echoes. Pro-UFO Maj. Dewey J. Fournet Jr., USAF public relations officer Al Chop, and Navy radar specialist Lieut. John Holcomb are conspicuous by their absence. (NICAP, “General Samford’s Press Conference,” July 29, 1952; Ruppelt, pp. 168– 169; “General Samford’s UFO Press Conference, Pentagon, July 29, 1952,” knightskross YouTube channel, August 3, 2010; “The Air Force Makes a Pass at the Saucer Stories,” Life 33, no. 6 (August 11, 1952): 35; Swords 159–163; Don Berliner, with Marie Galbreath and Antonio Huneeus, UFO Briefing Document: The Best Available Evidence, Dell, 2000, pp. 60–63; Kevin D. Randle, Invasion Washington: UFOs over the Capitol, HarperTorch, 2001, pp. 77–126; Shoot 53–57)
July 29 — 9:15 p.m. Air Force Reserve Lt. Col. Robert G. LeCompte sees a flight of at least 10 luminous objects pass over Albuquerque, New Mexico. At first they appear overhead in no pattern, heading north, then shift to a V formation. They then shift into two rows. (NICAP, “AF Reserve Colonel Observes Rapid Ellipse”; Sparks, p. 163; Michael D. Swords, “Intelligent Motions,” IUR 33, no. 1 (March 2010): 13, 15)
July 29 — 9:35 p.m. Marine Pfc Ralph C. Mayher, using 16 mm film exposed at 24 frames per second, obtains footage of a high-speed UFO over Miami Beach, Florida. Retaining a few frames for personal study, Mayher submits the main portion of the film to the Air Force for analysis. The film is never returned, and no analysis report is ever released. Enlargements of a few frames show a fiery looking, roughly circular object, symmetrical, with two small peaks or projection on opposite sides of the disc. The CIA examines the film in 1957 and returns it with no comment or analysis. The Mayher case features prominently in the subsequent lawsuit by Ground Saucer Watch against the CIA and is important because it is a confirmed case of direct interaction of the CIA with a witness, clearly indicating that there was CIA interest in the subject. (NICAP, “Ralph Mayer / Miami Film”; Ralph Mayer, “I Proved Flying Saucers Are Real,” Pic, June 1954; Good Above, pp. 355–356)
July 29 (or July 28) — 9:40 p.m. An Aircraft and Warning Station in Port Huron, Michigan, tracks an unidentified return on radar for 20 minutes. GCI asks Capt. Edward J. Slowinski flying an F-94B on a practice run to investigate. The pilot sees a bright, flashing, colored light in the location of the blip 29 miles west of Port Huron and follows it for 20 minutes. Slowinski is unable to close on the object. (NICAP, “Key Radar Case (CCL #17)”; Sparks, p. 160; James E. McDonald, “Statement on Unidentified Flying Objects,” in Symposium on Unidentified Flying Objects, Hearings, US House Committee on Science and Astronautics, 90th Cong., 2nd Sess., July 29, 1968, pp. 72–73; Center for UFO Studies, [documents and case files])
July 30 — Flight Sgt. Roland Hughes of No. 20 Squadron RAF is on a training flight in a de Havilland Vampire FB-9 jet fighter and returning to base at RAF Oldenburg, Germany, when he sees a “gleaming silver, metallic disc” drop down from above and fly alongside his aircraft for several seconds before speeding off. The object is about 100 feet long. Its surface is shiny “like tinfoil,” highly reflective, and “without a single crease or crinkle in it.” On August 5, Hughes is ordered to fly to RAF Faßberg for further questioning. He arrives and finds a number of officers, including his commander and the UK Minister of Supply, Duncan Sandys (Winston Churchill‘s son-in- law), who asks Hughes how many beers he had before his saucer sighting. The Air Commanding Officer then reveals that the object had also been tracked on radar going faster than any known aircraft. This convinces Sandys that the case is a serious one, a view that he communicates to Lord Cherwell, the government’s chief scientific adviser, in a letter, saying there is “ample evidence of some unfamiliar and unexplained phenomenon.” (UFOFiles2, pp. 44–46; “The UFO Sighting That Convinced a Government Minister,” The Telegraph, May 27, 2012)
July 30 — Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg tells the press that, although he does not believe there are flying saucers, he dislikes the “mass hysteria” about them. He says the Air Force has had experts investigating them since the end of World War II and never found anything substantial. (“‘Double Vision,’ Vandenberg,” Santa Rosa (Calif.) Press-Democrat, July 31, 1952, p. 6)
July 30 — 1:10 p.m. Willie Vaught of Alexandria, Indiana, sees a strange looking cloud and calls her two teenage daughters (Laura and Patsy) and Laura Oliver to see it. While looking at it, they see six flat, aluminum-like objects streak across the cloud, merge, and disappear within a minute. (“Alexandria Family Reports Seeing ‘Flying Saucers,’” Alexandria (Ind.) Times-Tribune, July 31, 1952, p. 1; Herbert S. Taylor, “Mystery Clouds and the UFO Connection,” IUR 29, no. 4 (July 2005): 19)
July 31 — Brig. Gen. Alfred R. Maxwell of the Research and Development Board prepares a memorandum that generally supports the official position that UFO reports contain no information of value, he writes: “The Air Force has made very little progress in learning what the phenomena or objects are.” (Don Berliner and Stanton T. Friedman, Crash at Corona, Marlowe, 1994, pp. 30–31)
August — Hollywood producer Clarence Greene and a friend see a “sphere of light” in the sky over Los Angeles, California. Visible for 5 minutes, the object alternately hovers and turns before speeding off over the horizon. The next morning, Greene tells his business partner Russell Rouse about the sighting. As he reflects on the experience, he grows ever more irritated by the stigma attached to UFO sightings. (Clark III 1188)
August 1 — 10:51 a.m. An Air Defense Command radar site on Campbell Hill at Bellefontaine, Ohio, tracks a target 20 miles NNW of Wright-Patterson AFB, traveling 500 mph against the wind. It vectors two F-86s piloted by Maj. James B. Smith and Lt. Donald J. Hemmer. They make visual contact but climb to 48,000 feet twice without reaching it. Smith gets a weak return on his radar gun sight and shoots a gun camera film of a white or silvery sphere estimated at 60,000 feet. They break off the intercept at 11:13 a.m. about 100 miles west-southwest of Dayton. The film reportedly shows a UFO in the upper right of the frames with noticeable motion to the lower left. Although Blue Book Capt. Edward J. Ruppelt’s assistants Lt. Anderson G. Flues and Lt. Robert Olsson initially declare the case an “unknown,” Ruppelt changes that evaluation a few weeks later after ATIC Technical Analysis Division Chief Col. Donald L. Bower transfers out, explaining it as two separate but coincidental IFOs—a weather balloon and a jet. Ruppelt goes to great lengths to debunk the case in his ADC briefings to the Robertson Panel. (NICAP, “Gun Camera R/V Case”; Condon, pp. 161–163; Clark III 392–395; Hynek UFO Report, p. 21; Sparks, p. 165; Patrick Gross, “The Bellefontaine, Ohio, Radar/Visual/Photographic Case, 1952”; Shoot 71–73; Center for UFO Studies, [Blue Book documents and files])
August 1 — Edward Tauss, acting chief of the Weapons and Equipment Division of the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence, writes a letter to OSI Deputy Assistant Director Ralph L. Clark, saying that less than 100 credible reports remain unexplainable. “interplanetary aspects and alien origin not being thoroughly excluded from consideration.” He recommends the CIA continue to cooperate with ATIC, but “no indication of CIA interest or concern reach the press or public.” (ClearIntent, p. 123)
August 1 — 8:30–9:00 p.m. We, the People, a 30-minute TV news show produced by Life magazine, devotes its airtime to the recent UFO sightings over Washington, D.C. WNBW-TV, which originates the program, rents a DC-3 airliner, fills it with 20 newsmen, and has the plane circle over Washington, just in case the saucers return. On the ground in the radar room of Washington National Airport there are more newsmen and TV cameras. The show features editors and journalists Frank Blair, David Brinkley, Clay Blair, and various UFO witnesses. (Curt Collins, “UFOs on TV: The 1952 Washington, DC Saucer Flap,” The Saucers That Time Forgot, July 5, 2018)
August 1 — 9:50 p.m. Scripps-Howard reporter Howard Doyle Kline sees a cluster of glowing white objects overhead in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The objects shift around into various patterns, including a perfect V at one point.
Their shifts in position are incredibly swift and fantastically violent, he says. “They made” a flying saucer believer out of me.” He reports the incident to Lincoln LaPaz, University of New Mexico meteoriticist, and Col. William A. Matheny, commander of the 34th Air Defense Division. The report, which is one probably used in Maj. Dewey Fournet’s Motion Study, is missing from the Project Blue Book files. (New York World-Telegram, August 2, 1952; UFOEv, pp. 69–70; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1952 July 21st–31st, Supplemental Notes, The Author, 2001, p. 95)
August 2 — 3:00 a.m. USAF 1st Lt. W. A. Theil and enlisted man Edwards see a red ball with a trail of blue flame fly straight and level over Lake Charles, Louisiana. (Sparks, p. 165)
August 2 [or July 30] — George Hunt Williamson and his wife Betty are visited in Prescott, Arizona, by two other metaphysics enthusiasts, Alfred C. Bailey and his wife Betty of Winslow, Arizona. This evening, in the course of an automatic-writing experiment using a sort of Ouija board, they receive a message from an extraterrestrial in a spacecraft. In the days and weeks that follow, “Nah-9 of Solar X Group” and many other planetary and star people communicate with them. The space people call earth “Saras.” Nah-9 says that the good men of Saras must unite with good space people to avert a calamity. More Ouija sessions take place through August 17. A message comes through that they will be contacted via radio with an International Morse Code message on August 22.
Bailey approaches a coworker on the Santa Fe Railroad, a ham radio operator named Lyman Streeter, and asks for
his help in picking up the space signals. (Clark III 1283; George Hunt Williamson and Alfred C. Bailey, The Saucers Speak! New Age, 1954; Michael D. Swords, “Strange Days,” IUR 30, no. 4 (Aug. 2006): 21–22; Zirger and Martinelli, The Incredible Life of George Hunt Williamson, Verdechiari, 2016, pp. 178–181)
August 3 — 3:00 p.m. An Air Force master sergeant on the ship Santa Luisa observes three round, flat, metallic objects hovering at 30,000–40,000 feet some 10 miles away from his position at the mouth of the Rio Guayas near Isla Puná, Ecuador. After 5 seconds, one object dives to the west then turns back northwest. They all disappear after another 5 seconds. (Project 1947, [case documents]; Project 1947, “UFO Reports, 1952”)
August 3 — 4:15 p.m. Two huge silvery discs are observed visually and tracked on radar for 1 hour and 15 minutes over Hamilton AFB [now closed] near Novato, California. The ground observers are pilots Capt. Leslie R. Hadley, Capt. Wayne T. Perske, and 2d Lt. Duane A. Swimley. They dive at each other and maneuver as if in a dogfight. After F-86s are dispatched to intercept, 6 more objects appear, take up a diamond formation, and accelerate out of sight. (NICAP, “Eight Huge Objects Observed by 8 Witnesses and Radar”; Sparks, p. 165; Project 1947, “Hamilton Air Force Base, Hamilton, California, August 3, 1952”; Project 1947, [Blue Book documents and files]; Michael D. Swords, “Intelligent Motions,” IUR 33, no. 1 (March 2010): 14, 15)
August 3 — 10:20 p.m. Civilian engineer Paul L. Anderson sees 3 light-green cylindrical objects at Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. They are hovering at 45° elevation in an inverted-V formation, switching to echelon when one object moves with a rolling motion along its long axis. It disappears by rapidly rising vertically. The observation lasts 9 minutes. (NICAP, “Three Cylindrical Objects Observed by Engineers”; Sparks, p. 165; Michael D. Swords, “Intelligent Motions,” IUR 33, no. 1 (March 2010): 14, 15)
August 5 — 12:25 a.m. A trio of brilliant white dots of indefinite shape, at an altitude of an estimated 5,000 feet, passes over Westover AFB [now Westover Reserve Air Base] in Chicopee, Massachusetts. The second object is half the size of the first, and the third is half the size of the second one. The first one resembles an automobile headlight. The appearance of other two is not given. The three are in a triangular formation. No jet activity is recorded over the airbase at the time and witnesses say the objects are moving “faster than jets.” (Loren E. Gross, UFOs, a History: 1952, August, The Author, 1986, p. 23)
August 5 — Day. During a daylight observation of Venus, astronomer James C. Bartlett Jr. watches two discs fly overhead in a southerly direction at Baltimore, Maryland. They move away to the east, then two more objects with dome-like protrusions in the center fly past. (“Two Huge UFOs Sighted by Baltimore Astronomer,” UFO Investigator 1, no. 5 (Aug./Sept. 1958): 1, 3)
August 5 — 9:46–12:00 midnight. A visual sighting is made at 9:46 p.m. by an observer on the ground at Manassas, Virginia, who spots a brilliant oval flying south. About 10:50 p.m., Andrews AFB in Maryland picks up two unidentified blips moving slowly and steadily away from Washington, D.C., on a course toward Mount Vernon, Virginia. Minutes later the fluorescent screens at Andrews show two more UFOs to the east of the field moving for a short distance, stopping, and then moving again. The speed of the targets is a slow 60 mph. The height of the targets is unknown. Planes from both Andrews AFB and Bolling AFB are sent up to investigate but rainy weather forces them to turn back after they reach 15,000 feet altitude. Around 12:00 midnight yet another target appears on radar, and jets from New Castle AFB in Delaware are scrambled. The jets see no UFOs when they arrived over Washington; however, a spokesman for Andrews radar tells the press that “no radar sightings were made while the planes were overhead.” (“Flock of ‘Saucer’ Objects Again Puzzles Wash. DC,” Visalia (Calif.) Times-Delta, August 6, 1952, p. 1; Loren E. Gross, UFOs, a History: 1952, August, The Author, 1986, pp. 23–24)
August 5 — 10:45 p.m. Eight residents of Camden, New Jersey, report a bright, round, orange object hovering or moving slowly in the western sky. (“8 City Residents Report ‘Saucers’ on Nocturnal Sweep through Sky,” Camden (N.J.) Courier-Post, August 6, 1952, p. 16)
August 5 — 11:45 p.m. A complex radar-visual sighting takes place at Haneda AFB [later Tokyo International Airport], Japan. Control tower operators watch a disc as it passes over Tokyo Bay at about 1,500 feet. It is a dark round shape surrounded by a bright light with a curved outer edge and smaller lights around it. While being tracked on radar, a scramble alert is issued at 11:55 p.m., and an F-94 Starfire jet from nearby Johnson Air Base [now Iruma Air Base] in Sayama, Saitama Prefecture, goes after the object. The interceptor, piloted by 1Lt. Wesley R. Holder and Radar Observer 1Lt. Aaron M. Jones Jr., chases the object, which speeds away while being tracked by onboard radar. During the next 30 minutes, the UFO disappears and reappears throughout the sky, vanishes when the jet closes in, performs intricate maneuvers, and at one point splits into three radar targets. The jet searches over Tokyo Bay until 12:33 a.m. when it is recalled. (NICAP, “F-94 Pilots Tracked Object for 90 Seconds”; Ruppelt, pp. 187–189; Condon, pp. 123–126; Sparks, p. 166; Martin L. Shough, “Radar and the UFO,” UFOs 1947–1987, Fortean Tomes, 1987, pp. 217–219; Patrick Gross, “The Haneda AFB Case, Japan, August 5, 1952”)
August 6 — Hynek sends Project Blue Book a report on his interviews with 45 astronomers about their opinions on UFOs at a June meeting of the American Astronomical Society and finds that five (11%) have seen a UFO, seven are
indifferent to the subject, more express at least some interest, and a few are very interested but wary of publicity. (J. Allen Hynek, “Special Report on Conferences with Astronomers on Unidentified Aerial Objects,” August 6, 1952; “Seven Status Reports for Project Stork, Part 2,” CUFON; “Seven Status Reports for Project Stork, Part 3,” CUFON; Loren E. Gross, UFOs, a History: 1952, August, The Author, 1986, pp. 83–85)
August 6 — 9:00 p.m. James J. Allen sees a UFO 6 feet high, 8 feet long, and lighted inside strike the chimney of his home in West Lumberton, North Carolina. It crashes into his backyard. When he approaches it, the lights go off and he sees a man about 30 inches tall standing next to it. He asks if he is hurt, then the figure reenters the vehicle and it zooms away. (“West Lumberton Event Added to Growing ‘Saucer’ Reports,” Lumberton (N.C.) Robesonian, August 7, 1952, pp. 1, 4; Clark III 326; Curt Collins, “James J. Allen’s Alien Encounter Embarrassment: Aug. 6, 1952,” The Saucers That Time Forgot, January 19. 2018)
August 7 — 12:02 a.m. At Kerkrade, Netherlands, marine engineer Will Jansen watches a domed object swoop down to a low altitude, hover, zigzag, then speed away. He sees a similar object hovering further away. It finally tilts up vertically and shoots out of sight. (UFOEv, p. 122)
August 7 — 9:08 a.m. Mrs. Susan Pzuhl (or Pfuhl) observes over San Antonio, Texas, four round UFOs that give off a color similar to white-hot metal. The objects appear to be approximately 18 inches in diameter and are observed one at a time at intervals of approximately 20 minutes. With the exception of one object that moves slowly, the speed must have been 3 times as fast as a propeller-driven aircraft. No sound can be heard. Their maneuvers consist of radical directional change by the first object, straight and level flight by the second object, a slight directional change by the third object, and a large circular maneuver by the fourth object. An aircraft passes under the fourth object with no apparent reaction by the plane or the object. It vanishes suddenly like an extinguished light. Duration is 70 minutes. (NICAP, “Four 18ʺ UFOs Observed”; Sparks, p. 166)
August 7 — 3:00 p.m. Two Ground Observer Corps skywatchers in Silverton, Oregon, Ida Pfeifer and Dorothy Sthamann, see an aluminum-colored object 3 miles away that appears at first triangular, then more saucer shaped. Army and air observers in Portland confirm that jet interceptors are at that moment in pursuit of the object. Replacement skywatchers Sadie Barkhurst and Mrs. Olaf Teglund also see the object at 5:00 p.m. All agree that the UFO is headed east at a moderate speed, but darts “fiercely” toward the interceptor when it approaches. (“Flying Saucer at Silverton,” Salem (Oreg.) Capital Journal, August 9, 1952, p. 14)
August 8 — A special CIA/Office of Scientific Intelligence team consisting of Philip Grandin Strong, Ransom L. Eng, and Frederick C. Durant visits Wright-Patterson AFB in Ohio for a comprehensive briefing about UFOs from Blue Book staff. This classified visit is in response to secret orders from President Truman to the CIA to investigate the Air Force’s mishandling of UFOs during the Washington National Airport cases. (CUFON, “The CUFON 1952 CIA UFO-Related Document Sampler, Part 1 of 2 Parts,” May 17, 1996; Clark III 397; Swords 172–173)
August 9 — 1:45 a.m. A/3C Joseph F. Raley is walking to work at Lake Charles Air Force Station [now closed] in Lake Charles, Louisiana, when he observes a disc-like object from a distance away of 3,000–5,000 feet. The object is at an estimated altitude of 5,000 feet. It moves several hundred mph faster than any known jet aircraft. No sound is heard. The object is first seen moving north to south until it crosses the air station, where it stops and hovers for approximately 2 seconds, then takes off to the west. (NICAP, “Faster-Than-Jet Disc Stops, Hovers Two Seconds, Accelerates”; Sparks, p. 167)
August 10 — 5:38 p.m. Roy E. Munson is resting in his hammock at 1231 Widergren Drive, Rockford, Illinois, when he sees a disc-shaped object moving west to east and streaking across the sky in 6 seconds. Within minutes, another appears on the same flight path. Some family members and neighbors join him to watch the objects, which keep appearing for the next 90 minutes by which time a total of 54 have gone by. Munson alerts the CAA operator at the Rockford airport, who calls O’Hare Airport in Chicago, which sends two USAF jet interceptors to the area. They appear just as the last of the discs, which seem surrounded by a haze, disappears. Of the 54 objects, 36 appear larger that the others and move faster. Fifty follow the straight west-to-east path out of sight. Three deviate from the path to the north, and one deviates to the south. (NICAP, “Rockford, Illinois, Monday, August 11, 1952”)
August 11 — A CIA memo refers to a meeting of the newly created study group on UFOs attended by eight operatives. (Central Intelligence Agency, “Minutes of Branch Chief’s Meeting of 11 August 1952”; CUFON, “The CUFON 1952 CIA UFO-Related Document Sampler, Part 1 of 2 Parts,” May 17, 1996; Swords 173)
August 12 — 1:43 a.m. An Air Force F-94B jet fighter from Dover AFB in Delaware is flying at 20,000 feet when both the pilot and his radar crewman sight a glowing object 45° to their left and at a lower altitude, with the waters of the Delaware Bay as a dark backdrop. Curious, the jet pilot adjusts his course and heads directly at the object, which is stationary. In an apparent reaction, the object loses some of its brilliance and diminishes in size, apparently moving away. The pilot determines that the object had halted above Cape May, New Jersey, where it
again hovers. Without success, the pilot tries to raise the local CCI station on the radio on F channel to request a radar scan of the Cape May area. Low on fuel, the pilot cannot pursue the UFO any further, so he breaks off the chase and heads for home. The UFO follows the jet, increasing in apparent size as it draws near and overtakes it. Eventually, the UFO loses interest and flies away to the south. (Loren E. Gross, UFOs, a History: 1952, August, The Author, 1986, p. 36)
August 13 — Around 7:00 p.m. Two civilians in the Tampa, Florida, area watch three UFOs. One object changes its course abruptly to the west, moving in excess of 600 mph. The same object hovers for about 5 minutes then moves at an excessive rate back to the east and resumes its course to the north and disappears. The two other objects do not alter course but disappear to the north. (Loren E. Gross, UFOs, a History: 1952, August, The Author, 1986, p. 39)
August 13 — Night. Pioneer Airlines pilot Capt. Max M. Jacoby sees a mystery light while on a routine test flight out of Dallas Love Field, Texas. He tries to intercept it, but the light evades him and disappears. (Loren E. Gross, UFOs, a History: 1952, August, The Author, 1986, p. 39)
August 13 — 9:10 p.m. A witness in Oakland, California, calls Hamilton AFB [now closed] in Novato to notify them he is watching “two balls of fire” making a 10-mile circle and leaving in the direction of Hamilton. When the report is made to Capt. Kenneth Broden, Hamilton AFB Airdrome Officer, he orders an F-94 jet scrambled to search the bay between Oakland and the air base. (Loren E. Gross, UFOs, a History: 1952, August, The Author, 1986, p. 39)
August 13 — 9:45 p.m. In Tokyo, Japan, US Marine Corps pilot Maj. James D. McGough sees an orange light fly a left orbit at 8,000 feet and 230 mph, then spiral down to no more than 1,500 feet, remain stationary for 2–3 minutes, and go out. An attempted interception is unsuccessful. (NICAP, “Orange Light Maneuvers Then Stops in Mid- Air”; Sparks, p. 167)
August 13 — 11:10 p.m. USAF Reserve Capt. Stanley W. Thompson sees a formation of lighted objects flying rapidly over Tucson, Arizona. (Loren E. Gross, UFOs, a History: 1952, August, The Author, 1986, p. 39)
August 14 — Australian Minister for Air William McMahon states facetiously in Parliament that flying saucer reports are “probably based on flights of imagination,” but indicates he will “cause a thorough investigation to be made.” (Swords 376)
August 14 — The CIA’s special UFO study group meets for the first time and is given a summary (probably written by A. Ray Gordon, project officer of the CIA’s Physics and Electronics Branch) of UFO history, an analysis of Project Blue Book, and a discussion of explained sightings and theories about unexplained sightings. (Central Intelligence Agency, “Flying Saucers,” August 14, 1952; Good Above, pp. 331–333)
August 14 — 7:20 p.m. People on the docks of Phillippeville [modern Skikda], Algeria, see an enormous red disc leaving behind a greenish trail. At 9:15 p.m., two people in Constantine, Algeria, watch a luminous object flying at high speed. It emits a bright light. (ClearIntent, p. 122)
August 14 — 10:30 p.m. A yellow ball of light undulates up and down and from side to side over the Mathieson chemical plant in Lake Charles, Louisiana. It is also seen to shoot ahead abruptly and come to a halt in the same manner.
Witnesses estimate that the ball passes over at 5,000 feet, growing fainter and fainter as it moves away. (Loren E. Gross, UFOs, a History: 1952, August, The Author, 1986, p. 43)
Mid-August — 10:30 p.m. John D. Moorman, deputy sheriff of Starke County, is fishing in a boat with Surphin Casper on the Tippecanoe River about 3 miles northwest of Monterey, Indiana. Moorman looks up and sees 7–8 objects hovering. They watch for a few seconds until the objects move away to the west. About half of them return east momentarily, and all of them disappear by blinking out. (NICAP case file)
August 15 — 4:20 a.m. Ground Observer Corps observers in Davis, California, see a rainbow-colored, round object hovering in the air. Soon they notice eight more objects of a strange appearance. At 5:30 a.m., two more UFOs are seen, one moving west while the other moves east. The Air Force scrambles a F-94 jet interceptor to search the area at altitudes of 10,000–20,000 feet. The military claims the pilot can see nothing unusual, although the GOC spotters say that the UFOs and the jet are both visible in the sky at the same time and possibly at the same altitude. At 5:00 a.m., in Napa, California, GOC post observer Diane Robinson sights a “cigar-shaped silver thing” traveling at tremendous speed at 10,000 feet toward the southwest. (Loren E. Gross, UFOs, a History: 1952, August, The Author, 1986, p. 43)
August 15 — CIA operative Frederick C. Durant [and/or Ransom L. En] writes a top-secret draft memo for DCI Walter Bedell Smith on the OSI teams visit to Wright-Patterson AFB and a summary of its findings. It offers an analytical description of UFOs going back to the 1946 Scandinavian ghost rockets. It rules out the possibility of Russian secret weapons and mentions the sightings at Los Alamos and Oak Ridge at a time when the “background radiation count had risen inexplicably. Here we run out of even ‘blue yonder’ explanations that might be tenable, and, we still are left with numbers of incredible reports from credible observers.” Yet “even though we might admit that intelligent life may exist elsewhere and that space travel is possible, there is no shred of evidence to
support this theory at present.” (Central Intelligence Agency, “Flying Saucers,” August 15, 1952; CUFON, “The CUFON 1952 CIA UFO-Related Document Sampler, Part 1 of 2 Parts,” May 17, 1996; Clark III 397; Swords 172–173)
August 15 — RAAF Flight Lt. William H. Scott, chief test pilot of the Government Aircraft Factories, is flying a de Havilland Vampire jet between 35,000 and 36,000 feet near Rockhampton, Queensland. Looking east toward the coast, he sees a large, circular light at a lower elevation. It is the color of an ordinary incandescent light bulb.
After about 60 seconds, 6–10 smaller lights break off from the main light, surrounding it for 2 minutes before disappearing. After another 2 minutes, the big light also disappears. (Swords 376)
August 19 — The CIA/OSI study group prepares an internal 6-page document of its findings. It has made a study of the Soviet press that shows “not one report or comment” about UFOs, which indicates official censorship. It perceives a danger that the Russians might try to infiltrate civilian UFO groups (such as Civilian Saucer Investigation of Los Angeles) or add UFO disinformation during a nuclear attack: “We give Russia the capability of delivering an air attack against us, yet at any given moment now, there may be a dozen official unidentified sightings plus many unofficial.” It briefs CIA Director Walter Bedell Smith on August 20. (Central Intelligence Agency, “Flying Saucers,” August 19, 1952; CUFON, “The CUFON 1952 CIA UFO-Related Document Sampler, Part 1 of 2 Parts,” May 17, 1996; Clark III 1013; Swords 174)
August 19 — 2:38 p.m. Ground Observer Corps observer Albert Lathrop sees two objects shaped like fat bullets flying straight, level, and fast over Red Bluff, California. (Sparks, p. 167)
August 19 — 8:00 p.m. An oval disc is seen above Boron Air Force Station [now closed] in Boron, California. Two jet fighters are guided into the area by Capt. Ralph J. Borgerson at the base, but the object speeds away to the east as they close in. (Loren E. Gross, UFOs, a History: 1952, August, The Author, 1986, p. 49; Sparks, p. 167)
August 19 — About 10:00 p.m. Scoutmaster D[unham] S[anborn] “Sonny” DesVergers is driving with three scouts on the edge of the Everglades south of West Palm Beach, Florida, when he sees a light in a wild palmetto grove. The boys do not see it, so he drives on. Another boy admits he has seen a light in that direction too, so DesVergers returns to the spot and goes into the grove, telling the boys to stay in the car unless he is delayed. Soon all three boys see red lights flashing in the grove. This alarms them, and they go to a nearby house for help. They return to see DesVergers staggering out of the grove, incoherently saying he has been zapped into semiconsciousness by some kind of red flare coming from a hatch in a red ball of light (and burns his cap as well). An area of flattened and burned grass is found after the event. DesVergers has a reputation as a prankster and hopes to monetize his story somehow, but the scouts do corroborate his story and there are physical traces. Grass samples from the site sent to the Air Force show root damage extending 4 inches or more into the soil, suggesting overheating, possibly by microwave radiation. Karl Pflock thinks it is a hoax, but Jerry Clark isn’t 100% sure. (NICAP, “Florida Scoutmaster Case”; “Attack by Flying Saucer Described by Scoutmaster,” Miami (Fla.) Daily News, August 24, 1952, pp. 1A, 4A; “‘Line Forms at Left’ for That Saucer Yarn,” Miami (Fla.) Daily News, August 25, 1952, p.
1A; “Boy Scout Wants New Saucer Hunt,” Miami (Fla.) Daily News, August 26, 1952, p. 2A; “‘Saucer’ Witnesses Talking,” Miami (Fla.) Daily News, August 27, 1952, pp. 1A, 8A; Clark III 496–498; Ruppelt, p. 176; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1952 August, Supplemental Notes, The Author, 2001, pp. 115–119; Story, pp. 128–131; Jenny Randles, UFO Reality, p. 143; Karl T. Pflock, “The Best Hoax in UFO History?” 1997; “The Scoutmaster’s Tale,” Saturday Night Uforia, March 27, 2013)
August 20 — The CIA/OSI UFO study group briefs CIA Director Walter Bedell Smith, who then orders the preparation of a National Security Council Intelligence Directive for submission to the NSC stating the need for a UFO investigation. (H. Marshall Chadwell, “Unidentified Flying Objects,” December 2, 1952)
August 20 — Air Defense Command radar at Congaree AFB [now McEntire Joint National Guard Base], southeast of Columbia, South Carolina, tracks a target traveling more than 4,000 mph some 60 miles from the base. (NICAP, “ADC Tracks Object at 4,000 MPH”; UFOEv, p. 78)
August 21 — 10:10 p.m. Ground Observer Corps Supervisor D. C. Scott spots a yellowish-white light flying in the sky at 2,000 feet northeast of Elgin, Illinois. Several times it rises to 5,000 feet in three minutes, hovers, then descends again. Scott alerts Capt. Everett A. Turner at the Chicago Filter Center, who tells him to call again when the light settles down. After one hour and 23 minutes the light begins to hover, Scott calls Turner again, and Turner has at least one F-86 Sabre jet scrambled from O’Hare Airport in Chicago. The pilot makes four passes between 10,000 and 2,000 feet. On the fourth pass, it heads directly toward the light, which blinks out. (“Jets Pursue Mystery Light,” Carbondale Southern Illinoisan, August 23, 1952, p. 1; UFOEv, p. 66; Shoot 102–103)
August 22 — George G. Carey, CIA assistant director for operations, writes a memo to Chadwell on “USSR and Satellite Mentions of Flying Saucers” that reviews mentions of UFOs in the Soviet press during the past two years. (“USSR and Satellite Mentions of Flying Saucers,” August 22, 1952; CUFON, “The CUFON 1952 CIA UFO- Related Document Sampler, Part 1 of 2 Parts,” May 17, 1996)
August 22 — A. Ray Gordon, project officer of the CIA’s Physics and Electronics Branch, provides a briefing document explaining the “Air Force Stand on ‘Flying Saucers’” to CIA Director Walter Bedell Smith, who then briefs President Truman on the CIA UFO study group’s reports at his regular Friday intelligence briefing. (“The Air Force Stand on ‘Flying Saucers’,” August 22, 1952; CUFON, “The CUFON 1952 CIA UFO-Related Document Sampler, Part 1 of 2 Parts,” May 17, 1996; Clark III 1013)
August 22–23 — Evening. Lyman Streeter sees unusual lights near Winslow, Arizona, and hears strange signals on his ham radio. Not long afterward, Lyman, his wife, and Alfred C. Bailey hear a mysterious code coming through the air itself. Eventually, at 2:00 a.m., a Morse Code-like message comes through the radio from Regga of Mars and Zo and Nah-9 from Neptune. Zo refers to Affa from Uranus, who thinks earth is too evil. He also warns them that the evil Orion Solar System is coming to earth in a “square star body.” Williamson arrives from Prescott on August 23. (George Hunt Williamson and Alfred C. Bailey, The Saucers Speak! New Age, 1954; Michael D. Swords, “Strange Days,” IUR 30, no. 4 (Aug. 2006): 22; Clark III 1283–1284)
August 23 — Telenews Productions re-releases its 1950 UFO documentary short, The Flying Saucer Mystery, edited and expanded to 12½ minutes with new material. It features footage from the July 29, 1952, press conference given by Air Force Maj. Gen. John A. Samford, the UFO photo taken by Shell Alpert, a photo taken by August C. Roberts, German UFO occupant witnesses Oskar and Gabriele Linke, Frank Scully, and U.S. Army Engineers physicist Noel W. Scott. (“The Flying Saucer Mystery (Full) (1952),” TheUFOVideoChannel YouTube channel, September 1, 2010; Internet Movie Database, “The Flying Saucer Mystery”; Curt Collins, “The Flying Saucer Mystery and the 1952 UFO Flap,” The Saucers That Time Forgot, January 9, 2020)
August 24 — 10:15 a.m. USAF Col. Gerald W. Johnson is flying an F-84G when he sees two silver balls in the vicinity of Hermanas (a ghost town), New Mexico. They seem to be 6 feet in diameter and 2 miles away. One seems to change into a long, gray object as it is turning to the right. After 3 minutes they disappear, then reappear 7 minutes later, by which time the F-84 is over El Paso, Texas. One after the other, the objects climb straight up 2,000–3,000 feet. (NICAP, “F-84 Encounters Two Silver Balls”; Sparks, p. 168; Michael D. Swords, “Intelligent Motions,” IUR 33, no. 1 (March 2010): 14, 15)
August 24 — Williamson, Streeter, and Bailey receive coded radio messages indicating the saucer intelligences intend to land, inviting them to help. (George Hunt Williamson and Alfred C. Bailey, The Saucers Speak! New Age, 1954 Michael D. Swords, “Strange Days,” IUR 30, no. 4 (Aug. 2006): 22)
August 25 — 3:40 p.m. At Holloman AFB, New Mexico, plant supervisor Fred Lee and foreman Lawrence A. Aguilar watch a round silver object for 5 minutes. It flies south, turns and flies north, makes a 360° turn, then flies away vertically. (NICAP, “Silver Sphere Maneuvers over Base”; Sparks, p. 168)
August 25 — 5:50 a.m. William Squyres, a radio station musician at KOAM [now KKOW-AM] is driving from his home northeast of Frontenac, Kansas, to the station at Pittsburg. He is in his 1952 Jeep station wagon on a rough gravel road about a quarter of a mile from US Highway 160 when he sees a large, disc-shaped object hovering 10 feet in the air on the right side of the road 750 feet away. The UFO looks like two bowls placed together end to end, 75 feet long, 40 feet wide, and 15 feet high in the midsection. Through a window he can see the head and shoulders of a motionless human figure. Along its outer edge are a series of propellers 6–8 inches in diameter, spaced closely together and mounted on a bracket so they revolve “in a horizontal plane” along the edge of the object. He stops and gets out to watch it. As he is walking toward the object, it rises into the air and flies away at great speed. (Hynek UFO Report, pp. 200–203; Patrick Gross, “Project Blue Book Unexplained Cases”; Sparks, p. 168)
August 25 — 9:25 p.m. Affa of Uranus contacts the Baileys, the Streeters, and the Williamsons (as well as two students named Ronald Tucker and Betty Bowen) by radio, using 405 or 450 kilocycles. Zo and Um of Neptune, Regga of Mars, and other aliens continue sending messages by both radio and telepathy. Streeter sees a dark spot in the sky that he claims is Affa. Williamson sees a blue light that he thinks is Zo. Everyone signs an affidavit that the events have truly taken place. (George Hunt Williamson and Alfred C. Bailey, The Saucers Speak! New Age, 1954; Michael D. Swords, “Strange Days,” IUR 30, no. 4 (August 2006): 22, 24; Clark III 1284)
August 27 — 4:45 a.m. Two meteorological officers at Macdonald Airport in Manitoba see a disc-shaped object with shadows on it. It makes two turns around the airfield. When the rotating airport beacon light strikes it, the object glints like shiny aluminum, speeds away to the northeast, and vanishes. (Good Above, pp. 184–185)
August 28 — A family on the ground in Le Roy, New York, sees a disc making tight vertical circles around an airliner. (UFOEv, p. 10)
August 28 — 9:30 p.m. Three civilians in Chickasaw, Alabama, report to Brookley AFB [now Mobile Downtown Airport] in Mobile, Alabama, their observation of multiple red stationary and maneuvering objects to the south, and another one moving from south to west, all in the direction of Brookley. AFOSI agent Charles A. Robinson arrives in Chickasaw at 9:50 p.m. to investigate and sees the same four objects to the south and southwest at an estimated 8–12 miles distance. One fiery red object is stationary for 15 minutes then drifts 15°–20° to the right
after which it is stationary again. Radar operator A/2C Irl A. Whitaker visually spots a red-green object over Chickasaw to the north. USAF duty officer Capt. William A. Edwards and control tower operators see one object to the southwest to the right and lower than the moon, and another object to the west at 10°–20° elevation. The latter is confirmed by radar as a stationary target at four miles range and 4,000 feet altitude. Robinson and others see one object explode, and another does a figure 8 maneuver. There are 4–6 objects larger than a star or planet varying from fiery red, red-blue, red-green, and sparkling diamond appearance. A civilian Air Force employee sees a flat oval shape. (NICAP, “GCA Paints Stationary Target”; Sparks, p. 169)
August 29 — 10:50 a.m. Pilot LtJG William A. O’Flaherty and navigator LtJG R. S. Moore are flying a P4Y-2 patrol plane west of Thule Air Base, near Qaanaaq, Greenland. They are following an 85-foot-diameter Skyhook balloon launched from an icebreaker, US Coast Guard Cutter Eastwind, when, upon release of the parachute instrument package from the balloon, they see 3 white discs or globes, about ½ to almost the full apparent size of the balloon, in triangle formation clustered to the right of the Skyhook instrument package at 74,000 feet for some 2–3 minutes. (NICAP, “Three Objects Shake Up Air Crew”; Sparks, p. 167)
August 29 — 8:35 p.m. Civil Air Patrol pilot Carlton A. Magruder sees three aluminum-colored objects with a red-yellow exhaust over Colorado Springs, Colorado. They are 50 feet in diameter and 10 feet high, flying in line at about 1,500 mph. (NICAP, “Pilot Reports Three Objects 50ʹ in Diameter”; Sparks, p. 169; Loren E. Gross, UFOs, a History: 1952, August, The Author, 1986, p. 80)
Late August — Albert and Betty Bailey go to the Palomar Gardens Café in California to visit George Adamski and tell him about their contacts and their friendship with George Hunt Williamson. (Michael D. Swords, “Strange Days,” IUR 30, no. 4 (Aug. 2006): 22)
Late summer — As a Signal Corps employee working the night shift, Vivian Walton handles decoded teletype messages inside a high-security building at the Defense Supply Center near Columbus, Ohio. She walks into the photo lab, where colleague Joe Sheehy is developing photos, one of which he says is a UFO that had landed in the “hill country” somewhere near Columbus. He says the object is 30 feet in diameter and unoccupied, with minimal damage. A few days later, an alert is sounded, allegedly because of danger of attack by UFOs. Walton claims the downed UFO has gone through the depot on the way to Wright-Patterson AFB in Dayton. (James W. Moseley, “The Wright Field Story, or Who’s Lying?” Nexus 3, no. 1 (September 1954): 11–15; James W. Moseley, The Wright Field Story, Saucerian, 1971; Jerome Clark, “A Catalog of Early Crash Claims,” IUR 18, no. 4 (July/Aug. 1993): 18; Irena Scott and William E. Jones, “Crash Claims,” IUR 18, no. 5 (Sept./Oct. 1993): 21; Good Need, p. 159; Clark III 329)
September — 10:00 a.m. A radar scope near Kirtland AFB in Albuquerque, New Mexico, picks up an unknown target approaching at 700 mph then slows down to 100 mph northeast of the airfield. Two F-86 Sabre jets are scrambled but at first cannot locate the target. The second pilot suddenly spots what seems to be a balloon but as he gets closer it looks more like a “doughnut without a hole.” He gets as close as 1,500 feet before the object accelerates. When it is again at a range of 3,000 feet, the pilot begins firing at the object, but it pulls up in a climb and disappears in seconds. Capt. Ruppelt is given this report by an intelligence officer (probably Lt. Glen Parrish) at the base, who is about to forward the incident report to ATIC but the commanding officer (Brig. Gen. William A. Matheny) orders it destroyed. Parrish shows the last copy of the report to Ruppelt during a visit to Kirtland. (Ruppelt, pp. 1–5; NICAP, “F-86 Shooting Incident / 700 MPH Target”)
September — UFO witness turned researcher Kenneth Arnold releases The Coming of the Saucers, coauthored by his friend and publisher, Raymond A. Palmer. As publicity, the story “Flying Saucer-y” is prepared by King Features Syndicate and carried in many newspapers as a full-page story. (Kenneth Arnold and Ray Palmer, The Coming of the Saucers, Palmer, 1952; Curt Collins, “Kenneth Arnold’s 1952 UFO Book Promotion,” The Saucers That Time Forgot, September 28, 2018)
September — Civilian Saucer Investigation in Los Angeles publishes the first of only four issues of its CSI Quarterly Bulletin. The final issue appears in early 1954. (CSI Quarterly, no. 1 (Fall 1952))
September — John P. Cahn publishes an exposé of Frank Scully’s Behind the Flying Saucers in True magazine. Scully’s sources are an oil prospector named Silas M. Newton and a mysterious “Dr. Gee,” later identified as Leo GeBauer, a con man with a long arrest record. The tale is a ploy to gain the attention of potential investors in a bogus oil detection scheme allegedly linked to alien technology. Jerome Clark writes that Scully was himself a victim, not a perpetrator. (J. P. Cahn, “Flying Saucers and the Mysterious Little Men,” True, September 1952, pp. 17–19, 102–112; Clark III 1044–1045)
September 1 — 8:23 p.m. Air Defense Command radar at Yaak Air Force Station in Montana picks up UFOs exhibiting changes of direction as many as five times a minute. Some course changes are 90° and speeds are measured at 1,400–1,600 mph. Six blips at one time appear on the FPS-3 radar scopes and the strange targets come within 10
miles of the GCI site. So close is the indicated range the radar personnel leave their windowless operations room to check the sky. Six objects can be seen an estimated 10 miles away. When first spotted, the UFOs are in an in- trail formation, and shortly thereafter that changes to an in-line abreast grouping. Finally, the UFOs switch to a vertical stack. S/Sgt. William Kelly remembers tracking the UFOs on the radar executing vertical climbs that exceed the limit of the site’s height-finding equipment. (NICAP, “Radar/Visual at Air Force Radar Site”; Sparks, p. 170)
September 1 — 10:30 p.m. An ex-artillery officer named Bowman and 24 others at Marietta, Georgia, see a red, white, and blue-green object that spins and shoots off sparks. An unidentified witness using binoculars sees two large objects shaped like spinning tops with red, blue, and green colors, flying side by side and leaving a sparkling trail for 30 minutes. At 10:50 p.m., a former Army Air Force B-25 gunner sees two large white disc-shaped objects with green vapor trails fly in trail formation, merge, and fly away quickly. (NICAP, “Two Discs in Trail Formation”; Sparks, p. 170)
September 2 — 12:01 a.m. CAA radar controllers Robert L. Terneuzen (GCA), Ralph L. Frick, Dale E. Warner, Warren J. Weber, and Radar Maintenance Technician Gordon R. Copeland track as many as 30 targets simultaneously at Midway Airport in Chicago, flying in various directions with an average speed of 175 mph at about 2,000 feet.
The 755th Aircraft Control and Weapons radar station in Elkhorn, Wisconsin, claims that the Midway Airport Tower supervisor has called them at 2:50 a.m., saying there are 40 targets plotted by airport radar flying from 3,000 to 6,000 feet at a speed of 120–150 mph. The targets are the size of blips from light planes or larger (the best target quality is in the 6–10-mile range) and move in no particular pattern—sometimes erratically and sometimes in straight lines up to 15 miles long. In at least one instance, the targets fly in formation with an aircraft. At 5:14 a.m., the Air Defense Command is alerted and authorizes the scramble of two jets from the 4706th Interceptor Wing at O’Hare Airport in Chicago. At 5:55 a.m., a pair of F-86 Sabre jets piloted by Capt. William W. Maitland and Lt. Beverly L. Dunhill, lift off and are vectored right through the targets as shown on radar, making passes at 800 and at 4,000 feet without making contact. The F-86s are evidently without airborne radar because they only mention visual descriptions. Maitland and Dunhill later tell the media: “We didn’t hit anything. We didn’t see anything. We went through the target showing on the scope and there was nothing there, not even a cloud.” The jets break off their aerial search at 6:19 a.m. and return to base. By 7:00 a.m. all of the mysterious targets disappear off the scopes toward the south. The Midway radar crews are convinced the targets are returns from tangible bodies, but CAA chief Bob Zeigler overrules them and blames “peculiar atmospheric conditions.” (“Sabre Jets Fly through ‘Object,’” Spokane (Wash.) Spokesman-Review, September 3, 1952, p. 1; NICAP, “40 Targets at Midway Airport”; Sparks, p. 171)
September 3 — 9:00 a.m. Instructor pilot Donald L. McCraven and N. D. Thomas observe a dark elliptical object reflecting sunlight 6 miles north of Tucson, Arizona. The object makes three well-coordinated turns with no perceptible sound. It moves at tremendous speed during a slight climb and is observed for approximately 90 seconds. (NICAP, “Dark Ellipse Makes Three Coordinated Turns”; Sparks, p. 172)
September 3 — 12:30 p.m. Truman meets in the Cabinet Room with Gen. William M. Garland, Col. John Gordon Fowler, and three other USAF officers; Lawrence J. Henderson Jr. and Walter W. Niles from the RAND Corporation; and Robert B. Landry and four others from the National Security Resources Board. The topic is the Washington UFO incident. (Frank Stalter, “The Real Majestic 12: Harry Truman’s 1952 DC UFO Meeting,” The UFO Partisan, 2009)
September 6 — 10:10 a.m. Walter Borys and George McCracken, two guards at the Osborn Prison Farm [now Osborn Correctional Institute] in Somers, Connecticut, are with 13 inmates in the yard when they hear an odd motor noise and see a silvery object in the northern sky. It appears to be descending in a zigzag motion but stops and shoots upward at a right angle at terrific speed after releasing a puff of smoke. Other witnesses in the area think it is a jet aircraft. (Hartford (Conn.) Courant, September 7, 1952, p. 1; Audrey H. Hennis, “The ‘Flying Saucer’ Was from a Jet After-Burner,” Hartford (Conn.) Courant, September 19, 1952, p. 18; Loren E. Gross, UFOs, a History: 1952, September–October, The Author, 1986, pp. 11–12)
September 8 — Wilbert B. Smith and Department of Transport associates launch a large weather balloon with a magnesium flare over Ottawa, Ontario, but it does not inspire any UFO reports. (Clark III 1078; Loren E. Gross, UFOs, a History: 1952, September–October, The Author, 1986, pp. 17–18)
September 9 — 9:00 p.m. US Air Force civilian illustrator E. J. Colisimo sees a disc with lights along part of its circumference over Rabat, Morocco. It is flying twice as fast as a T-33 jet trainer in a slightly curved path. (NICAP, “Disc Twice As Fast As T-33”; Sparks, p. 172)
September 10 — Battelle issues its fifth status report on Project Stork to ATIC. It says that 800 copies of its revised report questionnaire have been sent to the Air Force, many of which were passed on to military witnesses as a trial test.
The group has now examined UFO reports from 1947–1949 and 1951. It decided to discontinue the news clipping service. (“Seven Status Reports for Project Stork, Part 3,” CUFON)
September 10 — 2:30 p.m. The wife of a civilian employee at Andrews AFB [now Joint Base Andrews] in Prince George’s County, Maryland, sees a shiny, metallic, elliptical, silent object moving back and forth near the base. It is visible for 2–3 minutes. (Loren E. Gross, UFOs, a History: 1952, September–October, The Author, 1986, p.
September 11 [or 7 or 17] — CIA Office of Scientific Intelligence Director H. Marshall Chadwell writes a memorandum to Director of Central Intelligence Walter Bedell Smith that sets out two national security implications of UFOs for the government of the United States: the potential for psychological panic by citizens, and demonstrating the nation’s vulnerability by air. It recommends that “A national policy should be established as to what should be told the public regarding the phenomena, in order to minimize risk of panic.” (H. Marshall Chadwell, “Flying Saucers,” September 11, 1952; CUFON, “The CUFON 1952 CIA UFO-Related Document Sampler, Part 1 of 2 Parts,” May 17, 1996; Swords 175–181, 503–507; Good Above, p. 224)
September 11 — Williamson, Streeter, and Bailey receive a radio message saying, “I hope we might have a landing soon,” and later, “We must make landing contact soon… If you believe us, you will act accordingly.” (George Hunt Williamson and Alfred C. Bailey, The Saucers Speak! New Age, 1954; Michael D. Swords, “Strange Days,” IUR 30, no. 4 (Aug. 2006): 22)
September 12 — 1:30 a.m. Two oil well drillers, William Darling and Donald Davis, see a lighted object with windows on one side circling 150 feet above the ground silently for nearly 30 minutes at Bladensburg, Ohio. Suddenly it makes a noise like steam blowing and shoots out of sight. (“Report from the Readers,” Fate 6, no. 2 (February 1953): 108)
September 12 — Around 7:15 p.m., in Flatwoods, West Virginia, two brothers, Edward and Fred May, and their friend Tommy Hyer (ages 13, 12, and 10 respectively) witness a bright object cross the sky, coming to rest on land belonging to local farmer G. Bailey Fisher. The boys go to the home of the May brothers’ mother, Kathleen May, where they tell the story of having seen a UFO crash land. From there, Mrs. May, accompanied by the three boys, local children Neil Nunley, 14, and Ronnie Shaver, 10, and West Virginia National Guardsman Eugene Lemon, 17, walk to the Fisher farm. At the top of a hill, they reportedly see a large pulsating “ball of fire” about 50 feet to their right. They also detect a pungent mist that makes their eyes and noses burn. Lemon then notices two small lights over to the left of the object, underneath a nearby oak tree and directs his flashlight towards them, revealing a creature, which May reports as bounding towards them. Other sources describe it as emitting a shrill hissing noise before gliding towards them, changing direction and then heading off towards the red light. The group flees in panic. Sheriff Robert L. Carr and his deputy Burnell J. Long search the area separately, but find no trace of the encounter other than the smell. Early the next morning, A. Lee Stewart, co-owner of the Braxton Democrat, visits the site of the encounter for a second time and discovers two elongated tracks in the mud, as well as traces of a thick black liquid. It is later revealed that the tracks are likely those of a 1942 Chevrolet pickup truck driven by local Max Lockard, who had gone to the site to look for the creature some hours prior to Stewert’s discovery. Ivan
T. Sanderson interviews the witnesses several days later and concludes that a flight of “intelligently controlled objects flew over West Virginia.” The Air Force concludes that people have seen a meteor and that the monster was only the glowing eyes of a barn owl. Joe Nickell also concludes in 2000 that the bright light in the sky reported by the witnesses on September 12 was most likely a meteor, that the pulsating red light is likely an aircraft navigation/hazard beacon, and that the creature described by witnesses closely resembles a barn owl. Nickell claims that the experience was distorted by the heightened state of anxiety felt by the witnesses after having observed the original meteor. However, Frank C. Feschino has done extensive research to support his hypothesis that the Flatwoods incident was only one small part of a major UFO display involving multiple objects (many of them reported as “meteors” or “balls of fire” or “flaming planes”) passing in westerly and other directions across the eastern and southern United States between 6:50 and 7:25 p.m. The trajectory of one of these objects (moving first northwest then northeast then south) alone takes it over Baltimore, Catonsville, Frederick, Hagerstown, Cumberland, and Garrett County, Maryland; Preston County, Morgantown, Fairmont, Wheeling, Charleston, Parkersburg, Nitro, Ward, and Chelyan, West Virginia; Selma, Columbus, Zanesville, St. Clairsville, Ohio; it is last seen moving south around Bluefield, West Virginia. Another object is seen over Washington, D.C., heading due west towards West Virginia, apparently landing in Flatwoods. A third object travels southwest over Roanoke and Pulaski, Virginia, possibly landing near Arcadia, Tennessee. Feschino thinks that these three objects had been damaged by fire directed at them by Air Force interceptors. Five other objects are observed in North Carolina in that time period, and these Feschino suspects may have been attempting to look for and assist the damaged objects. He also speculates that the disappearance of an F-94 jet fighter out of Tyndall AFB in Panama City, Florida, piloted by 2Lt John A. Jones and radar operator 2Lt John S. DelCurto, might have involved a tragic
UFO interception that began three hours earlier; the last known contact with the fighter is at 5:43 p.m. over the Gulf of Mexico 70 miles northwest of Tampa, the accident takes place under unusual circumstances, and the wreckage has never been found. Feschino thinks that a UFO damaged in dogfights with many interceptors over the Gulf might have triggered the second battle over the Atlantic seaboard around 7:00 p.m. Then a second wave of multiple objects is observed 8:00–8:10 p.m. in the Washington, Maryland, Virginia, Ohio, and West Virginia region that, according to Feschino, involves a search for a second downed UFO. Although Feschino jumps to many conclusions and his documentation for specific incidents and conditions is somewhat confusing, he may well have grasped more truth than the meteor-and-owl explanation of the skeptics. (Wikipedia, “Flatwoods Monster”; Gray Barker, “The Monster and the Saucer,” Fate 6, no. 1 (January 1953): 12–17; Gray Barker, They Knew Too Much about Flying Saucers, University Books, 1956, pp. 11–35; Keyhoe, FS from OS, pp. 116–120; Clark III 494–495; Ivan T. Sanderson, Uninvited Visitors, Cowles, 1967, pp. 39–51; Northern Ontario UFO Research and Study, “The Braxton Democrat”; Shoot 112–313, 320–327; Joe Nickell, “The Flatwoods UFO Monster,” Skeptical Inquirer 24, no. 6 (Nov./Dec. 2000): 15–19; Michael D. Swords, “Peeking at Ivan’s SITU Files: The Flatwoods Monster,” The Big Study, April 11, 2011; Frank C. Feschino, The Braxton County Monster: The Cover-Up of the Flatwoods Monster Revealed, Quarrier Press, 2004)
September 14 — 4:30 a.m. Fred J. Brown is preparing to milk the cows at the Everglades Experiment Station [now the Everglades Research and Education Center] in Belle Glade, Florida, when he spots a circular object about 35 feet in diameter hovering about 100 feet above the ground. It has a row of red and amber lights spaced around the outside rim and the underside. As it descends to about 40 feet, the 13 cows bolt as the object disappears to the west. As Brown is rounding up the cows, the object appears again, moving from south to north at a speed of 30 mph, making a high-voltage buzzing noise, and emitting an odor “like acid or ammonia” that makes Brown’s eyes smart. The cows stampede once again. The object’s glow illuminates the ground as it passes, and it gains altitude and disappears again. (“Cattle Stampeded Twice by Mysterious ‘Object,’” Palm Beach (Fla.) Times, September 16, 1952, p. 1)
September 14 — Exercise Mainbrace begins in the North Sea. It is the first large-scale naval exercise undertaken by NATO and jointly commanded by Admiral Lynde D. McCormick and Gen. Matthew B. Ridgway. It involves the US Navy and the navies of Great Britain, France, Canada, Denmark, Norway, Portugal, Netherlands, and Belgium. Its objective is to convince Denmark and Norway that they can be defended against an attack from the USSR, and involves 80,000 men, 200 ships, and 1,000 aircraft. The operation lasts through September 25. (Wikipedia, “Exercise Mainbrace”)
September 14 — 10:13 p.m. The Danish destroyer Willemoes, during the Exercise Mainbrace maneuvers, is north of Bornholm island, Denmark, in the Baltic Sea. Lt.Cmdr. G. Schmidt-Jensen and several members of the crew see an unidentified object, triangular in shape, that moves at high speed toward the southeast. It emits a greenish glow and jets three rays of fire from its rear. Jensen estimates the speed at 930 mph. (NICAP, “Operation Mainbrace Sightings”; Loren E. Gross, UFOs, a History: 1952, September–October, The Author, 1986, p. 28; Marler 128– 129, 265)
September 19 — 10:53 a.m. During Exercise Mainbrace maneuvers, a silvery, spherical UFO appears near RAF Topcliffe in North Yorkshire, England, following an RAF Meteor jet (possibly piloted by Flight Lt. John W. Kilburn and Flight Lt. Marian Cybulski) about to land. It has been following about 5 miles behind the jet at15,000 feet, swinging like a “falling sycamore leaf” and descending. As the jet turns toward Dishforth, the object follows but begins rotating on its axis then suddenly accelerates and disappears. Several ground crew members of RAF 269 Squadron (Master Signaller Albert Thomson, Sgt. Flight Engineer Thomas Deweys, Flight Lt. R. Paris, and Leading Aircraftman George Grime) and civilians also see it. Prince Philip suggests to RAF Air Marshal Peter Horsley, who is serving as equerry to the duke, that he investigate credible reports of UFOs, especially those by fighter pilots who have seen them. He arranges for RAF Fighter Command to send copies of any reports for examination at Buckingham Palace and begins an informal study that lasts until 1955. (NICAP, “Swaying Silver Object Follows Jet”; Richard Hall, “Operation Mainbrace Sightings”; Good Above, pp. 31–32, 450; Nick Redfern, “UFOs and NATO: The Mainbrace Affair,” Mysterious Universe, April 22, 2014; David Clarke, “The Prince and the Saucers,” Fortean Times 406 (June 2021): 18–19; Sparks, p. 173; Ruppelt, pp. 195–196;
UFOFiles2, p. 47)
September 20? — Sometime during Exercise Mainbrace, at the underground RAF Ash, near Woodnesborough, Kent, England, Senior Aircraftman William Maguire tracks on radar a huge UFO high above the English Channel for 18 minutes. Eventually it splits into three and speeds away, one object to the north, another toward France, and the third toward Eastern Europe. (Good Need, p. 152; Nick Redfern, “UFOs, NATO, and Military Encounters,” Interesting and Curiosities, October 28, 2018)
September 20 — Naval personnel on the US aircraft carrier USS Franklin D. Roosevelt in the North Sea observe a silvery sphere moving across the sky behind the fleet. Photographer Wallace Litwin takes three color photos that are developed and examined by naval intelligence officers. Ruppelt says they “turned out to be excellent … judging by the size of the object in each successive photo, one could see that it was moving rapidly.” No balloon has been launched. (NICAP, “Object Photographed during Operation Mainbrace”; Ruppelt, pp. 195–196; UFOEv, p. 162; “In the News 1952,” Saturday Night Uforia, 2013)
September 20 — 7:30 p.m. At Air Base Karup in Jutland, Denmark, three Danish Air Force officers see a shiny, metallic UFO pass overhead and disappear in clouds to the east. (Aimé Michel, The Truth about FS, 133)
September 21 — Six RAF Meteor jets flying above the North Sea observe a shiny sphere approaching from the direction of the Mainbrace fleet. It eludes their pursuit and disappears. As they are returning, it reappears following one of the jets, but when he turns to chase it, it speeds away. Ruppelt says the Mainbrace sightings forced the RAF to “officially recognize the UFO.” (NICAP, “Six RAF Jets Approached by Shiny Sphere”; Ruppelt, p. 196; Sparks, p. 173)
September 22 — Night. A UFO hovers over the Army’s Camp Drum [now Fort Drum] near Watertown, New York, for 30 minutes. Eight soldiers say the object is 200 feet across, trailing red-orange sparks. (“Mysterious, Gyratuing Object Looks Down on Camp Drum,” Rochester (N.Y.) Democrat and Chronicle, September 27, 1952, p. 1)
September 24 — CIA Assistant Director of Scientific Intelligence H. Marshall Chadwell writes a 4-page memo to CIA Director Walter Bedell Smith, summarizing his earlier memo and stating that since 1947 unexplained sightings were running at 20% and in 1952 they rose to 28%. “I consider this problem to be of such importance that it should be brought to the attention of the National Security Council in order that a community-wide coordinated effort toward its solution may be initiated.” His CIA scientific consultants (Julius Stratton, and perhaps Lloyd Berkner and Howard P. Robertson) think the answer will be found “on the margins of just beyond the frontiers of our present knowledge in the fields of atmospheric, ionospheric, and extraterrestrial phenomena, with the added possibility that the present dispersal of nuclear waste products might also be a factor.” (H. Marshall Chadwell, “Flying Saucers,” September 24, 1952; CUFON, “The CUFON 1952 CIA UFO-Related Document Sampler, Part 1 of 2 Parts,” May 17, 1996; Good Above, pp. 328–329, 506–507)
Late September — Ruppelt visits the headquarters of the Air Defense Command at Ent AFB [now the US Olympic Training Center] in Colorado to brief Gen. Benjamin W. Chidlaw and his staff on the past few months of UFO activity at a lunch at the officer’s club. One of the attendees is Maj. Vernon L. Sadowski, the ADC Intelligence liaison to Blue Book, who says that “no one 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.” (Ruppelt, pp. 194–197)
September 26 — Syndicated aviation columnist Robert S. Allen writes in his column that the “Air Force has a breathtaking report” ready on UFOs. The study expresses the belief that some reports are genuine and originate from “sources outside of this planet.” The supposed document also says that some sightings involve secret US military devices. The study is allegedly based on more than 1,800 sightings in the past 5 years. (Robert S. Allen, “Report on Flying Saucers,” Los Angeles Mirror News, September 26, 1952, p. 43; Michael Hall, “Was There a Second Estimate of the Situation?” IUR 27, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 10–11)
September 26 — 11:16 p.m. The pilot and crew of a USAF C-124 see two distinct green lights to the right and slightly above the plane, about 400 miles north-northwest of the Azores Islands. At one point, they appear to turn toward the plane. They remain visible until the plane sights the islands. (NICAP, “Air Crews Observe Green Lights”; Sparks, p. 174)
September 27–28 — Throughout West Germany, Denmark, and southern Sweden, there are widespread UFO reports. A luminous object with a comet-like tail is seen moving irregularly near Hamburg and Kiel, Germany. Once, three satellite objects are reported moving around a larger object. A cigar-shaped UFO moving silently eastward is also seen. (UFOEv, p. 163)
September 28 — 2:00 p.m. Williamson, Streeter, and Bailey attempt to meet the saucer intelligences for a landing somewhere in the Arizona desert, but apparently get lost. They return to Streeter’s home, where the radio sends sinister-sounding messages about the radio being dangerous, a man coming, and Streeter having a deep secret (perhaps that Streeter has attempted psychic contact once before in 1950). (George Hunt Williamson and Alfred
C. Bailey, The Saucers Speak! New Age, 1954; Michael D. Swords, “Strange Days,” IUR 30, no. 4 (Aug. 2006): 22)
September 28 — 8:35 p.m.–10:09 p.m. USAF radar operator A/3c Carlton L. Hall, stationed on the southwest coast of Tsushima Island, Japan, notices unusual targets on six separate occasions, each time for a duration of 2–4 sweeps. On two separate outbound tracks from Itazuke Air Base [now Fukuoka Airport], a series of targets appear directly behind aircraft when entering an azimuth of 50°–70° from nearby Tsutsusaki Lighthouse. The objects appear as
normal aircraft but are rounder in shape, trailing about 2–3 miles to the rear of the aircraft. A/2c Warren D. Grovenstein also observes four of these anomalies with Hall. ([Blue Book report])
September 29 — 6:30 p.m. Capt. Dursemaine, commanding officer of the Gendarmerie Maritime en Allemagne, watches a luminous, egg-shaped object with a black spot in its center flying at an altitude of 3.7 miles above his home 1.2 miles south of Mainz, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. It emits a low-pitched hum and white exhaust. (Jan Aldrich)
September 30 — 10:30 a.m. A North American Aviation Company film crew, headed by Dick Beemer, is at Edwards AFB in southern California to film some tests. They are at Rogers Dry Lake when a B-29 passes overhead.
Cameraman Carlos Garcia sees an unusual object moving near the plane. A second object appears. Soon the whole crew is looking up. Beemer says the objects are silent, leave no vapor trail, take turns maneuvering around each other, and look like “flattened spheres.” They have a color motion picture camera with them, but the UFOs are too near the sun. (UFOEv, pp. 57–58)
Fall — Evening. Paul Solem has his first contact with a flying saucer around the Lost River Sinks a few miles from his ranch in Howe, Idaho. After watching a metallic object land, Solem sees a man with long blond hair and dressed in a white uniform standing next to it. He tells Solem to call him “Paul 2.” He says he is from Venus and tells Solem to work with Indians in North America in preparing for a postapocalyptic social order. This will be the first of many contacts for Solem. Over the next 17 years he wanders through the western states, speaking with Indians and contactees, gathers a small group of followers, and generally avoids the limelight. (Clark III 1094)
October — The first number of Albert K. Bender’s Space Review is published. (Space Review 1, no. 1 (October 1952); Clark III 189)
October — Opal Church is driving with her nephew in a car between Salem and Corvallis, Oregon, when they see an 8- foot, heavily built figure walking with “fluid movements” along the road. It is wearing an Arab-style headdress and a uniform, with gloves and boots, of fine metallic mesh. A ribbed belt surrounds the waist. Its face is pale and the huge round eyes, nearly 3 inches in diameter, glow. Inside them are reticulations “resembling the filament in old electric light bulbs.” Church turns around immediately, but the figure is gone, even though the terrain is flat. (Center for UFO Studies, HUMCAT Index 1952–1953, p. 28; Clark III 267)
October — Andrija Puharich, a medical doctor interested in parapsychology, discovers that a person’s ESP abilities are enhanced when they are placed inside a Faraday cage. His experimental subject is none other than gifted psychic Eileen J. Garrett, whom he has tasked with clairvoyantly perceiving cosmic ray bursts of sufficient magnitude to trigger a signal in a detector. (Michael D. Swords, “Strange Days, Part 2,” IUR 32, no. 2 (December 2008): 8)
October — Stanley Glickman, an American artist living in Paris, France, joins a group of fellow Americans at a café, one of whom is CIA mind-control and poison specialist Sidney Gottlieb. A heated political debate ensues, and when Glickman decides to leave, he is offered a drink to soothe ill feelings. Gottlieb surreptitiously slips LSD into Glickman’s drink and it derails his life. Glickman suffers a complete mental breakdown from which he never recovers. In 1977, he learns about Gottlieb and CIA’s LSD experiments on unwitting involuntary subjects from the Kennedy congressional hearings. Glickman sues in 1981, but the trial is delayed 17 years on technical grounds, by which time Glickman has died in 1992. His sister, Gloria Kronisch, pursues the case in the US Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, as his executrix in 1998, but it is thrown out on July 9 because the statute of limitations has passed. (H. P. Albarelli Jr., A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Cold War Experiments, Trine Day, 2009; Kronisch v. United States, US Court of Appeals, 2d Circuit, July 9, 1998)
October — Evening. Aeronautical engineer and former Project Sign liaison Alfred Loedding and his wife Marion see an odd object while driving near Plainsboro, New Jersey. At first, they think it is an aircraft crashing, but the object levels off and flashes away at high speed, emitting a bluish-green light. He estimates it is 100 feet in diameter and 500–600 feet high, and it gives off a “weird light like looking at a firefly” while changing shape. Loedding says Rep. L. Gary Clemente (D-N.Y.) is also a witness. (“Flying Saucer Design Practical, WADC Aid Says; U.S. Interested,” Dayton (Ohio) Journal Herald, August 9, 1957, p. 13)
October 2? — Shortly before 7:00 a.m. One Thursday this month, Johannes Nordlien is waiting for coworkers when he hears a howling sound. A white, saucer-shaped object, 13 feet in diameter, comes in from the west at high speed and passes him only 325 feet away. It falls with a violent splash into the river Lågen [Gudbrandsdalslågen?] in Norway. When his colleagues show up, the water is still roiling. (Ole Jonny Brænne, “Observations of Unidentified Submarine Objects in Norway,” IUR 20, no. 1 (Jan./Feb. 1995): 12)
October 2 — CIA Office of Scientific Intelligence Director H. Marshall Chadwell writes a memorandum to Director of Central Intelligence Walter Bedell Smith recommending he advise the National Security Council that more research is needed on UFOs to investigate their national security threat. (H. Marshall Chadwell, “Flying Saucers,”
October 2, 1952; CUFON, “The CUFON 1952 CIA UFO-Related Document Sampler, Part 1 of 2 Parts,” May 17, 1996; Good Above, pp. 509–510)
October 9–11 — At the Optical Society of America meeting in Boston, Massachusetts, J. Allen Hynek presents a paper on “Unusual Aerial Phenomena,” in which he expresses skepticism for most reports, except for nocturnal lights that do “not appear to be readily explainable on an astronomical basis, or by mirages, balloons, or by conventional aircraft.” Astronomer Donald Menzel presents a dismissive paper on radar angels and mirages, while Urner Liddel presents “Phantasmagoria or Unusual Observations in the Atmosphere,” dismissing UFO reports as mass hysteria, fear psychosis, and sensation-seeking. (J. A. Hynek, “Unusual Aerial Phenomena,” Journal of the Optical Society of America 43 (1953): 311–314; Urner Liddel, “Phantasmagoria or Unusual Observations in the Atmosphere,” Journal of the Optical Society of America 43 (1953): 314–317)
October 10 — Battelle issues its sixth status report on Project Stork. UFO reports through 1951 have been coded and put on IBM punch cards. About 60% of the reports have been evaluated. The panel has looked at two films and soil and vegetation samples from cases in Florida and Pittsburg, Kansas. The witness questionnaire is further refined and will become the basis for Project Blue Book’s form. (“Seven Status Reports for Project Stork, Part 3,” CUFON; “Seven Status Reports for Project Stork, Part 4,” CUFON)
October 11 — A Ground Observer Corps spotter sees a disc hovering in one spot for 20 minutes over Newport News, Virginia. When two interceptors arrive from Langley Air Force Base, the object tilts up, accelerates, and shoots away. (UFOEv, p. 150)
October 12 — Harold H. Fulton founds Civilian Saucer Investigation (New Zealand) in Auckland. It begins publishing a quarterly newsletter, Flying Saucers, in May 1953, which continues until September 1959 with a name change in 1958 to Space Probe. (Flying Saucers 1, no. 1 (May 1953); Space Probe, Christmas 1958)
October 13 — James Q. Reber, assistant director of CIA intelligence coordination, writes a memo to the CIA deputy director of intelligence, arguing that fundamental research into the question of positive identification is the responsibility of the Defense Department and that while investigating Soviet knowledge of UFO phenomena is a “primary concern” for the CIA, it “is far too early in view of the present state of our knowledge regarding Flying Saucers for psychological warfare planners to start planning how the United States might use U.S. Flying Saucers against the enemy.” Reber goes on to recommend that when “intelligence has submitted the National Estimate on Flying Saucers there will be the time and basis for a public policy to reduce or restrain mass hysteria.” (James Q. Reber, “Flying Saucers,” October 13, 1952; CUFON, “The CUFON 1952 CIA UFO-Related Document Sampler, Part 1 of 2 Parts,” May 17, 1996)
October 13 — 7:08 p.m. USAF pilot Maj. William D. Leet and his engineer, flying a C-54 troop carrier, watch an elliptical UFO hovering in clouds near Oshima, Japan. It speeds away after 7 minutes. (UFOEv, p. 24)
October 14 — OSI Deputy Assistant Director Ralph L. Clark writes a memorandum for the record suggesting a meeting on October 20 or 21 to work out a research and intelligence program on UFOs. (Ralph J. Clark, “Flying Saucers Problem,” October 14, 1952)
October 16 — George Hunt Williamson is in a state of panic from the messages he and the Baileys have received from space people. He writes an associate doing missionary work in Guatemala that disaster will strike the earth before December 1. He says radio contacts have stopped and that he has been told there will be a direct contact with a spaceman: “Professor George Adamski is in on this too.” The Baileys have already met with Adamski (in August) and now the messages are urging another meeting with him. (Y. N. ibn Aharon [Yonah Fortner], “Diagnosis: A Case of Chronic Fright,” Saucer News 4, no. 5 (Aug./Sept. 1957): 3–6; Clark III 1284)
October 17 — Early afternoon. Residents of Oloron-Sainte-Marie, Pyrénées-Atlantiques, France, see a large cigar-shaped structure in the blue sky, inclined at a 45° angle. The witnesses include the family of Yves Prigent, general superintendent of the local high school. A plume of white smoke is escaping from its upper end. At some distance in front of the cylinder, about 30 round, puffy objects with a central red spot are following the same trajectory.
The smaller objects move in pairs following a broken, zig-zag path. They leave an abundant trail of a white substance (angel’s hair) behind them, which slowly falls to the ground as it disperses. For several hours, clumps of it hang on the trees, on the telephone wires, and on the roofs of houses. (“Les Soucoupes Volantes vues à Oloron le 17 Octobre,” France-Dimanche, October 26, 1952, in The Spectrum of UFO Research, CUFOS, 1988,
p. 114; Jimmy Guieu, Flying Saucers Come from Another World, Hutchinson, 1956, pp. 87–92; Jacques Vallee and Janine Vallee, Challenge to Science: The UFO Enigma, Regnery, 1966, pp. 120–121; Clark III 123; Patrick Gross, “Documents: Found in the Attic”; Loren E. Gross, UFOs, a History: 1952, September–October, The Author, 1986, pp. 73–74; Lotharson, “Unidentified Flying Spiders in Southern France?” Shards of Magonia, March 12, 2017)
October 18 — 9:44 p.m. Journalist Keith Hooper is returning home from an assignment for the Adelaide Advrtiser when he sees a greenish-white, cigar-shaped object about the size of a Boeing 707 some 10 miles away over the
Adelaide Hills, South Australia, moving southeast to northwest. The object makes a sharp, right-angle turn upward, recedes, then vanishes at tremendous speed. The duration is 5–7 seconds. (Keith Hooper, “My Flying Saucer,” Sydney (N.S.W.) Morning Herald, March 13, 1965, p. 13)
October 21 — Afternoon. Flight Lt. Michael Swiney and a student pilot, Royal Navy Lt. David Crofts, are flying a Meteor
T.7 trainer out of RAF Little Rissington, Gloucester, England, for a high-altitude navigation exercise at 35,000 feet. Not long after breaking out of a cloud during a climb at 13,000–14,000 feet, they see three circular, white objects in front of them. As the aircraft get closer and turns to avoid them, the objects become visible as discs. They disappear quickly when the pilot looks away briefly. Two Meteor F.8 fighters are scrambled from RAF Tangmere [now closed] in West Sussex to chase three unknown radar targets moving at 3,000 mph but fail to intercept them. (Wikipedia, “Little Rissington UFO incident”; David Clarke and Andy Roberts, Out of the Shadows, Piatkus, 2002, pp. 98–102; UFOFiles2, pp. 47–49)
October 23 — Ruppelt holds a briefing on UFOs at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, New Mexico. Afterward Assistant Director for Scientific Personnel William H. Crew arranges a special meeting for Ruppelt and Col. Bower with seven people from the laboratory. Several of them have evidence that there is a possible correlation between sightings of UFOs and unusual radiation detection. (Edward J. Ruppelt, [Message referring to a December 1 telephone call], December 2, 1952)
October 24 — President Truman signs National Security Council Directive 6, a 7-page document that eliminates the Armed Forces Security Agency formed in 1949 to unite all military signal intelligence operations and creates the National Security Agency. Since the memo is a classified document, the existence of the NSA is not known to the public. Due to its ultra-secrecy the US intelligence community refers to the NSA as “No Such Agency." The NSA is responsible for global monitoring, collection, and processing of information and data for foreign intelligence and counterintelligence purposes. NSA inherits Project Shamrock from the AFSA. It also inherits collection of UFO data, at least by 1958, but probably in 1953. (ClearIntent, p. 189; Thomas L. Burns, The Origins of the National Security Agency, 1940–1952, National Security Agency, 1990, pp. 97–99)
Late October — Night. Radioman Tom Kramer is serving aboard the USS Curtiss, the AEC flagship for Ivy Mike, the first detonation of a hydrogen bomb at Elugelab Atoll in the Marshall Islands. After an onboard movie, Kramer and other crewmen see a round, silent, bright white light that is motionless at first, then starts zigzagging for less than 10 seconds and takes off at high speed. (Nukes 100–101)
Late October — 3:45 a.m. Seaman Abelardo Marquez, posted on the USS Fletcher near Eniwetak Atoll for the upcoming Ivy Mike thermonuclear test, is going on duty to the bridge when he notices that the ship is uncharacteristically moving at full speed. Other crew members tell him it is because of a round white light that has been moving above the ship. Marquez sees it descending, then it stops and hovers about 40°–45° above the horizon and perhaps one-half mile from the ship. Capt. Grover L. Rawlings is talking with other officers on the bridge, saying they do not know what the light is, and that is not tracked on radar. After about 4–5 minutes, the light takes off straight up at the same speed it had descended. (Nukes 101–105)
October 27 — 2:03 a.m. Customs officer Gabriel Gachignard observes a cigar-shaped object land briefly on a runway of the airport at Marignane, Bouches-du-Rhône, France, 100 meters away, producing a dull sound. The object is dark with four lighted windows. It takes off with a “swish” and a shower of sparks when he runs toward it. (Clark III 243–244; Jimmy Guieu, Flying Saucers Come from Another World, Hutchinson, 1956, p. 53; Michel, The Truth about FS, pp. 152–156; Jacques Vallee and Janine Vallee, Challenge to Science: The UFO Enigma, Regnery, 1966, pp. 6–11; Loren E. Gross, UFOs, a History: 1952, September–October, The Author, 1986, pp. 82–84)
October 27 — An FBI memorandum to Alan H. Belmont from Victor P. Keay reports that “Air Intelligence still feels that the so-called flying saucers are either optical illusions or atmospheric phenomena. He pointed out, however, that some Military officials are seriously considering the possibility of interplanetary ships.” (V. P. Keay, “Flying Saucers,” October 27, 1952)
October 27 — 4:00 p.m. Residents of Gaillac, Tarn, France, see a formation of 16 disc-shaped UFOs ranged in twos. An elongated cylinder is in the center of the objects, all of which are discharging angel’s hair like glass wool. (Aimé Michel, The Truth about FS, p. 148; Loren E. Gross, UFOs, a History: 1952, September–October, The Author, 1986, pp. 84–85; Lotharson, “Unidentified Flying Spiders in Southern France?” Shards of Magonia, March 12, 2017)
October 29 — 5:10 a.m. Two USAF F-94 crews see a white luminous object maneuvering at high speed for 20 minutes above Hempstead, Long Island, New York. Lt. William F. Hamilton and Lt. Norman W. Booth write: “Based on my experience in fighter tactics, it is my opinion that the object was controlled by something having visual contact with us. The power and acceleration were beyond the capability of any known aircraft.” (NICAP, “Two F- 94’s Encounter Controlled Object”; Sparks, p. 177)
November — Aladino Félix and a friend are climbing a hill near Angatuba, São Paulo, Brazil. When they get to the top, Félix claims they see numerous UFOs flying around. Félix comes back another day by himself; eventually a saucer lands and he is invited inside to meet its crew and examine the technology. Several months later, he is visited at his home in São Paulo by the saucer captain, who claims to come from one or two of the satellites of Jupiter. Félix, under the pseudonym of Dino Kraspedon, writes about his various conversations with the spaceman in Meu Contato com os discos voadores in 1957. He writes other mystical and religious tracts under the names Dunatos Menorá and Sábado Dinotos. In 1967–1968, Félix is operating a right-wing terrorism group that sets off bombs, steals arms and explosives, and robs a bank. He serves three years in prison. (Clark III 661–662; Zirger and Martinelli, The Incredible Life of George Hunt Williamson, Verdechiari, 2016, pp. 164–165)
November 1 — Nuclear test Ivy Mike is the first successful full-scale test of a multi-megaton thermonuclear weapon (“hydrogen bomb”) using the Teller-Ulam design the size of an airplane hangar. Unlike later thermonuclear weapons, Mike uses deuterium as its fusion fuel, maintained as a liquid by an expensive and cumbersome cryogenic system. It is detonated on Elugelab in the Marshall Islands yielding 10.4 megatons, almost 500 times the yield of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. The fireball is 3 miles wide and completely destroys the atoll. USAF Capt. Jimmy Priestly Robinson of the 561st Fighter-Day Squadron, is lost near the end of his mission to successfully pilot his F-84G through the mushroom cloud’s stem to collect radiochemical air samples. After re- emerging from the cloud, both he and his wingman, pilot Captain Bob Hagan, encounter difficulties picking up navigational beacons due to “electromagnetic after effects” of the detonation. By the time they are successful in finding the signal four hours later, they are dangerously low on fuel, and before reaching the runway, both have depleted their reserves. While Hagan is able to glide to the runway and achieve a hard landing, Robinson is too far out to follow the same path and therefore attempts to land on water. Neither his plane nor his body has ever been found; his family only learned the truth in 2008 after repeated FOIA requests. (Wikipedia, “Ivy Mike”)
November 4 — Capt. Edward J. Ruppelt and Lt. Robert M. Olsson visit Col. John R. Hood Jr., AMC chief of the Nuclear Powered Aircraft Branch of Wright Air Development Center. Hood had contacted ATIC in December 1950 in regard to certain sightings of UFOs at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee, in which he and a naval officer attempted to obtain correlation between sightings and peaks in radiation backgrounds. Now there are indications that there may be some correlation present between unknown radar pickups and rises in radiation, and he suggests that ATIC begin an instrumented radiation program. (“Visit to WADC,” November 4, 1952; Patrick W. Hayes, “Unconventional Aircraft,” Spot Intelligence Report, Dec. 1950)
November 4 — The National Security Agency is established in Fort Meade, Maryland, in a memo by Secretary of Defense Robert A. Lovett, making the new agency responsible for all communications intelligence. The existence of the NSA is not known to the public at this time. (Wikipedia, “National Security Agency”)
November 4–6 — The Baileys and Williamsons come up together for a visit to the Palomar Gardens Café. Adamski tells them he has been making special trips into the desert in hopes of meeting a saucer. Soon Adamski begins channeling space messages in the presence of the Williamsons and the Baileys. At one of these sessions, a space being declares that a face-to-face meeting will take place soon. Williamson and Bailey ask Adamski to call them before he attempts his next contact. (Michael D. Swords, “Strange Days,” IUR 30, no. 4 (Aug. 2006): 23; Zirger and Martinelli, The Incredible Life of George Hunt Williamson, Verdechiari, 2016, p. 357)
November 5 — Dwight D. Eisenhower is elected president. ()
November 10 — Battelle’s Project Stork notes in its seventh status report that current UFO reports “are now in more detail and often consist of sightings of one object by more than one individual.” 500 copies of a final version of the sighting questionnaire were delivered to ATIC at Wright-Patterson AFB in Ohio. It expects to have all UFO reports dated before June 15, 1952, processed and evaluated by December 10, ready for IBM analysis later. (Clark III 929; “Seven Status Reports for Project Stork, Part 4,” CUFON)
November 16 —Around 5:00 p.m. An air traffic controller at Florence Airport, South Carolina, watches a huge, gleaming disc through binoculars and sees it tilt up sharply before climbing out of sight. About 6 minutes later, people see a group of round, glowing objects north of Landrum, South Carolina. David S. Bunch takes 40 minutes of film with an 8mm camera and telephoto lens before the UFOs disappear to the west. Keyhoe reviews the film along with some Air Force officers. It shows five glowing, oval-shaped objects. (Keyhoe, FS from OS, pp. 4–5; UFOEv, p.
November 18 — Date of the fake four-page “Briefing Document: Operation Majestic 12. Prepared for President-Elect Dwight D. Eisenhower: Eyes Only.” It states that UFOs are the product of an extraterrestrial civilization, that several had crashed and came into the possession of the US government, and that the US had custody of an alien for some time before it died. It says that Truman established the MJ-12 group in 1947. Called Majestic-12, the group supposedly consists of CIA Director Roscoe Hillenkoetter, Vannevar Bush, Secretary of Defense James Forrestal (replaced by Gen. Walter Bedell Smith in 1950), Gen. Nathan Twining, Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg, Detlev
Bronk, Jerome Clarke Hunsaker, Sidney Souers, Gordon Gray, Donald Menzel, Gen. Robert Miller Montague, and Lloyd Berkner. (“Briefing Document: Operation Majestic-12, Prepared for President-Elect Dwight D. Eisenhower (Eyes Only),” November 18, 1952; Stanton T. Friedman, “MJ 12: The Evidence So Far,” IUR 12, no. 5 (Sept./Oct. 1987): 13–17; Joe Nickell and John R. Fischer, “The Crashed-Saucer Forgeries,” IUR 15, no. 2 (Mar./Apr. 1990): 4–20; Good Above, pp. 257–260, 544–550)
November 18 — President-Elect Eisenhower receives a 43-minute national security briefing on matters that are still classified. Gen. Nathan Twining, Gen. Omar Bradley, Adm. William Fechteler, Gen. J. Lawton Collins, Gen. Lemuel C. Shepherd Jr., and Secretary of Defense Robert A. Lovett are present. (Stanton T. Friedman, “MJ 12: The Evidence So Far,” IUR 12, no. 5 (Sept./Oct. 1987): 16)
November 18 — George Adamski telephones George Hunt Williamson and tells him that the space people have informed him a physical encounter will take place on November 20. (Clark III 1284; Michael D. Swords, “Strange Days,” IUR 30, no. 4 (Aug. 2006): 23; Zirger and Martinelli, The Incredible Life of George Hunt Williamson, Verdechiari, 2016, p. 358)
November 19 — Pilot J. Slade Nash reaches 698.5 mph in a North American F-86D Sabre over the Salton Sea, California. (Bryan R. Swopes, “19 November 1952,” This Day in Aviation, 2018)
November 20 — Morning. George Adamski and two associates, Lucy McGinnis and Alice Wells, drive out from the Palomar Gardens Café. They meet the Williamsons and the Baileys at Blythe, California, at 8:00 a.m., and they drive to Desert Center, California, taking Desert Center Rice Road 117 toward Coxcomb Mountain. (Clark III 1284; Zirger and Martinelli, The Incredible Life of George Hunt Williamson, Verdechiari, 2016, p. 358)
November 20 — 1:00 p.m. Adamski’s group picnics along the roadside. At 1:30 p.m., they see a cigar-shaped UFO that appears shortly after a US Air Force B-29 passes overhead going in the direction of Parker, Arizona. Adamski asks Lucy McGinnis, accompanied by Alfred Bailey, to drive him a bit more than half a mile away to a flatter area near the foot of Coxcomb Mountain where he can set up his telescope. The cigar-shaped UFO is allegedly following them. (Zirger and Martinelli, The Incredible Life of George Hunt Williamson, Verdechiari, 2016, pp. 54–56, 358–359)
November 20 — 1:57 p.m. Adamski stays behind to set up his equipment as McGinnis and Bailey return to the rest of the group. At 2:04 p.m., another UFO, this time a “Scout ship,” appears near Adamski, who takes seven photos through his telescope. The cigar-shaped UFO is still visible through binoculars. At 2:12 pm., Adamski takes three more photos of the Scout ship with a Kodak Brownie before it disappears behind a hill. Air Force jets circle the area at least twice. (Zirger and Martinelli, The Incredible Life of George Hunt Williamson, Verdechiari, 2016, pp. 359–360)
November 20 — 2:15 p.m. As he is packing up his telescope, Adamski sees a man waving to him from about a quarter- mile away. He walks over to him and meets an entity named Orthon as his 6 companions watch from a distance. Five-and-a-half feet tall, Orthon [could Adamski have thought of this name from Kodak Ortho film?] is a beautiful being with long blond hair and an extremely high forehead. Through gestures, sign language, a few words, and telepathy, Adamski learns that he is from Venus and the Venusians are visiting earth out of concern for nuclear weapons. The conversation lasts about 45 minutes. Orthon declines to be photographed but asks Adamski to borrow one of his unexposed photos. After Orthon leaves in his Scout ship around 3:04 p.m., Adamski finds tracks in the desert floor. His companions rejoin him at the site. Around 3:45 p.m., Williamson takes casts with plaster of paris, which he just happens to carry with him in case he runs into a stray bone. Each track contains within it a distinct set of symbols. After several hours of assessing the situation and waiting for the plaster to dry, the group returns to Desert Center, California. (Desmond Leslie and George Adamski, Flying Saucers Have Landed, British Book Centre, 1953, pp. 185–215; Adamski Foundation, “The Landing”; James W. Moseley, “Special Adamski Exposé Issue,” Saucer News, no. 27 (October 1957); Curt Collins, “Saucer News Presents: The George Adamski Exposé,” In Honor of James Moseley, May 30, 2014; Zirger and Martinelli, The Incredible Life of George Hunt Williamson, Verdechiari, 2016, pp. 41–89, 360–362; Clark III 39–40, 1284; Michael D. Swords, “Strange Days,” IUR 30, no. 4 (August 2006): 23; Michael D. Swords, “Adamski in the Desert,” IUR 31, no. 3 (October 2007): 22; Rene Erik Olsen, [George Adamski photo analysis], Adamski Foundation; Marc Hallet, A Critical Appraisal of George Adamski: The Man Who Spoke to the Space Brothers, The Author, 2016)
November 20 — 9:00 p.m. The Williamsons and the Baileys, with Adamski’s permission, drive to Phoenix, Arizona, and tell the story of their contact to reporters at the Phoenix Gazette. (Zirger and Martinelli, The Incredible Life of George Hunt Williamson, Verdechiari, 2016, pp. 363)
November 21–23 — An Air Force review panel meets at ATIC for three days and recommends that a “higher court” be formed to review UFOs. It schedules this tentatively for late December or early January. (Ruppelt, pp. 200–201)
November 22 — 10:00 p.m. Fr. Carlos Maria, a Capuchin missionary, and five others are driving along the road to Bocaranga, Ubangi-Shari [now Central African Republic] when they notice a large disc speeding overhead. Later, they see four others, motionless. They watch the UFOs for 20 minutes, changing shape and color. (Aimé Michel, The Truth about FS; Jimmy Guieu [pseudonym of Henri René Guieu], Les soucoupes volantes viennent d’un autre monde, Fleuve Noir, 1954; ClearIntent, pp. 128–129)
November 24 — Andrija Puharich, invited by an Army colonel friend who is chief of the Research Section of the Office of the Chief of Psychological Warfare, delivers a lecture on ESP to high-ranking Pentagon officers in the Army’s Psychological Warfare Research Section and the Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations. Col. Howard McCoy is probably present. (Nick Redfern, The Pyramids and the Pentagon, New Page, 2012; Michael D. Swords, “Strange Days, Part 2,” IUR 32, no. 2 (December 2008): 8)
November 24 — The first printed account of the encounter with Orthon appears in the Phoenix Gazette. The newspaper publishes one of Adamski’s photos as well as a photo of the Williamsons and the Baileys. Adamski becomes instantly famous, and Williamson moves to Palomar Gardens for several days. When he tells Adamski he is planning to write a book about his channelings and contacts, Adamski warns him not to mention the contacts have been largely psychic. Adamski discourages him and they have a falling out. Alfred C. Bailey later says he has seen neither spaceship nor spaceman and doubts that anyone else has either. (Zirger and Martinelli, The Incredible Life of George Hunt Williamson, Verdechiari, 2016, pp. 45–52, 99, 358–363; “Palomar Mountain, 1940–1960: From Obscurity to World Fame,” The Adamski Case, September 22, 2019)
November 25 — ATIC Col. Donald L. Bower and Maj. Dewey Fournet brief CIA consultants Frederick C. Durant and Edward Tauss on Blue Book’s top three cases: the Tremonton UFO film of July 2; a dubious sighting of an object seen at Presque Isle and Limestone AFB [now Loring International Airport], Maine, on the night of October 10– 11 (which Hynek has already explained as a theodolite miscalibration causing Jupiter and its 4 prominent moons to be visible); and the problematic Florida scoutmaster case of August 19. USAF wants the CIA to think these are good cases until they unravel at the proposed Robertson Panel meeting. (CUFON, “The CUFON 1952 CIA UFO- Related Document Sampler, Part 1 of 2 Parts,” May 17, 1996; Clark III 1014)
November 25–26 — Two UFOs are tracked by defense radar in the Panama Canal Zone. (NICAP, “Two Objects Tracked by A/A Gun Radar”; Condon, pp. 168–170)
November 26 — 5:56 p.m. An F-94B from the USAF 59th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron at Goose Bay AFB [now CFB Goose Bay], Labrador, for 15 minutes chases a maneuverable object that changes color from white to red, heading south or southwest. The fighter gets a brief radar lock-on. (Loren E. Gross, UFOs, a History: 1952, November– December, The Author, 1986, p. 44; Sparks, p. 181)
November 30 — 12:30 a.m. Numerous slow-moving 90–100 mph radar targets appear on the MEW VG-2 radar at Washington National Airport in Washington, D.C. Suggestive of anomalous propagation, but they are unlike the July 1952 cases since there is no visual confirmation, no other radars confirming, and no fighters scrambled. A pilot at 6,000 feet sees nothing. CAA Senior Airways Specialist Austin M. Stapf claims the same thing was observed at same time on November 29, and that the Andrews AFB watch supervisor could not visually confirm targets over Andrews displayed on the ARTCC radar scope. (Sparks, p. 181)
December — Maj. Dewey Fournet completes a study of UFOs to assess whether their motions are random or ordered. He concludes that their reported movements show that UFOs are under intelligent control. (Ruppelt, pp. 189–190; Michael D. Swords, “Intelligent Motions,” IUR 33, no. 1 (March 2010): 8–15)
December 2 — CIA Office of Scientific Intelligence Director H. Marshall Chadwell writes another secret memo to Director Walter Bedell Smith on UFOs: “At this time, the reports of incidents convince us that there is something going on that must have immediate attention. The details of some of these incidents have been discussed by AD/SI with DDCI. Sightings of unexplained objects at great altitudes and traveling at high speeds in the vicinity of major U.S. defense installations are of such nature that they are not attributable to natural phenomena or known types of aerial vehicles.” Physicist Julius Adams Stratton and economist Max Millikan tell Chadwell that scientists at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory would like to be a part of any scientific study of the UFO phenomenon, perhaps through Millikan’s MIT Center for International Studies. Stratton indicates that Lab Director Albert G. Hill should organize the study. Attached is a draft of an intelligence directive by Chadwell on behalf of Smith to the National Security Council recommending that the CIA “formulate and carry out a program of intelligence and research activities required to solve the problem of instant positive identification of unidentified flying objects.” But Smith refuses to approve or sign the directive because he is briefing the president directly. (H. Marshall Chadwell, “Unidentified Flying Objects,” December 2, 1952; CUFON, “The CUFON 1952 CIA UFO-Related Document Sampler, Part 1 of 2 Parts,” May 17, 1996; Swords 175; Clark III 1013)
December 3 — In another “Flying Saucer” memo, Chadwell admits the Air Force would be suspicious of any MIT Lincoln Lab involvement, and that Princeton or Cal Tech would do, and that “it will be necessary to secure the full backing of the DCI in order that a scientific review of the problem may be laid on.” However, he recommends that this “External Research Project Concerned with Unidentified Flying Objects” be administered by Max Millikan at the MIT Center for International Studies. (P. G. Strong, “Flying Saucers,” December 3, 1952; CUFON, “The CUFON 1952 CIA UFO-Related Document Sampler, Part 1 of 2 Parts,” May 17, 1996; Swords 185–186)
December 4 —The CIA Intelligence Advisory Committee recommends that “the Director of Central Intelligence will ‘enlist the services of selected scientists to review and appraise the available evidence in the light of pertinent scientific theories.’” The meeting, chaired by Chadwell, is attended by Robert Amory Jr., Gen. John Samford, Rear Admiral Carl F. Espe, Gen. John M. Willems, William Park Armstrong, Walter F. Colby, Col. Edward R. Porter, and Col. Jere Boggs. This is to be done “immediately” through a National Security Council Intelligence Directive and is essentially the go-ahead for what will be the Robertson Panel. (Robert Amory Jr., “Intelligence Advisory Committee: Minutes of Meeting Held in Director’s Conference Room, Administration Building, Central Intelligence Agency, on 4 December 1952,” December 4, 1952; CUFON, “The CUFON 1952 CIA UFO-Related Document Sampler, Part 1 of 2 Parts,” May 17, 1996; Swords 184, 186–187; Hynek UFO Report, p. 20; Clark III 1013)
December 4 — 8:46 p.m. USAF pilot Lt. Robert O. Arnold, 3640th Pilot Training Wing, Laredo AFB [now Laredo International Airport], Texas, is flying a T-28 trainer at 6,000 feet when he sees a bright bluish-white glowing object below him at about 1,500–2,000 feet and rapidly climbing to his level. It shows no navigation lights. He tightens his left turn to keep the object in view, but it suddenly climbs to 9,000 feet in several seconds and drops down to his altitude again, then stops and hovers. Arnold pursues but after 2 seconds the object suddenly heads towards him on a collision course at high speed at 8:53 p.m., wavering slightly at about 300 feet. He sees the object as a blurred reddish-bluish haze smaller than his T-28. It rapidly ascends to 15,000 feet then circles left as if positioning for another pass. In fear Arnold turns off his running lights, spirals down to 1,500 feet while keeping the object in sight as it continues to head towards him in a dive, then pulls up and climbs out of sight. A lighted weather balloon is launched at 8:53 p.m. from Laredo AFB but it is not observed near any aircraft. (NICAP, “The Laredo / ‘Earl Fogle’ Case”; Sparks, p. 182)
December 6 — 5:24 a.m. The 3-man crew of a USAF B-29 (1st Lt. Norman Karas and 1st Lt. William W. Naumann) over the Gulf of Mexico 100 miles south of Louisiana track five unidentified blips on the bomber’s radar. They maneuver around the plane at a speed of 5,240 mph. The crew sees some flashes of light, but the targets are 20 miles or more away. The five UFOs merge with a huge blip that accelerates and vanishes at a speed of 9,000 mph. Additional crewmen involved are 1st Lt. William W. Naumann, Jr., Staff Sgt B. R. Purcell, Staff Sgt. William J. De Rause, 2nd Lt. Robert J. Eckert, and Staff Sgt. Harry D. Shogren. (NICAP, “B-29 Encounters High Speed Objects over Gulf”; Keyhoe, FS from OS, pp. 161–166; Sparks, p. 183; Condon, pp. 148–150; Patrick Gross, “B- 29 Radar and Visual Multiple Witnesses Observations, Dec. 6, 1952”)
December 9 — Col. Donald L. Bower forbids Ruppelt from visiting the CIA to give its Office of Scientific Intelligence certain UFO cases in preparation for the Robertson Panel in January. CIA consultant Frederick C. Durant learns about this the same day in a phone call to Ruppelt. (Frederick C. Durant, “Unidentified Flying Objects,” December 9, 1952; CUFON, “The CUFON 1952 CIA UFO-Related Document Sampler, Part 1 of 2 Parts,” May 17, 1996; Thomas Tulien, ed., Proceedings of the Sign Historical Group UFO History Workshop, Sign Historical Group, November 2001, p. 47; Clark III 1014)
December 10 — H. Marshall Chadwell writes to Walter Bedell Smith that OSI has been working with mathematician Howard P. Robertson of Cal Tech to establish a panel of scientists (including astronomer Thornton Leigh Page) and engineers to review the status of UFOs in January. Somewhere along the line, MIT’s Lincoln Labs and CIS have been eliminated. (Thornton Page, [Letter], December 12, 1952; CUFON, “The CUFON 1952 CIA UFO- Related Document Sampler, Part 1 of 2 Parts,” May 17, 1996; Swords 187–188)
December 10 — 7:15 p.m. The pilot and radar observer of an F-94 patrolling from Moses Lake AFB [now the Grant County International Airport] spots a light over the Hanford nuclear plant near Richland, Washington, while flying at 26,000 feet. They contact the ground control station, which reports that they know of no planes in the area and that their ground radar shows nothing. They close in on the object, which is large, white, and round and features a dim reddish light coming from two windows. They lose visual contact then get a lock-on from their ARC-33 airborne radar. As they attempt to close in, the object reverses direction and dives away. They attempt several more times to approach the light and have to alter course to avoid a collision that seems imminent. (NICAP, “F-94 R/V with Round Object”; Ruppelt, pp. 61–62; Sparks, p. 185; James E. McDonald, “Statement on Unidentified Flying Objects,” in Symposium on Unidentified Flying Objects, Hearings, US House Committee on
Science and Astronautics, 90th Cong., 2nd Sess., July 29, 1968, p. 66; Center for UFO Studies, [case file]; Patrick Gross, “Radar Visual Aircraft UFO Encounter near Hanford Nuclear Plant, December 10, 1952”)
December 12 — The CIA, having learned that ATIC is withholding significant case reports for the upcoming Robertson Panel, sends a three-man team to Wright-Patterson AFB in order to obtain relevant documents. The team includes Robertson himself, CIA Assistant Director H. Marshall Chadwell, and CIA rocket consultant Frederick C. Durant, a personal friend of Ruppelt who urges him to comply. At ATIC they meet with personnel from Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio, which has been studying the UFO data in great secrecy. Battelle requests the CIA to postpone the panel until March so they can finish the study. Robertson agrees to postpone the panel, but is later overruled by CIA Director Gen. Walter Bedell Smith. (CUFON, “The CUFON 1952 CIA UFO- Related Document Sampler, Part 1 of 2 Parts,” May 17, 1996; NICAP, “The 1952 Sighting Wave”; Thomas Tulien, ed., Proceedings of the Sign Historical Group UFO History Workshop, Sign Historical Group, November 2001, p. 47; Clark III 1014)
December 13 — Morning. George Adamski’s scout ship makes a second appearance, this time at the Palomar Gardens Café in California, ostensibly so that Orthon can return the photo he borrowed. The film holder is pushed out of a porthole to the ground. One of the three Venusian photos taken by Adamski, though credited to Jerrold E. Baker, is taken secretly the day before by Adamski, probably of a model. Bill Moore claims in 1985 that the photos resemble the prototype space vehicle described in Mason Rose’s A Simplified Explanation of the Application of the Biefeld-Brown Effect to the Solution of the Problems of Space Navigation, published in February 1952 (Clark III 40; Desmond Leslie and George Adamski, Flying Saucers Have Landed, British Book Centre, 1953, pp. 217– 221; Paul E. Potter, “The Flying Saucer”; “Some New Facts about Flying Saucers Have Landed,” Nexus 2, no. 1 (January 1955): 13–17; James W. Moseley, “Special Adamski Exposé Issue,” Saucer News, no. 27 (October 1957); Curt Collins, “Saucer News Presents: The George Adamski Exposé,” In Honor of James Moseley, May 30, 2014; George M. Eberhart, “Postcards with a UFO Theme,” IUR 29, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 21; Rene Erik Olsen, “The 13th December 1952 Photos of George Adamski Analysis,” April 23, 2019; Rene Erik Olsen, [George Adamski photo analysis], Adamski Foundation; Marc Hallet, A Critical Appraisal of George Adamski: The Man Who Spoke to the Space Brothers, The Author, 2016)
December 15 — 7:15 p.m. Two Air Force pilots get a momentary lock on a strange object above Goose Bay, Labrador. A T-33 and an F-94B (piloted by Capt. E. T. Johnson and Radar Observer Lt. H. S. Norris) see a bright red and white light. (NICAP, “Momentary Lock On”; Condon, pp. 126–127; Sparks, p. 186)
December 16 — Chadwell tells CIA Acting Deputy Director for Intelligence Robert Amory Jr. that he is unimpressed with the three Blue Book cases, especially since Presque Isle was identified as the planet Jupiter. (Clark III 1014)
December 21 — Lyman Streeter and five other witnesses observe a large, cigar-shaped object over Winslow, Arizona. (Michael D. Swords, “Strange Days,” IUR 30, no. 4 (Aug. 2006): 24)
December 21 — Evening. J. E. Hawkey, civil commissioner of Fort Victoria [now Masvingo], Zimbabwe, is driving near Mvuma when he sees a bright red light crossing the road about 30 feet in the air, then hovering. Suddenly it shoots straight up and disappears. After a short while it descends some distance away and travels straight down the road. Hawkey follows it at about 80 mph, after which it speeds up and disappears at three or more times the speed. He has the object in sight for about 20 minutes. (Southern Rhodesia Newsletter; Jan Aldrich)
December 22 — Ruppelt finds out that the CIA Robertson Panel is back on again after being postponed on December 12. Apparently under pressure from the Air Force, which is setting a trap to embarrass the CIA with sensational IFO cases dressed up as “best” unknown UFO cases, CIA Director Gen. Walter Bedell Smith reverses the decision to postpone the panel meeting till March 1953 or later. Smith orders the Robertson Panel to be carried out immediately. A rush-to-judgment panel will have no time to reflect on the USAF trickery involved in the IFOs-as- UFOs deception and will just react in dismissive skepticism that there is no scientific evidence for UFO reality, and hence no reason for the CIA to intrude into USAF jurisdiction over air intelligence matters such as unidentified aerial threats (UFOs). Ruppelt calls ADC to say that he will not be able to conduct the ADC UFO briefing tour as previously scheduled due to the CIA meeting now tentatively set in early January 1953 (he confirms the call by teletype December 23). (Thomas Tulien, ed., Proceedings of the Sign Historical Group UFO History Workshop, Sign Historical Group, November 2001, p. 48; Clark III 1014)
December 22 — 7:30 p.m. An instrument technician driving toward Larson AFB [now Grant County International Airport] near Moses Lake, Washington, stops his car to watch a hat-shaped glowing object rising vertically in odd spurts right and left, then level off at high speed. The object glows white with a red side when it is rotated.
Halfway through a roll the light disappears, then it holds stationary in the sky with jumpy movements. Duration is about 15 minutes. (NICAP, “Hat-Shaped Object Observed by Technician”; Sparks, p. 16)
December 29 — 7:48 p.m. Col. Donald J. M. Blakeslee, 27th Fighter Escort Wing, while flying near Misawa, northern Honshu, Japan, in an F-84G at 27,000 feet in altitude, observes an object like a rotating cluster of lights colored
white, green, and red. Blakeslee climbs to 35,000 feet, at which point he is level with the unknown object. He attempts a pursuit, but the UFO disappears in 30 seconds. (NICAP, “Col. Blakeslee / F-84 Incident”; Sparks, p. 187; Swords 212–213)
December 29 — 9:05 p.m. Capt. William T. Bowley and Capt. Herbert T. Lange, both of Perrin AFB [now North Texas Regional Airport] near Denison, Texas, are piloting a B-26 on a training flight headed west at 6,000 feet altitude and 300 mph when they see a large, intense, bluish-white light near Vega, Texas. It is about 350 feet long at their 11 o’clock position, paralleling their course at the same altitude and closing slightly. After 5 minutes, the object suddenly climbs vertically 7,000 feet in 5 seconds (about 2,000 mph) to disappear in thin clouds at 13,000 feet and causing the clouds to glow as if lit by a searchlight. Bowley radios the CAA controller in Tucumcari, New Mexico. Shortly after, the object reappears under the clouds and the CAA controller is told to look for it but he can’t see it (possibly because he is told to look in the wring direction). After 2 minutes, it climbs to the west and disappears. (NICAP, “Object Closing on B-36 Suddenly Climbs”; Sparks, p. 187)
December 31 — Project Blue Book issues its Status Report #8, classified “confidential.” (US Air Force, Projects Grudge and Blue Book Reports 1–12, NICAP, 1968, pp. 131–154)
1953
1953 — During off-shore combat maneuvers, a squadron of carrier-based Navy AD-3 attack planes is approached by a rocket-shaped UFO that swoops down on the flight from above. The object levels off about 1,000 feet overhead, slows, and paces the aircraft. When the Squadron Commander leads his flight in pursuit of the UFO, it turns sharply so that its tail is pointed away and shoots upward out of sight in seconds. (Keyhoe, FSTS, pp. 266–267).
1953 — Midday. A member of the crew of a Shell tanker in Hong Kong harbor, China, watches, along with many others on shore and aboard the ship, a silver-white disc hovering at 6,000–7,000 feet. Within a second or so, it moves a full 45° arc to an area where there are some white clouds at about 5,000 fee. It shines through the cloud cover like the moon through a mist. (J. Allen Hynek, “A Daylight Disc in Hong Kong Harbor,” IUR 2, no. 8 (August 1977): wrap)
1953 — Evening. An Air Force pilot and a student are flying an F-84 Thunderjet on the home leg of a training flight over North Texas when the student notes an out-of-place light. At first the pilot thinks it’s Venus, but they realize it is moving. The student steers the plane toward the light, but it zooms past them at high speed. The pilot takes the stick and turns the aircraft to follow it. The light, which now looks like a metallic domed disc with windows, passes them again. The pilot accelerates to more than 500 mph and pursues it; the disc roars past them again. The chase goes on for 10–15 minutes until a final pass when the object shines a bright light into the cockpit. The pilot takes an evasive measure and flies back to base. (CUFOS case file)
1953 — Fred P. Stone founds the Australian Flying Saucer Club in Adelaide, South Australia. It later becomes the Australian Flying Saucer Research Society and publishes the Australian Saucer Record from 1955 to 1963. From 1962 to 1971, it publishes Panorama. (Australian Saucer Record 1, no. 2 (2nd Quarter, 1955); Panorama 1, no. 1
(1962))
January — Beams of microwaves, varying between 2.5 and 4 gigahertz, from Soviet sources aimed at the US embassy in Moscow are first detected, increasing in intensity by 1975. Detected by routine background radiation testing, the beams come from a source in a Soviet apartment building about 325 feet west of the embassy, affecting the west façade of the central building, with highest intensities between the third and eighth floors. The microwave transmissions are only five microwatts per square centimeter, well below the power level of microwave ovens and well below what would be needed to heat anything. Shielding is put in place by 1964, but the discovery is kept secret. (Wikipedia, “Moscow Signal”; J. Mark Elwood, “Microwaves in the Cold War: The Moscow Embassy Study and Its Interpretation,” Environmental Health 11 (2012))
January 1 — 8:45 p.m. While driving on Hwy 91 between Craig and Wolf Creek, Montana, Warner E. Anderson, manager of a photo shop with wartime air spotter experience; Mrs. Greta C. Wills, manager of women’s apparel store; and teenager Marlene Wills see a saucer-shaped object above horizon about 5 miles away to the southwest. The object is an estimated 25–40 feet long and 6–8 or 18–25 feet thick and looks like two soup bowls joined at the rims. It has a red glowing bottom and portholes. The object dives low over the Missouri River to within 150–300 feet away then climbs fast horizontally at an estimated 3,600 mph to the northeast. (NICAP, “The 1953 UFO Chronology”; Sparks, p. 188)
January 3 — The 4602d Air Intelligence Service Squadron (AISS) is created at Ent AFB [now the US Olympic Training Center] in Colorado Springs, Colorado, by Air Defense Command Regulation AFR 24-4. One of its missions is to
collect physical UFO evidence. (Brian Skow and Terry Endres, “The 4602d Air Intelligence Service Squadron and UFOs,” IUR 20, no. 5 (Winter 1995): 9)
January 6 — 1:05 a.m. The 147th AC&W Squadron at Duncanville, Texas, is notified by the CAA at Meacham Field [now Fort Worth Meacham International Airport] about a UFO northeast of Dallas. Tinker AFB in Oklahoma City reports a radar target 20 miles southwest of Paris, Texas. An arrowhead-shaped UFO with green and white lights is seen by some witnesses in the Dallas area. (NICAP, “Arrow-Shaped Object Tracked at 600 Knots”; “‘Flying Arrowhead’ Seen over Dallas: ‘Not a Star or Plane,’” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 6, 1953, p. 1; Sparks, p. 188)
January 8 — 7:15–7:30 a.m. USAF ADC 82nd Fighter Interceptor Squadron personnel at Larson AFB [now Grant County International Airport], Moses Lake, Washington, all on the ground, see a green, disc-shaped object about the size of large weather balloon flying to the southwest. It has a vertical bobbing motion and makes sideways movements at about 8,000 feet below scattered clouds. It moves away against the wind until it disappears in the distance. The object is also observed by base personnel at Ephrata, Washington. An F-94 is scrambled at 7:43 a.m. and searches for 30 minutes, but the UFO is gone. (NICAP, “The 1953 UFO Chronology”; Sparks, p. 188; James E. McDonald, “Statement on Unidentified Flying Objects,” in Symposium on Unidentified Flying Objects, Hearings, US House Committee on Science and Astronautics, 90th Cong., 2nd Sess., July 29, 1968, pp. 50–51)
January 8 — 10:20 p.m. A triangular object with a brilliant reddish glow is seen for 10 minutes at Mosgiel, New Zealand. It fades, then reappears with a rising and falling motion, accompanied by a small white light. (“The New Zealand Sightings,” Flying Saucer News, no. 1 (Spring 1953): 8)
January 9 — Howard C. Cross, a senior staff member at Battelle, writes a letter to Col. Miles E. Goll of ATIC, arguing that “agreement between Project Stork [Battelle’s study] and ATIC should be reached as to what can and what cannot be discussed at the meeting in Washington on January 14–16.” He suggests a “controlled experiment” be undertaken by USAF to obtain physical data. This would consist of “observation posts with complete visual skywatch, with radar and photographic coverage, plus all other instruments necessary or helpful in obtaining positive and reliable data on everything in the air over the area.” The suggestion is that “Many different types of aerial activity should be secretly and purposefully scheduled within the area,” meaning that the Air Force would release balloons to generate spurious UFO phenomena. The memo is a desperate effort to buy time for Battelle to finish its statistical analysis. Jacques Vallée speculates that this letter by Cross (to whom Vallée assigns the pseudonym “Pentacle”) could have led to the military setting up artificial UFO waves and simulated cases in selected areas; however, this is clearly not the case, as Jennie Zeidman and Mark Rodeghier elaborately demonstrate in IUR. (H. C. Cross letter to Miles E. Goll, January 9, 1952; NICAP, “The ‘Pentacle Memorandum,’ Including Text of Correspondence with Dr. Jacques Vallee,” August 17, 1993; Hynek, The UFO Experience, Ballantine ed., 1974, p. 191; The Hynek UFO Report, p. 21; Jacobs, The UFO Controversy, Signet ed., 1976, p.
79; Jacques Vallée, Forbidden Science, North Atlantic, 1992, p. 428; Clark III 1214–1215; Thomas Tulien, ed., Proceedings of the Sign Historical Group UFO History Workshop, Sign Historical Group, November 2001, p. 48; Jennie Zeidman, “I Remember Blue Book,” IUR 16, no. 2 (Mar./Apr. 1991): 7–12, 23; Jennie Zeidman and Mark Rodeghier, “The Pentacle Letter and the Battelle UFO Project,” IUR 18, no. 3 (May/June 1993): 4–12, 19–21)
January 9 — The CIA/OSI attempts to get Walter Bedell Smith’s approval for “two series” of scientific panels in January and February, which would buy some time, but the suggestion is rejected. (Clark III 1014)
January 9 — Radio station KVET in Kerrville, Texas, blames a 75-second interruption in its operation on a red-orange oval object seen by four junior high school students over the city at the same time. Ivan Young, 13, and Edgar Rasmussen, 14, see the object fly in from the west, circle, and disappear to the north. They see two fins on its end shooting out red and green flames. It is making a buzzing noise. KVET engineer Britt Lamb says the radio interference is the weirdest he has ever seen—heavy static “with a roar that traveled up and down the scale.” (“Fiery Object Jams Radio at Kerrville,” Fort Worth (Tex.) Star-Telegram, January 10, 1953, p. 2; Schopick, pp. 78–79)
January 9 — 6:50 p.m. An F-94 makes radar contact with a UFO at a range of about 13.5 miles over Misawa Air Base, Honshu, Japan. The radar locks on at 15,000 feet and contact is broken at a range of 600 feet. The radar observer reports unusual interference on the set throughout the mission, but the set appears to be operative both before and after. The radar contact lasts approximately 2 minutes. (NICAP, “F-94 Radar/Visual of Rotating UFO”; Sparks, p. 189)
January 9 — 7:27 p.m. B-29 copilot 1st Lt. Charles C. Loveless sees a V-formation of bluish-white lights approaching his aircraft over Santa Ana, California. Pilot 1st Lt. Lowell D. Brandt turns to avoid them. (NICAP, “B-29 Bomber Crew Watch V-Formation”; UFOEv, p. 21)
January 10 — 4:45 p.m. Retired Air Force Col. Robert McNab and a Mr. Hunter of the Federal Security Agency see a flat object to the northwest of their location 8 miles west of Sonoma, California. It is traveling about 2,400 mph and
makes three 360° right turns in 2–3 seconds each in about 1/8 the radius required for jets (about 1/4 mile) and two abrupt 90° turns to the right and left, each turn 5 seconds apart. It almost stops, accelerates to its original high speed, almost stops again, speeds up again, and finally flies out of sight vertically. (NICAP, “Flat Object at 2,400 MPH”; Sparks, p. 189)
January 12 — 1:00 p.m. Maurício Ramos is driving on grassy terrain near Santana dos Montes, Minas Gerais, Brazil, when he sees a luminous, metallic disc smaller than a Volkswagen hovering 6 feet from the ground. He approaches to within 6 feet of it, and a door opens. Two entitles shorter than 5 feet tall, wearing lead-colored clothing with shiny balls fitted to the shoes, jump out. Ramos thinks they invite him aboard, but he does not answer because he is getting an increasingly severe headache as he watches. When the headache goes away, the disc and creatures have disappeared. (“Pesquisas sobre Tripulantes de DV,” Boletim SBEDV, no. 55/59 (1967): 1– 2, 8–9; Brazil 25–26)
January 14 — 9:30 a.m. The opening meeting of the Robertson Panel convenes in the OSI conference room at CIA Building “M” in Washington, D.C. Present are scientists Howard P. Robertson, Samuel A. Goudsmit, Luis Walter Alvarez, and Thornton Leigh Page. CIA members Philip Grandin Strong, Lt. Col. Frederick C. E. Oder, David B. Stevenson, and Frederick C. Durant are also present. All are skeptical, if not openly hostile to UFO reports. Page later says that “H. P. Robertson told us in the first private (no outsiders) session that our job was to reduce public concern and show that UFO reports could be explained by conventional reasoning.” The panel first reviews the CIA OSI study from August, the ATIC November 21 meeting, the December 4 IAC decision, the visit to ATIC by Chadwell and Robertson, and CIA concern over potential national security dangers. They watch the Montana and Utah films. Lt. Robert S. Neasham and Harry Woo of the Navy Photo Interpretation Laboratory report on their analyses of both films, which conclude that the objects are unidentified. Ruppelt speaks for 40 minutes on the Blue Book method of UFO investigation. It is possibly here that he first suggests using 4602nd AISS field units to conduct Blue Book field investigations. The meeting adjourns at 5:15 p.m. (Frederick C. Durant, “Report of Meetings of Scientific Advisory Panel on Unidentified Flying Objects, January 14–18, 1953,” memorandum for Assistant Director for Scientific Intelligence, February 16, 1953; Clark III 1014–1015; Michael D. Swords, “Dr.
Robertson Requests the Honor of Your Attendance,” IUR 20, no. 4 (July/Aug. 1995): 16–20; Good Above, pp. 335–339; Swords 188–192)
January 15 — The second day of the Robertson Panel. Ruppelt completes his presentation, then Hynek discusses Battelle’s Project Stork. The CIA shows a film of seagulls in flight. Lt. Col. Oder gives a 40-minute presentation on Project Twinkle. In the afternoon, Gen. William M. Garland states his desire to increase the use of thoroughly briefed USAF intelligence officers to investigate UFO reports, declassify as many reports as possible, and enlarge Blue Book. Other USAF representatives discuss the difficulties of setting up instrument watches to monitor sightings. (Frederick C. Durant, “Report of Meetings of Scientific Advisory Panel on Unidentified Flying Objects, January 14–18, 1953,” memorandum for Assistant Director for Scientific Intelligence, February 16, 1953; O’Connell 87–89; Clark III 1015; Michael D. Swords, “Dr. Robertson Requests the Honor of Your Attendance,” IUR 20, no. 4 (July/Aug. 1995): 16–20)
January 16 — The third day of the Robertson Panel. Hynek speaks again, followed by Maj. Dewey Fournet, who talks about his motion studies of UFOs that indicate controlled flight. Physicist Lloyd Berkner joins the panel in the afternoon. In the afternoon, panel members talk about conclusions they have reached, and Robertson agrees to draft a report for review (although it has already been written by Durant prior to the meetings, which Fournet has suspected). (Frederick C. Durant, “Report of Meetings of Scientific Advisory Panel on Unidentified Flying Objects, January 14–18, 1953,” memorandum for Assistant Director for Scientific Intelligence, February 16, 1953; O’Connell 87–89; Clark III 1015; Michael D. Swords, “Dr. Robertson Requests the Honor of Your Attendance,” IUR 20, no. 4 (July/Aug. 1995): 16–20)
January 17 — The final day of the Robertson Panel. The panel reviews Robertson’s draft report (Berkner has already seen it) and puts it into final form. (By 11:00 a.m., both CIA Director Walter Bedell Smith and Gen. John A. Samford have seen and approved the draft.) The scientists agree that since most sightings can be explained, the rest can be accounted for with further investigation, which is a “great waste of effort.” They reject Fournet’s UFO reports as “raw” and “unevaluated.” The Montana film is said to depict aircraft. They reject the Navy analysis of the Utah film, calling the objects “high reflectivity of seagulls in bright sunlight.” Because the “mass receipt of low-grade reports [tends] to overload channels of communication with material quite irrelevant to hostile objects that might some day appear” (a phony issue invented by Thornton Page), the Air Force should embark on a debunking campaign that would “result in reduction of public interest in flying saucers” with the help of scientific pronouncements (suggested by Hynek) and media, including Walt Disney Inc. animated cartoons. Blue Book should be expanded to 18 staff members (it has 5) so that it can educate and debunk effectively, but this never happens. Civilian UFO groups such as CSI and APRO should be watched “because of their potentially great
influence on mass thinking if widespread sightings should occur. The apparent irresponsibility and the possible use of such groups for subversive purposes should be kept in mind.” The panel and report are kept classified until a brief summary is declassified in 1958, and the CIA’s involvement is kept secret until 1966. (Frederick C. Durant, “Report of Meetings of Scientific Advisory Panel on Unidentified Flying Objects, January 14–18, 1953,” memorandum for Assistant Director for Scientific Intelligence, February 16, 1953; Clark III 1014–1016 ; Michael
D. Swords, “Dr. Robertson Requests the Honor of Your Attendance,” IUR 20, no. 4 (July/Aug. 1995): 16–20; Swords 192–200)
January 17 — 3:55 p.m. Geologist/salesman John Townsend Sackett is riding in a bus with about a dozen passengers near Guatemala City, Guatemala, when he observes a brilliant greenish-gold object, shaped like the Goodyear blimp. It is later described as being about twice the size of a DC-3. The object is traveling at about 400 mph straight and level in a northwesterly direction at about 6,500 feet. It almost stops in mid-flight then rises vertically about 1,500 feet, hovers for about 2 seconds, then immediately resumes flight at a new altitude. The object is lost to view because of intervening terrain. (NICAP, “Blimp-Like Object Sighted by Geologist”; Sparks, p. 189)
January 18 — Upon Hynek’s return to Ohio State University from the Robertson Panel, he and his new research assistant Jennie Zeidman come up with the name “Project Henry” to describe his consultancy with the Air Force. It is based on the Flit bug-spray advertisement that has a woman saying, “Quick, Henry, the Flit!” About once a week, a courier from Battelle arrives at Hynek’s office with a manila envelope stuffed with teletype UFO reports for him to examine. Hynek travels to the Blue Book facility in Building 263 at Wright-Patterson about 2–3 times a month, with Zeidman sometimes accompanying him, (Jennie Zeidman, “I Remember Blue Book,” IUR 16, no. 2 (Mar./Apr. 1991): 7–12, 23)
January 20 — Robertson writes a letter to Chadwell, saying “perhaps that’ll take care of the Forteans for a while” and mentions an upcoming meeting with the “NSA group” on February 5. (Swords 189)
January 20 — Dwight D. Eisenhower is sworn in as president. ()
January 24 — Ruppelt travels to Ent AFB [now the US Olympic Training Center] in Colorado Springs, Colorado, to brief the 4602nd AISS on how they might help Blue Book investigate UFOs. He also puts in for a transfer to Air Defense Command here. ()
January 26 — Air Force Press Officer Albert M. Chop writes a letter to Keyhoe’s publisher Henry Holt & Co., declaring that all the sighting reports he is using for his upcoming Flying Saucers from Outer Space were cleared and made available to him from Air Technical Intelligence records. (Albert E. Chop, Letter to Henry Holt & Company, January 26, 1953; Good Above, p. 542)
January 28 — 1:06 p.m. R. W. Love and a Mr. Ferrenti, while engaged in retrieving radio-controlled drones on a boat 1,100 yards offshore and south of Naval Air Station Point Mugu [now Naval Base Ventura County] near Oxnard, California, see a white, flat disc with fuzzy or shimmering edges rapidly approach from the northwest flying straight and level, overtake a jet aircraft, pass overhead, and disappear in the haze to the east. (NICAP, “Flat Disc Observed Overtaking Jet”; Sparks, p. 190)
January 28 — 2:20 p.m. Northrop Aircraft test pilot Rex Hardy Jr. is flying over Malibu, California, when he and two other crew members see a formation of four UFOs the size of a B-36. They are circular in shape, aluminum- colored, and flying at 1,200 mph. (Lorenzen, UFOs: The Whole Story, Signet, 1969, p. 50)
January 28 — A Maj. Geyer at Mitchel AFB [now closed] near Uniondale, New York, investigates reports of a UFO seen by both civilian and military witnesses. The UFO is an oval object glowing with different colors and having a tail or projection. He quickly concludes that it is a meteor and submits a report to Blue Book. However, one of the witnesses, author Marie Armstrong Essipoff (Ben Hecht’s first wife), later writes to Keyhoe saying that she had told Geyer that the object wobbled and it had a turret on top. She draws a picture and Geyer says it looks like one of their flight simulators. But it’s “still a meteor,” he says. (Swords 199–200)
January 28 — 9:00 p.m. The control tower at Marine Corps Air Station El Toro [now closed], California, spots a large, luminous, red object and asks Maj. Harvey N. Patton to give chase. He pursues it from Newport Beach to Long Beach and has it in sight for 3–4 minutes but is unable to gain on it. (NICAP, “Marine Fighter Asked to Check on Amber Object”)
January 28 — 9:40 p.m. Maj. Hal W. Lamb, USAF senior pilot at Moody AFB in Valdosta, Georgia, apparently sees the setting planet Venus (although this is disputed) changing color and shape while flying a T-33 (or an F-86). It is also seen by Turner AFB [now Naval Air Station Albany] tower operators in Albany [not Dobbins Air Reserve Base in Marietta], Georgia (with time errors of about 10 minutes). About the same time, two GCA radar maintenance men at Turner AFB radar track three moving targets and a stationary target. At 10:10 p.m., the GCA reports two stationary targets at 17 and 27 miles, both 300° azimuth. No visual confirmation, though binoculars are used. (NICAP, “Several Radar Contacts”; Sparks, p. 191; Loren E. Gross, UFOs, a History: 1953, January– March, The Author, 1988, p. 66; Marler 129–130)
January 29 — Ruppelt still thinks that the Robertson Panel has accepted Garland’s recommendation to expand Blue Book (it hasn’t) and that its education and debunking recommendation means that UFO information should be released to the public (it didn’t). Fournet, Chop, and Col. Teabert (Kenneth E. Thiebaud?) of AFOIN-2 think the same. In Washington, Ruppelt hears that the press has heard rumors about the Utah film, and he decides to release it, focusing on the seagull explanation. (The Hynek UFO Report, p. 236)
January 29 — A briefing of the Office of Naval Estimates Board by the CIA on UFOs includes the showing of the Utah and Montana films. (Frederick C. Durant, “Briefing of ONE Board on Unidentified Flying Objects,” January 30, 1953)
January 29 — 9:55 a.m. A small gray oval-shaped object is seen between Houlton and Chatham, Maine, by 2nd Lt. Fred
T. Goetting Jr., pilot of an F-94B. Goetting points out the object to his radar observer, Lt. Howard C. Kelley. The object appears to be 10° above the F-94B, which is at 23,000 feet. Goetting attempts to intercept the object at a speed of 0.8 Mach. This chase continues for 8 minutes without the F-94 gaining, and the chase is broken off because of low fuel. The object is seen by at least two fighter aircraft from other squadrons. (NICAP, “Gray Oval Sighted by 3 Fighter Aircraft”; Sparks, p. 191)
January 29 — 11:30 p.m. A farmer named Lloyd C. Booth just north of Conway, South Carolina, hears a commotion of animals, grabs his .22 revolver, and sees an oblong-shaped, lighted object 10 feet above the trees moving slowly or hovering, with a low humming sound. He shoots at the object twice. The first bullet bounces off with a metallic sound; at the second shot the object tilts slightly and ascends at a 65° angle to the west at 600–700 mph and disappears. One of his cows had died the previous evening. (NICAP, “Man Fires 0.22 at Hovering Object”; Sparks, p. 191; “Conway S.C. Man Shoots Saucer,” APRO Bulletin 1, no. 5 (March 15, 1953): 1, 4–5; Donald E. Keyhoe and Gordon I. R. Lore Jr., Strange Effects from UFOs, NICAP, 1969, pp. 64–66)
January 29 — 2:20 p.m. Northrup test pilot Rex Hardy Jr., test pilot Chester Mathews, and Northrup photographer Jim Wilkinson see four metallic, disc-shaped object the size of a B-36 flying in squadron formation over Malibu Beach, California. They estimate their height as 20,000 feet and speed as 1,200 mph. They watch for about 5 minutes. (NICAP, “Four B-36-Sized Discs Observed by 3-Man Crew”)
January 31 — Project Blue Book issues its Status Report #9. (US Air Force, Projects Grudge and Blue Book Reports 1– 12, NICAP, 1968, pp. 155–174)
February — Albert K. Bender appoints Gray Barker as IFSB’s chief investigator. (“IFSB Forms Dept. of Investigation,”
Space Review 2, no. 2 (April 1953): 1; Clark III 189)
February 1 — 9:30 p.m. A T-33 flying 10 miles west of Terre Haute, Indiana, sights a close group of moving lights changing color from red to blue, to green to yellow. The pilot estimates their altitude to range between 15,000 feet to 30,000 feet flying in a manner similar to conventional aircraft. Searchlights from the St. Louis, Missouri, area seem to be following the unidentified lights. (NICAP, “T-33 Pilot Observes Unidentified Lights”)
February 3 — 8:00 p.m. George Hunt Williamson and his wife Betty Jane watch two UFOs near the ground from their home on Brookside Boulevard in Prescott, Arizona. Another UFO passes over the house at 10:00 p.m. (Zirger and Martinelli, The Incredible Life of George Hunt Williamson, Verdechiari, 2016, pp. 363–364)
February 4 — 1:50 p.m. US Weather Bureau observer Stanley H. Brown in Yuma, Arizona, tracks with a theodolite a white, oblong object. It is surrounded by a thin white mist and flies straight up and levels off. After 20 seconds, the object is joined by a second one that flies away twice and returns. Both are lost to sight behind clouds to the south-southwest. The sighting lasts 5 minutes. (NICAP, “Theodolite Tracking of Two Elliptical Objects”; Sparks, p. 191; James E. McDonald, “Statement on Unidentified Flying Objects,” in Symposium on Unidentified Flying Objects, Hearings, US House Committee on Science and Astronautics, 90th Cong., 2nd Sess., July 29, 1968, pp. 62–63)
February 6 — 1:34 a.m. A B-36 aircraft piloted by Maj. Leo J. Moffatt is over Rosalia, Washington, when he sees one round white omnidirectional light at an altitude of approximately 7,000 feet on a southeast course, circling and rising as it proceeds. It is visually observed for a period of 3–5 minutes. The B-36 makes a 180° descending turn toward the light, which is estimated to be moving at a speed of 170–230 mph. Blue Book explains it as a weather balloon launched from Geiger Field [now Spokane International Airport]. (NICAP, “B-36 Encounters Light at 7,000ʹ”; Sparks, p. 192; James E. McDonald, “Statement on Unidentified Flying Objects,” in Symposium on Unidentified Flying Objects, Hearings, US House Committee on Science and Astronautics, 90th Cong., 2nd Sess., July 29, 1968, pp. 67–68)
February 7 — 9:22 p.m. A USAF F-94 crew and other witnesses near Nemuro, Hokkaido, Japan, see a bright orange object change color to red and green at intervals and disappear behind a cloud. It is also tracked by ground radar. (NICAP, “F-94 Crew in Air and Ground Radar Tracking”; Condon, p. 122; Sparks, p. 192)
February 9 — Al Chop has written a press release on the Utah film with the approval of Capt. Harry B. Smith of AFOIN. They decide to also release the USAF (possible aircraft) and Navy (self-luminous or light sources) analyses,
otherwise the press might suspect a cover-up. The release would state that, although no positive identification has been made, further analysis will result in an identification. Gen. Garland approves the release, which then goes on to the Pentagon, which “screamed ‘No!’” Ruppelt is ordered into silence. Chop says the CIA “killed the whole program. We’ve been ordered to work up a national debunking campaign, planting articles in magazines and arranging broadcasts to make UFO reports seem like poppycock.” Ruppelt tells Keyhoe that Blue Book must even discredit USAF pilots who report UFOs. “It’s a raw deal, but we can’t buck the CIA.” (Ruppelt, p. 228; Keyhoe, Aliens from Space, Signet ed., 1974, pp. 70–71; The Hynek UFO Report, pp. 236–237)
February 9 — CIA agent Hayden Channing writes a memo to the Domestic Contact Division describing a recent [late January?] public meeting of the Civilian Saucer Investigation group in Los Angeles, California. North American Aviation project engineer Walther A. Riedel is a member of the organization, and he describes the analyses of the UFO reports it receives. Only about 25 sightings are unidentified, and these they forward to Project Blue Book.
Channing writes: “Apparently, an eye and interest are also directed to the USSR for reactions to sightings as reported in the PRAVDA.” (Hayden Channing, “California Committee for Saucer Investigation,” February 9, 1953)
February 11 (or 19) — 10:00 p.m. At the Naval Auxiliary Air Station [now Northeastern Regional Airport] in Edenton, North Carolina, Marine 1st Lt. Edward Balocco is on intercept stand-by duty when the alert whistle goes off. Minutes later he is in his F9F Panther jet heading north to Virginia Beach, Virginia, while being vectored to an unknown target by the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point in Havelock, North Carolina. By the time he gets close to the target, it has disappeared from radar at Norfolk, Virginia. After searching the area for 15 minutes, he heads back for fuel. Flying south at 20,000 feet, he notices a light below him on the port side on or near the ocean. After turning his navigation lights back on, he notices that the light has risen to his altitude and is only 2,000 feet away. Closing in on it, he sees it is a disc with blinking red lights. At 350 feet away, his cockpit is bathed in blue-white light and everything seems motionless and silent. He looks at his gloved hand and he can see the bones in his hand like an X-ray. Suddenly there is a flash, and the UFO breaks away as sound and motion return. Balocco tries to pursue it again unsuccessfully. Captain Thomas Riggs, whose F9F Panther has also been scrambled, reports the UFO is moving south along the North Carolina coast. He is debriefed and told not to mention the incident. (“Cherry Point, N.C.,” APRO Bulletin 1, no. 5 (March 15, 1953): 9–10; Good Need, pp. 183–184; Shoot 60–61)
Mid-February — Weapons engineer Chester W. Lytle Sr., deputy director of operations for SAC’s Eighth Air Force Headquarters, is visiting Eielson AFB near Moose Creek, Alaska, with Gen. William H. Blanchard when he finds out his wife is about to give birth in Chicago, Illinois. Blanchard offers to personally fly him in a bomber to an air force base in Illinois so he can get home quickly. During the long flight, their conversation turns to UFOs.
Blanchard unexpectedly mentions the 1947 Roswell incident and that a crashed alien spacecraft had indeed been recovered. He tells Lytle that four dead humanoid beings had been aboard. (Nukes 478–481)
February 23 — Project Stork’s William T. Reid writes to Miles E. Goll at Wright-Patterson AFB in Ohio, saying that UFO reports have been processed through October 15, 1952, and evaluations completed for reports through July 31, 1952. (“Seven Status Reports for Project Stork, Part 4 of 4 Parts,” CUFON)
February 25— Pentagon press officer Albert M. Chop writes to Maj. Donald E. Keyhoe and verifies that the files on 41 cases investigated by the Air Force for his upcoming book Flying Saucers from Outer Space were indeed cleared for release by ATIC. (Albert M. Chop, Letter to Donald E. Keyhoe, February 25, 1953; NICAP, “The Chop Clearance List”)
February 25 — Project Second Storey meets for the last known time, chaired by astrophysicist Peter M. Millman of the Dominion Observatory in Ottawa, Ontario, and consisting of military and intelligence officers, as well as Wilbert Smith. It concludes that, because details of most sightings cannot be adequately confirmed, UFO reports do not lend themselves to a “scientific method of investigation.” It determines that UFOs do not require a Canadian armed forces investigation, but reports should still be sent to the Directorate of Scientific Intelligence. (“Wilbert
B. Smith,” Northern Ontario UFO Research and Study; Chris Rutkowski and Geoff Dittman, The Canadian UFO Report, Dundurn Press, 2006, p. 229; Good Above, p. 182; Story, p. 276)
Late February — ADC commander Benjamin Chidlaw at Ent AFB [now US Olympic Training Center] near Colorado Springs, Colorado, tells future UFO researcher Robert C. Gardner that he has “stacks of reports about flying saucers. We take them seriously when you consider we have lost many men and planes trying to intercept them.” (Stringfield, 3-0 Blue, p. 91; Stringfield, Situation Red, Fawcett Crest, 1977, pp. 137–138)
February 27 — Project Blue Book issues its Status Report #10, classified “secret.” (US Air Force, Projects Grudge and Blue Book Reports 1–12, NICAP, 1968, pp. 175–198)
February 28 — Capt. Edward J. Ruppelt transfers out of Blue Book for a seven-month assignment in Denver, Colorado.
He is replaced by Lt. Robert M. Olsson, who has one staff member. (Ruppelt, p. 228)
March — 10:00 a.m. Pilot Howard C. Strand is flying a routine patrol mission in a F-94B out of Selfridge AFB [now Selfridge Air National Guard Base] near Mount Clemens, Michigan, when he is asked to check out a radar target over downtown Detroit. He and his radar operator see tiny specks that seem to be a ragged formation of aircraft. As he approaches, he cannot see any wings or tails. Ground radar has the UFOs as “good, strong targets.” Strand looks at his instruments briefly and when he looks up the objects are gone, though ground radar tracks them another 4 minutes. Gordon Thayer calls it an inferior mirage. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1953 March–July, Supplemental Notes, The Author, 2002, pp. 24–26; Condon, pp. 151–153)
March — Harvard University astronomer Donald H. Menzel publishes Flying Saucers, in which he explains all UFO sightings as known phenomena such as mirages and temperature inversions. It is the first book-length argument against UFOs, one of the few published by an academic institution, and the first UFO book by a scientist. ATIC personnel are displeased that Menzel has used a few classified reports supplied to him for an examination of patterns, which he has never produced. However, he has an imaginative vision of what Venus looks like, with “warm seas” in which life teems. (Donald H. Menzel, Flying Saucers, Harvard University, 1953; Getty Images, “Dr. Donald H. Menzel, Harvard Professor and Native Denverite, Refers to His Book,” March 13, 1953; Clark III 742)
March — Gen. John A. Samford is interviewed in See magazine and provides straightforward, factual answers about Project Blue Book, UFOs, and the inadequacy of Menzel’s theories. He claims the view of the Air Force is that “many credible people have seen incredible things.” (Swords 210–211)
March 3 — 1:25 p.m. USAF Capt. Roderick D. Thompson, 3600th Fighter Training Group out of Luke AFB near Glendale, Arizona, is an instructor pilot flying an F-84 at 25,000 feet over Blythe, California. He spots am object 300–500 feet wide leaving a contrail crossing his path from left to right at about 35,000–45,000 feet at about 400 mph. It is visible only by condensation vapor emitted from its manta-ray shaped flat surface. Student pilots flying two F-84s, Lt. Jack
E. Brasher and Lt. Thomas W. Hale, also see the object but do not follow in pursuit. When Thompson turns to pursue it, the object makes a slight dipping turn to the northwest and begins climbing at about 20°. It appears to be very thin and immediately begins to form a heavy condensation trail behind it for roughly 1,000 feet and splits in two. Thompson reaches 30,000 feet and closes to within roughly 5–10 miles to a point over the Colorado River north of Parker Dam on the Arizona border. He takes 151 frames of gun camera film of object with a 16 mm N-9 camera, apparently at 16 fps 1/40 second exposure setting. (NICAP, “Three F-94 Pilots Encounter Manta-Ray, Gun Camera Shots”; Sparks, p. 194; Swords 213–214)
March 5 — Brig. Gen. Woodbury M. Burgess, commander at Ent AFB [now the US Olympic Training Center] in Colorado Springs, Colorado, sends a memo to Air Defense Command and the director of intelligence at Ent suggesting that field teams of 4602nd personnel interview UFO witnesses. (Maj. Robert C. Brown, “Utilisation of 4602nd AISS Personnel in Project Blue Book Field Investigations,” March 5, 1953; Kevin D. Randle, “UFO Coverup: The Early Days,” A Different Perspective, June 20, 2011)
March 8 — Journalist Peter H. Wyden’s interview with Ruppelt appears in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Ruppelt tells him that Project Blue Book “has no evidence of any of these objects being anything other than misinterpretation of known objects…. We can’t say positively because our data isn’t good enough. But we’re not worried.” The lengthy article provides a good overview of Blue Book’s investigations and staff of seven, including Ruppelt’s assistants Lt. Anderson G. Flues and Max Futch. (Peter Wyden, “They’re Still Chasing Flying Saucers,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 8, 1953, p. 1G)
March 8 — 9:02 p.m. Physics teacher Leigh Van Etten, two other teachers, and 10 students at Kents Hill School, Maine, watch a big red ball of fire moving west-northwest for 12 minutes before it disappears beyond the horizon. He estimates it is about 40–60 miles away. (Jennie Zeidman, “I Remember Blue Book,” IUR 16, no. 2 (Mar./Apr. 1991): 10)
March 14 — 11:43 p.m. Lt. Robert J. Wooten is flying a Navy P2V-5 antisubmarine plane over the Sea of Japan northwest of Nishinoshima, Japan, when he encounters an “electrifying display” of groups of 5–10 colored lights, totaling 90–100, slowly moving to the left side of the aircraft at a range of 3–7 miles and maintaining an extremely precise formation. Some of the objects are also tracked on radar. A 1955 RAND report falsely attributes this to an armada of 100 MiG-15 fighter aircraft (actually only 11) that menaced four US Navy Panther jets from the carrier USS Oriskany, but this earlier incident took place on November 18, 1952, resulting in damage to one of the MiGs. (NICAP, “Groups of Lights / IFF Signals”; Clark III 53–59; Sparks, p. 195; Swords 214)
March 15 — The International Flying Saucer Bureau declares today World Contact Day and calls upon the UFO occupants to make a public appearance on earth. (Albert K. Bender, FS and the Three Men, Saucerian, 1962)
March 17 — An FBI agent and two AFOSI officers interview George Adamski and ask him to draft a statement saying that neither the FBI nor Air Force has approved material used in his speeches. (Loren E. Gross, UFOs, a History: 1953, March–July, The Author, 1989, pp. 4–5; Clark III 44)
March 18 — Ohio Northern University’s Project A reports that UFOs are usually disc-shaped, silent, and fast-moving. “Our major conclusion to date is that no one explanation fits all sightings, and about 20% of all the sightings definitely fit the category of unnatural phenomena.” (Loren E. Gross, UFOs, a History: 1953, March–July, The Author, 1989, pp. 15, 18)
March 22 — 2:00 a.m. Sara Shaw and Jan Whitley, who share an isolated one-bedroom cabin in the forest around Tujunga Canyon north of Burbank, California, wake up when an odd light shines through the window. An eerie silence falls over the cabin and neighboring forest. They get out of bed but feel paralyzed. Then suddenly and inexplicably, it is 4:20 a.m. Shaw, who was originally kneeling on the bed, is now sitting on it with her feet on the floor. The two women flee the cabin. As they run, they pass an apparition or “vaporous something” with the “head and shoulders of a long-haired” person. When they return to the cabin two days later, they feel a sense of dread. Shaw can remember nothing more and the two women move apart. In 1975 Shaw watches a UFO documentary that evokes some memories, and she contacts ufologist Ann Druffel. During three hypnotic regression sessions—December 5, 1975; February 26, 1976; and October 22, 1978—Shaw recalls her abduction by black-garbed aliens. She undergoes a physical examination and the aliens show her a cure for cancer. (Ann Druffel and D. Scott Rogo, The Tujunga Canyon Contacts, Prentice-Hall, 1980, updated in New American Library, 1989)
March 23 — Gen. Burgess’s 4602nd AISS plan is approved. It is seen as aiding ATIC and giving AISS personnel valuable experience in field interrogations and cooperating with other agencies (Kevin D. Randle, The Government UFO Files, Visible Ink, 2014, p. 249)
March 24 — The Upshot-Knothole Nancy nuclear test at Nevada Test Site Area 4 sends radioactive fallout on livestock across the region, including those grazing at Papoose Lake, Nevada. Sixteen horses and numerous cows belonging to local farmers, the Stewart brothers, die from acute radiation poisoning. The Army compensates them for the horses, but claim the cows died from Vitamin A deficiency. (Wikipedia, “Operation Upshot–Knothole”; Jacobsen, Area 51, p. 102)
Spring — After 12:00 noon. RAF Flight Lt. Cyril George Townsend-Withers is asked to test some new ECM radar equipment using an experimental English Electric Canberra aircraft. The jet has been stripped of all removable parts to make it as light as possible. With this modification, he is able to leave RAF Boscombe Down [now MoD Boscombe Down] in Wiltshire, England, and soar to 55,000 feet, then a record for the aircraft. Cruising over Salisbury Plain, Townsend-Withers picks up a blip on his screen. It shows an object traveling 5 miles behind him and maintaining a steady course. His immediate reaction is to curse the “anomalous propagation” effects that they have gone to so much trouble to avoid. However, he soon becomes aware that this was an image of something flying right behind them. The science officer goes up to the turret to take a look and sees, glinting in the sun or pouring out a fantastic amount of its own light, a round shape trailing in their wake. Townsend-Withers calls his pilot on the microphone and tells him that he can see an unknown and suggests trying to outpace it. They reach 260 mph but the thing cannot be shaken off, so the pilot executes a sweeping radius turn. As the Canberra comes around from its turn, the object comes into view dead ahead. For half a minute they are on a collision course, swiftly trying to calculate what to do next. The object is round like a thin disc, but with two small tailfins at the rear. It seems to be metallic and enormous, and it is simply sitting there waiting for them to fly right into it.
Suddenly, it flips vertically into the air and climbs upwards at an astonishing rate. Leaving no vapor trail, wake, or detectable sound, the object vanishes within just a couple of seconds. (NICAP, “Canberra Crew Encounters UFO / Radar/Visual”; Jenny Randles, “Collision Course,” IUR 27, no. 4 (Winter 2002–2003): 16–18; Jenny Randles, “Scramble, UFO! Part Three, The Team,” Fortean Times 388 (January 2020): 31)
April — Wilbert B. Smith is drafting a report on Project Magnet for the Canadian Department of Transport. He writes Keyhoe that their conclusion will probably be that UFOs are alien vehicles. (Clark III 1078)
April–June — The US Army Chemical Corps’ Dew II project involves the secret release of fluorescent particles (zinc cadmium sulfide) and plant spores (Lycopodium) from an aircraft over St. Louis, Missouri. (Minneapolis, Minnesota, was a previous target.) It only targets black ghetto sections of St. Louis and arranges for local police surveillance “to minimize the possibility of loss of equipment.” The Army reports “much less curiosity and interference” than Minneapolis. Dew II is described in a 1953 Army report that remains classified at the time of a 1997 report by the US National Research Council concerning the zinc cadmium sulfide dispersion program. (Leonard A. Cole, Clouds of Secrecy: The Army’s Germ Warfare Tests over Populated Areas, Rowman & Littlefield, 1988, pp. 63–65)
April 12 — 4:10 p.m. Ten round, flat, metallic objects changing formation are observed traveling at a high rate of speed at an estimated altitude of 7,500 feet over Sweetwater, Nevada. No trail, sound, or exhaust are noted. The objects pass under the right nacelle of the observers’ C-47 aircraft, which is en route to Stead AFB [now Reno Stead Airport]. The copilot takes control of the aircraft and turns to the right in a tight 300° turn for a better view. The objects are then picked up unassisted by two more members of the crew. The objects are seen in a right turn of a greater radius than that of the C-47 and at a lower altitude. They are observed for approximately 120° of their turn and disappear on a heading of 300°. Observers are unable to estimate the speed of the objects because of the distance and the large turn radius. (NICAP, “Ten Round Flat Objects Changing Formation”; Sparks, p. 197)
April 13 — The MKUltra project is launched on the order of CIA Director Allen Dulles and under the direction of Sidney Gottlieb. Its aim is to develop mind-controlling drugs for use against the Soviet bloc, largely in response to alleged Soviet, Chinese, and North Korean use of mind-control techniques on US prisoners of war in Korea. The project attempts to produce a perfect truth drug for use in interrogating suspected Soviet spies, and generally to explore any other possibilities of mind control. Another MKUltra effort, Subproject 54, is the Navy’s top secret “Perfect Concussion” program, which uses subaural frequency blasts to erase memory. However, the program is never carried out. Because most MKUltra records are deliberately destroyed in 1973 by order of then–CIA director Richard Helms, it is difficult, if not impossible, for investigators to gain a complete understanding of the more than 150 individually funded research subprojects sponsored by MKUltra and related CIA programs. A cache of some 20,000 documents survive Helms’s purge, as they are incorrectly stored in a financial-records building and discovered following a FOIA request in 1977. These documents are fully investigated during the Senate Hearings of 1977. (Wikipedia, “Project MKUltnra”; US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Project MKUltra, the CIA’s Program of Research in Behavioral Modification, 95th Congress, 1st Session, August 3, 1977; John D. Marks, The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate”: The CIA and Mind Control, Times Books, 1978; Jon Ronson, The Men Who Stare at Goats, Simon & Schuster, 2004; “Project MK-Ultra: The CIA’s Experiments with Mind Control,” ZazenLife.com, December 2011; Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control, Henry Holt, 2019)
April 14 — 9:23–11:50 p.m. A Navy P2V Neptune spy plane on an electronic intelligence (ELINT/ferret) mission over the Sea of Japan (about 200 miles southeast of Vladivostok, Russia) is paced and attacked by 10 agile and highly maneuverable UFOs. The encounter takes place with only 400 feet of distance between the aircraft and the sea. The objects make more than “70 aggressive non-firing passes” in “high-speed runs,” many just a few hundred feet directly underneath the Navy aircraft for just over an hour. The UFOs transmit Morse Code light signals (the letter “D”), an unprecedented occurrence in UFO history. The objects are tracked on radar and by the Navy’s ELINT systems (which pick up and analyze radar beams emitted from the objects) for almost two and a half hours. (NICAP, “Two Lights Flashing Morse Code Letter ‘D’”; Sparks, p. 198; Clark III 53–59)
April 16 — 3:45 p.m. The crew of a commercial Maritime Central airliner flying at 9,000 feet above Chatham, New Brunswick, watches a metallic disc approach their plane and pass underneath. (Chris Rutkowski, Canada’s UFOs: Declassified, August Night, 2022, pp. 64–67)
April 19 — 1:00 p.m. Four US Army reconnaissance observers (including pilot Lt. Julius T. Morgan, Lt. James O. Rymus, and Lt. Jack E. Myers) in two aircraft see a white, rounded, delta-shaped object 5–7 feet in diameter flying at 60–80 mph with a “vibrating” motion over Communist territory in Korea. An official G-2 Intelligence Report says the object is in the Old Baldy (Hill 266) and Pork Chop Hill areas. Radar supposedly tracks them also moving faster than sound (>767 mph). (NICAP, [news clippings]; Sparks, p. 199; Jennie Zeidman, “I Remember Blue Book,” IUR 16, no. 2 (Mar./Apr. 1991): 9)
April 23 — Gen. Charles P. Cabell becomes deputy director of the CIA. ()
April 23 — 3:00 p.m. Two witnesses in Iberville [now Saint-Jean-de-Richelieu], Quebec, see a disc the size of a car approach their house while they are eating dinner. It stops 250 feet above the Richelieu River a bit more than a half-mile away. The man runs outside for a better look and sees that it as a dome and is spinning as it hovers. After 15 seconds it flies to the southwest and disappears. (Chris Rutkowski, Canada’s UFOs: Declassified, August Night, 2022, pp. 65, 68–69, 151)
May — A flawed CAA report states the July 1952 Washington National Airport radar returns were weather targets. (Civil Aviation Authority, A Preliminary Study of Unidentified Targets Observed on Air Traffic Control, Technical Development Report 180, May 1953)
May — CIA Assistant Director H. Marshall Chadwell transfers chief responsibility for keeping abreast of UFOs to OSI’s Physics and Electronic Division. Todos M. Odarenko, chief of the division, does not want to take on the problem, saying it requires too much analytic and clerical time. Given the Robertson Panel findings, he proposes to call the project “inactive” and devote only one part-time analyst and a file clerk to maintain a reference file of activities of
USAF and other agencies on UFOs. (Gerald K. Haines, “CIA’s Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947–90,” Studies in Intelligence, 1997, p. 72)
May — The Air Force publishes, under the signatures of Chief of Staff Gen. Hoyt S. Vandenberg and Air Adjutant General Col. Kenneth E. Thiebaud, Air Force Manual 200-3, titled Handbook for Air Intelligence Officers. It is classified Restricted. Intended as a general guide for air intelligence officers conducting any type of investigation, the 6-page manual’s only illustration is of an Air Force plane accompanied by three flying saucers; the caption is “The Air Technical Intelligence center is responsible for the prevention of technological surprises.” It is discovered by Keyhoe in 1961 because someone forgot to reclassify the manual as Confidential in November 1953 when the Restricted classification is retired. (Department of the Air Force, Handbook for Air Intelligence Officers, Air Force Manual 200-3, May 1953, chapter 9, pp. 9-1–9-6; Keyhoe, Aliens from Space, Signet ed., 1974, p. 80)
May 1 — 11:35 p.m. USAF pilot Capt. R. L. Emberry and radar operator 1Lt J. R. Morin are flying an F-94 interceptor at 24,000 feet about 10 miles south of Goose Bay AFB [now CFB Goose Bay], Labrador. Both men and a control tower operator see a white light with a visible afterburner at 10,000 feet. The F-94 pursues it, both climbing to 40,000 feet, but the object climbs out of sight after 30 minutes. (NICAP, “Unidentified Evades Interception by F- 94”; Sparks, p. 199; Chris Rutkowski, Canada’s UFOs: Declassified, August Night, 2022, p. 262)
May 2 — BOAC Flight 783, a de Havilland Comet 1, crashes in a severe thundersquall six minutes after taking off from Calcutta-Dum Dum [now Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose International Airport], India, killing all 43 on board.
Witnesses observe the wingless Comet on fire plunging into the village of Jagalgori. A British aviation investigator, J. H. Lett, announces that the plane “collided with a fairly heavy body” and UFO rumors persist for about a year. However, leading investigators suspect structural failure. (Wikipedia, “de Havilland Comet”; Stringfield, Situation Red, Fawcett Crest, 1977, p, 141)
May 4 — 1:50 a.m. A witness sees a football-shaped, metallic object caught in the glare of a rotating beacon near Goose Bay AFB [now CFB Goose Bay], Labrador. It is traveling south at high speed and a low altitude, and disappears into low-hanging stratus clouds. She hears a sound “like tins striking together.” (Sparks, p. 199; Chris Rutkowski, Canada’s UFOs: Declassified, August Night, 2022, p. 262)
May 5 — 9:45 a.m. Chemist Wells Alan Webb is standing in a field near the Vacuum Cooling Company plant, not far from Spain Flying Field and about a mile north of Yuma AFB [now Marine Corps Air Station Yuma] near Yuma, Arizona, when he sees a fuzzy-white oblong object at an angle of 45° in the north. He observes it both with the naked eye and with Polaroid glasses with a greenish tint that he uses for cloud observations. It is about one-half the diameter of the full moon. After 5 minutes, the object moves to a position 30° eastward and suddenly becomes circular in appearance, becoming gradually smaller. Three concentric dark rings appear around the object, the largest about six times its diameter when viewed with Polaroid glasses. Webb thinks that the rings are the result of the rotation of polarized light scattered from the atmosphere (Faraday effect). (NICAP, “Polaroid Glasses Expose Concentric Circles around Disc”; Wells Alan Webb, Mars, the New Frontier: Lowell’s Hypothesis, Fearon, 1956, pp, 126–127; UFOEv, p. 51)
May 10 — 6:08 p.m. Capt. B. L. Jones is flying an Australian National Airways DC-3 just south of Mackay, Queensland.
He radios the local control tower that a “strange object like a lighted glass dome” is maneuvering around his plane. He and his copilot watch the object for about 5 minutes during which time it climbs and dives at a speed of 200–700 mph. Finally, it crosses the path of the aircraft and disappears swiftly to the west. A Mr. W. Overell, the officer in charge at Mackay tower, sees the light climbing from about 4,000–5,000 feet in the west at great speed, although the radar shows no other aircraft in the vicinity. (Lorenzen, UFOs: The Whole Story, Signet, 1969, p. 52; Swords 377–378)
May 10 — 11:00 p.m. Capt. Bob Jackson is piloting an Australian National Airways DC-3 near Woronora Dam, New South Wales, when he sees an object with an orange-colored light at the tail flash past toward the east near Wollongong. The radar tower at Mascot shows no traffic in the area. About 2 minutes later, the object reappears, makes a complete circle around the airliner, and speeds away toward the coast. (Swords 378)
May 11 — A declassified MKUltra document indicates hypnosis is a major focus. Experimental goals include: the creation of “hypnotically induced anxieties,” “hypnotically increasing ability to learn and recall complex written matter,” studying hypnosis and polygraph examinations, “hypnotically increasing ability to observe and recall complex arrangements of physical objects,” and studying "relationship of personality to susceptibility to hypnosis.” Experiments are conducted with drug-induced hypnosis and with anterograde and retrograde amnesia while under the influence of such drugs. (Wikipedia, “Project MKUltra”)
May 12 — 3:20 a.m. USAF F-94 pilot Lt. D. C. Rogers and radar operator Lt. J. A. Lane track a radar target about 39 miles northwest of Goose Bay AFB [now CFB Goose Bay], Labrador. Rogers attempts to intercept but cannot
make visual contact. (Sparks, p. 199; Chris Rutkowski, Canada’s UFOs: Declassified, August Night, 2022, p. 262)
May 16 — 8:15 p.m. Photographer Herman Charmanne is near Bouffioulx, Belgium, when he hears a strange metallic vibration. Looking up, he sees a long white trail in the wake of an object that shoots off at a great speed. The object, a luminous sphere, stops and hovers, allowing him to take two photos that depict a fried-egg-looking shape with a long tail. Recent analyses indicate that the photos are likely the result of a chemical reaction during the developing process, perhaps a flammable fluid deliberately poured on the image carrier that is then ignited. (Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos and Wim van Utrecht, Belgium in UFO Photographs, Volume 1 (1950–1988), FOTOCAT Report no. 7, 2017, pp. 12–30)
May 18 — 6:55 p.m. A bright, luminous object is seen over Abadan, Iran. It travels very fast and is visible for 20 minutes.
It is also seen over oil fields in Khuzestan Province. (ClearIntent, pp. 129–130)
May 20 — At the junction of Jordan and Marble Creeks in Plumas National Forest, northern California, titanium prospector John Q. Black sees a silvery object, 8 feet in diameter, land on a nearby sand bar. On June 20 the saucer returns, along with a barrel-chested “midget pilot” wearing a “forest-green outfit” and a “peak-billed cap with a cord” around it. The UFO is about 40 feet away, resting on a rock, and has tripod-like landing gear. The pilot fills a rubber-like pail with creek water and goes back inside the craft (which has one small window) after hearing Black step on a stick. The craft takes off at a 45° angle with a hissing sound. Black had seen the same object on March 20, for a total of seven times. Black is alone for each sighting, so his partner John Van Allen cannot corroborate the story. The UFO’s expected return on July 20 does not occur, perhaps because scores of sightseers descend on the Brush Creek area (snack bars are set up so that no one goes hungry during the vigil). (Wallace Kunkel, “The Little Man Who Wasn’t There,” Fate 7, no. 5 (May 1954): 48–52; Clark III 269; Patrick Gross, URECAT, December 15, 2006; Curt Collins, “Flying Saucer Ambush: Brush Creek, CA, 1953,” The Saucers That Time Forgot, November 17, 2017)
May 21 — 10:00 a.m. Eight disc-like objects are observed maneuvering in the sky for an hour or so above Prescott, Arizona, by sportsmen’s club president Bill Beers, post office employee Ray Temple, and O. Ed Olson. Two of the discs are stationary, while the other six discs participate in maneuvers similar to a dogfight. The six swoop around in formation, peel off, and shoot directly up and down in a maneuver that cannot be duplicated by a plane. When they move, they vary from very slow to speeds faster than a jet plane. (Prescott (Ariz.) Evening Courier, May 22, 1953; Nukes 87)
May 21 — Date of alleged UFO crash and retrieval near Kingman, Arizona. “Fritz Werner” [pseudonym of Arthur G. Stansel Jr.] claims to have worked on the retrieval. An informant in 1977 tells Leonard Stringield that he had seen three alien bodies in a crate at Wright-Patterson AFB in Ohio after a UFO crash in Arizona. (Leonard H. Stringfield, “Retrievals of the Third Kind: Part 2,” Flying Saucer Review 25, no. 5 (Sept./Oct. 1979): 6–7; Stringfield, Situation Red, Fawcett Crest, 1977, pp. 171–185; Clark III 335–338; Kevin D. Randle, A History of UFO Crashes, Avon, 1995, pp. 57–68; Good Above, pp. 398–400)
May 23 — Radar tracks a target over Cape Province, South Africa, that makes six passes at more than 1,250 mph at 5,000–15,000 feet altitude. (Aimé Michel, The Truth about FS, p. 123; James E. McDonald, “Statement on Unidentified Flying Objects,” in Symposium on Unidentified Flying Objects, Hearings, US House Committee on Science and Astronautics, 90th Cong., 2nd Sess., July 29, 1968, pp. 70–71)
May 26 — 5:10 a.m. D. Beyers, driving 80 miles south of Brandvlei in Northern Cape Province, South Africa, sees a bright yellowish-green light in the clouds, then emerges. The light has the appearance of “burning hydrogen” and emits three streaks that maintain a fixed position with regard to the main light. He watches it for 50 minutes. (ClearIntent, p. 130)
May 30 — After a small, bright-blue object with a strange irregular motion passes overhead at Palmerston North, New Zealand, numerous filaments of a “substance resembling spider webs, white in color and ashy in texture” float to earth. (“Palmerston North, New Zealand,” APRO Bulletin 2, no. 2 (September 15, 1953): 8; Clark III 124)
May 31 — Project Blue Book issues its Status Report #11. (US Air Force, Projects Grudge and Blue Book Reports 1–12,
NICAP, 1968, pp. 199–214)
Summer —Two F-94 jets are scrambled at Ernest Harmon Air Force Base [now Stephenville International Airport], near Stephenville, Newfoundland, after base radar picks up an unknown target. One of the pilots gets radar and visual confirmation, then radios that he is going into a steep climb to give chase. The jet crashes into a mountain. The base is supposedly placed on red alert. (Stringfield, Situation Red, Fawcett Crest, 1977, p. 142)
Summer — 10:00 p.m. A family is returning home on Scenic Avenue in Central Point, Oregon, when they see three entities along the side of the road only 6 feet away. They stop the car, and the beings glide across the road and
disappear into the woods. They are 4 feet high, white, with satiny fur, and resemble very large geese, but with no beaks or wings. (“No UFO Seen: Just Creatures,” CUFOS Associate Newsletter 5, no. 2 (April/May 1984): 3)
June — Night. An F-94C Starfire with classified electronic gear takes off from Otis AFB [now Otis Air National Guard Base] in western Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Piloted by Capt. Suggs and radar operator Lt. Robert Markhoff, the jet takes off in a westerly direction. Shortly after attaining 1,500 feet over the Base Rifle Range, the engine quits functioning and the electrical system fails. The jet’s nose drops and Suggs signals Barkhoff to bail out. Suggs bails out and he and his parachute wind up in a homeowner’s backyard. The jet should have crashed nearby, but neither Markhoff or the airplane can be located, despite months of searching. Although this account comes from M/Sgt Clarence O. Dargie, and investigator Raymond Fowler obtains the accident report from Norton AFB [now San Bernardino International Airport], California, there appears to be no open record of this incident. The F-94C models, especially at first, have fire-control problems and electrical short circuiting. (Raymond Fowler, UFOs: Interplanetary Visitors, Prentice-Hall, 1974, pp. 287–291; Good Need, pp. 189–191; Bob Pratt, “Conversations with Major Donald Keyhoe,” Mutual UFO Network; Barry Greenwood, “Questions on a 1953 Cape Cod Mystery,” UFO Historical Revue, no. 8 (February 2001): 1–3)
June — Secretary of Defense Charles Erwin Wilson abolishes the Research and Development Board for the politically motivated reason that suspected communist sympathizer Robert Oppenheimer is a sitting member. (Michael Hall and Wendy Connors, “The Research and Development Board: Unanswered Questions,” IUR 26, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 9)
June — Lt. Robert M. Olsson and J. Allen Hynek visit Coral Lorenzen in Wisconsin and try to convince her that it is in the national interest for her to reduce excitement about UFOs by publishing cases. (Swords 197; Lorenzen, FS Hoax, pp. 82–83)
June — Max B. Miller publishes the first issue of Saucers, a digest-sized quarterly of Flying Saucers International in Los Angeles, California. It continues until the Fall 1959 issue. (Saucers 1, no. 1 (1953); Clark III 1033)
June 9 — Sidney Gottlieb approves Project MKUltra’s “Subproject 8” on LSD. Experiments include administering LSD to mental patients, prisoners, drug addicts, and prostitutes—“people who could not fight back,” as one agency officer puts it. ()
June 17 — 7:30 a.m. Several witnesses in Galveston, Texas, see a large, cigar-shaped object silently flying in from the Gulf of Mexico. One estimates it to be about 300 feet long and no greater than 150 feet in the air. The object makes a cloud and disappears. (Herbert S. Taylor, “Mystery Clouds and the UFO Connection,” IUR 29, no. 4 (July 2005): 19)
June 24 — 11:30 a.m. A weather observer stationed at remote Simiutaq island, western Greenland, is tracking a weather balloon with a theodolite. He notices a rotating red object flying from southeast to northwest and approaching the balloon, which is at 18,000 feet. The object collides with the balloon, disintegrating it. Afterward, it hovers in a circular motion for 15 seconds and departs into the wind. He watches it another 5 minutes until it is lost to view. (Chris Rutkowski, Canada’s UFOs: Declassified, August Night, 2022, pp. 69–70)
June 24 — Night. A flight of US Navy F2H Banshee jets out of NAS Quonset Point [now Quonset Point Air National Guard Station] are on a night training mission over southern Rhode Island when two aircraft in the formation collide in mid-air. The crash occurs at 19,000 feet near or over the Exeter/West Greenwich town lines, and debris is scattered for several miles in all directions. The pilot of one Banshee, Lt. Jg. Jack Oliver Snipes, is killed. An emergency cable sent to the Director of Air Force Intelligence in the Pentagon indicates that “flying objects” are seen by the pilots prior to the accident. Its distribution list includes the fledgling National Security
Agency. (“Exeter/West Greenwich, Rhode Island: June 24, 1953,” New England Aviation History, October 2017; Good Above, pp. 272–273, 488)
June 30 — 11:45 p.m. An orange-colored, oval object is seen for a period of 20 minutes in the northern sky moving to the southeast by at least 10 personnel of the US 912th Air Control and Warning Squadron stationed at Ramore Air Station radar site [now CFS Ramore], 3 miles west of Ramore, Ontario. The first person to see it is A/2c Dean McDonald who comes out of the maintenance room to inspect a power unit that has caused a minor breakdown of the search radar set. He calls two other airmen to witness it. One of the two thinks the object is the moon. The first airman gets hysterical and calls the Charge of Quarters at the Domestic Area three miles to the southwest. At least seven witnesses in that area see the object, and two of them report that the moon is visible and the UFO is distinct and separate. The object soon fades away slowly to the north. ([Project Blue Book file])
July — The 4602nd AISS has taken over nearly all of Blue Book’s field investigations. (Ruppelt, p. 232) ()
July — Lt. Robert M. Olsson of Project Blue Book sends five supposedly unsolved UFO cases of 1953 to Cal Tech physicist Howard P. Robertson in an effort to see if any change in the Robertson Panel’s conclusions is warranted. One of them is the Sea of Japan ELINT case of April 14. Apparently, Robertson’s mind is not changed. He is now
heading up the Robertson Committee of the newly formed National Security Agency, tasked with developing better use of intercepted communications and radars in order to provide strategic warning of a military attack by the Soviet Union. (Clark III 55)
July 1 — 1:00 p.m. A cowherd, Maximo Munoz Olivares [or Hernáiz], 14, sees a “big balloon” on the ground behind him in Villares del Saz, Cuenca, Spain, after a faint whistling attracts his attention. Shaped like a water jug, the object is metallic. Through an opening come three dwarfs 2 feet tall, with yellow faces, narrow eyes, and oriental features.
They speak in a language he cannot understand. They are dressed in blue and have a sort of flat hat with a visor in front and a metal sheet on their arms. One of them smacks the boy’s face, then they reenter the machine, which glows very brightly, makes a soft whistling sound, and goes off “like a rocket.” Footprints and four holes 2 inches deep, forming a perfect square 13 inches in size, are found by police. Possible hoax. (Loren E. Gross, UFOs, a History: 1953, March–July, The Author, 1989, pp. 92–93; Antonio Ribera, “The Landing at Villares del Saz,” in Charles Bowen, ed., The Humanoids, special issue of FSR, Oct./Dec. 1966, pp. 28–30; Clark III 270)
July 7 — Evening. An Atlanta, Georgia, barber named Edward Watters buys a monkey from a pet shop, shaves and kills it, cuts off its tail, then takes it with two friends, Tom Wilson and Arnold Payne, to US Highway 78 near Leland, Georgia, and waits for the first car to stop. They tell the driver, who turns out to be Cobb County policeman Sherley Brown, that they had seen a flying saucer and accidentally killed one of its occupants. They bring the dead animal to the Atlanta Constitution office, where reporter Thomas McRae notifies the FBI, which alerts the Air Force at Dobbins AFB [now Dobbins Air Reserve Base] in Marietta. The animal is taken to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, where Anatomy Professor Marion Hines identifies it properly as a shaved Capuchin monkey. Watters admits the hoax and is fined $40 by a judge. (Wikipedia, “Martian Monkey”; Loren E. Gross, UFOs, a History: 1953, March–July, The Author, 1989, pp. 96–102; Clark III 593)
July 16 — Lt. Col. William F. Barns attains an official world airspeed record of 716 mph in a North American F-86D Sabre over the Salton Sea, California. (Wikipedia, “North American F-86D Sabre”; “16 July 1953,” This Day in Aviation History, July 16, 2021)
July 19 — 3:00 p.m. After an F-86 has been circling over a particular spot in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a black object emerges from a high white cloud and takes up its position after the plane has left toward Knoxville. “This object was extremely black in color, having an appearance of a deep black metal exterior with a fine gloss. It did not leave a vapor trail or were there any lights of shine noticed. No sound was heard. The object flew east at a tremendous speed for what appeared to be approximately three miles where it stopped. The object was then joined by two more of these same objects. A formation similar to a spread V was formed and the objects, at a tremendous speed flew in an eastward direction.” The report is made by the Atomic Energy Commission and addressed to Army Adjutant General William Edward Bergin in Washington, D.C. (NICAP, “Black Objects Maneuver over Area nr F-86”; “Air Space Violation at Oak Ridge, Tennessee,” July 27, 1953)
July 20 — Ed Ruppelt returns to Project Blue Book as either acting chief or consultant until August 31. (Sparks, p. 14; Clark III 55)
July 25 — ATIC guide, How to Make FLYOBRPTS, a 68-page manual for officials required to make UFO reports, is published. (Air Technical Intelligence Center, How to Make FLYOBRPTS, July 26, 1953)
July 26 — 9:39 p.m. At Perrin AFB [now North Texas Regional Airport] in Sherman, Texas, ground observers see 7 UFOs, each carrying a bright red light, hovering at 5,000–8,000 feet. They are in a formation of two groups of three, and one trailing, then come together to form the letter “Z.” Then they circle, gain altitude, and fade from sight. Citizens in Sherman and Denison also see the objects. Total duration is 16 minutes. This is classified as a “Vital Intelligence Sighting” and sent to the Air Defense Command, the Secretary of Defense, and the CIA. (CIRVIS Report, July 26, 1953)
July 30 — Science journalist John Joseph O’Neill observes through a telescope a feature on the western edge of the lunar Mare Crisium that he interprets as a giant natural bridge. The observation is prematurely confirmed by amateur Welsh astronomer Hugh Percy Wilkins. Although it turns out to be an illusion, the location is still known as O’Neill’s bridge. When viewing conditions are poor or the telescope’s aperture is small, the feature resembles a bridge joining the tips of the capes Promontorium Lavinium and Promontorium Olivium. If viewing conditions are good and the instrument is large enough, the feature is seen as two small, eroded crater pits. (The Moon Wiki, “O’Neill’s Bridge”; Andrew May, “The Lost Ruins of the Moon,” Fortean Times 358 (October 2017): 56–57)
July 30–August 1 — A large UFO is seen for three nights over Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks in California.
Park Superintendent Elvind T. Scoyen and his staff observe it once at close range. On August 1, a squadron of Air Force fighters sees the object streaking downward just before midnight. It stops abruptly then shoots upward. (Keyhoe, Aliens from Space, Signet ed., 1974, pp. 40–41)
July 31 — Lt. Robert Olsson leaves Project Blue Book. He later tells Ruppelt his 5-month tenure “was like being president of Antarctica on a nonexpedition year.” He is replaced by Airman 1C Max G. Futch. (Ruppelt, p. 228; Clark III 55; Sparks, p. 14)
July 31 — 7:00 p.m. Five Poles and two Germans see a disc-shaped object about 16 feet in diameter land in a field near a railroad track on Wolin Island, Poland. After several minutes it rises up and flies away at great speed. (Bronislaw Rzepecki, “UFOs and Ufologists in Poland,” IUR 11, no. 2 (Mar./Apr. 1986): 15; Vallée, Magonia, p. 203)
August — Wilbert B. Smith completes his classified report on Project Magnet for the Canadian Department of Transport, writing that it can be deduced that UFOs are 100 or more feet in diameter, they can travel at speeds of several thousand miles per hour, and can reach high altitudes. “It is difficult to reconcile this performance with the capabilities of our technology [and] we are forced to the conclusion that the vehicles are probably extraterrestrial, in spite of our prejudices to the contrary.” The DOT agrees to his proposal to set up an electronic station for a “24-hour watch for flying saucers” in a hut at Shirley’s Bay, off Lake Manitou, Ontario. Equipment includes am ionospheric reactor, electronic sound measurement devices, gamma-ray detector, gravimeter, magnetometer, and radio set. (Clark III 1078–1079)
August 1 — The US Air Force Security Service moves its headquarters from Brooks Air Force Base [now closed] to Kelly Air Force Base [now Kelly Field Annex], both in San Antonio, Texas. (Wikipedia, “Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance Agency”)
August 5–6 — Around 8:00 p.m. Ground Observer Corps observer Phyllis Killian spots a UFO in Black Hawk, South Dakota. Soon after, radar at Ellsworth AFB near Rapid City tracks a “well-defined, solid, and bright” object. The base scrambles an F-84 and the pilot sees the UFO. Many witnesses see the object accelerate and climb. The F-84 pursues but can reach no closer than 3 miles. Now low on fuel, the F-84 returns, followed by the UFO. Immediately, another F-84 is sent up. Before long, the pilot receives strong radar returns of a target right in front of him. Fear prevails and he breaks off the chase. The UFO goes off the scope, traveling northeast. Reports soon come from Brunswick of a fast-moving, bright blue object, similar to the Rapid City object. It hovers near an air filter center, performing more maneuvers and disappearing after midnight. Before it leaves, three more UFOs are seen at 10,000 feet for three hours. Ruppelt personally investigates and calls it “the best” in the USAF files, Hynek writes that the “entire incident…has too much of an Alice-in-Wonderland flavor for comfort.” Menzel blames the star Capella. The official file is several hundred pages long. (NICAP, “The Rapid City / Ellsworth AFB Incident (RV)”; Condon, pp. 132–136; Ruppelt, pp. 232–235; Sparks, p. 203; Loren E. Gross, UFOs, a History: 1953, August–December, The Author, 1990, pp. 2–3; Swords 215; Jan Aldrich; Patrick Gross, “The Ellsworth AFB Radar Multiple Visual Case, 1953”)
August 6 — 5:00 p.m.–12:00 midnight. An estimated 75 objects with lights are seen by many witnesses on the ground around Naval Air Station Barbers Point [now Kalaeloa Airport], Hawaii, from the airport control tower and from the air. Many are also detected by radar. At 9:00 p.m., the crew of a Navy patrol aircraft reports three head-on passes. These close calls alarm the pilot so much he lands immediately. Jet fighters are scrambled and the same night an interceptor pilot sees a “glowing blob” rising rapidly toward him. It comes to a sudden stop just behind his aircraft then accelerates briefly until it is beside him for four more seconds before accelerating away out of sight at several times his own top speed. (Keyhoe, FS Conspiracy, p. 63; Loren E. Gross, UFOs, a History: 1953, August–December, The Author, 1990, p. 30)
August 9 — 9:34 p.m. Supervisor Larry E. Towner and other Ground Observer Corps personnel report a glowing disc about 200 feet in diameter over Moscow, Idaho. At 10:10 p.m., the first of two F-86s is scrambled. The object lingers, with other lights seen, until around 5:00 a.m. (NICAP, “Three F-86’s Chase Disc Spotted by GOC”; Loren E. Gross, UFOs, a History: 1953, August–December, The Author, 1990, pp. 3–4)
August 10 — Wilbert B. Smith issues another report on Project Magnet, in which he concludes there is a “substantial probability of the real existence of extraterrestrial vehicles” that use a “technology considerably in advance of what we have.” The report is eventually sent to Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent. (Good Above, pp. 185, 187)
August 12 — The USSR tests its first thermonuclear device, RDS-6s or Joe 4, at the Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kazakhstan. A tenfold increase in explosive power is achieved by a combination of fusion energy and neutron- initiated fission. Scholars dispute the authenticity of RDS-6 as a true thermonuclear device, as it does not manage to produce a yield consistent with a true hydrogen bomb. (Wikipedia, “Joe 4”)
August 13 — Paramount Pictures’ The War of the Worlds premieres in New York City. It is a modern retelling of H. G. Wells’s story of an invasion from Mars and features a Northrop YB-49 flying wing dropping an atomic bomb on the invading Martians. The color footage comes from a test flight. The film is produced by George Pal, directed by Byron Haskin, and stars Gene Barry and Ann Robinson. (Wikipedia, “The War of the Worlds (1953 film)”; Internet Movie Database, “The War of the Worlds”)
August 16 — Flying Saucers International holds the first UFO conference at the Hollywood Hotel in Los Angeles, California, featuring contactee speakers. However, George Van Tassel’s first Giant Rock Interplanetary Spacecraft Convention launches the same day near Landers, California, for three days with speakers Frank Scully, George Van Tassel, Orfeo Angelucci, George Adamski, and the Amazing Criswell. (Story, p. 91 ; Orfeo Angelucci, “A Release: On Flying Saucers First Convention,” Interplanetary News Digest 1, no. 2 (October 1953): 1; “Blast from the Past: UFO Conventions from Giant Rock in Landers,” Palm Springs (Calif.) Desert Sun, July 25, 2014)
August 17?— Lina Ivanova Kravets is in her garden in Shtanivka, Ukraine, when she sees a trio of intruders cutting branches off her apple, plum, and cherry trees. Approaching closer, she sees they are 11-foot-tall entities wearing dark overalls, helmets, and gloves. They claim to be extraterrestrials, converse with her about God and their peaceful home world that is prone to natural disasters and somehow affected by the earth’s wars, and insist they are on a mission to rescue a missing scout team. They then point out a silvery sphere hovering just above the ground with similar tall being standing next to it. Before the lengthy encounter ends, the beings offer Kravets a piece of bread the size of a small coin. Breaking it open, she sees something dark and odorless inside, so she refuses it. The beings then walk to the sphere in a peculiar waddling manner, wave as they enter, and take off in the craft at terrific speed. (Peter Rogerson, “INTCAT 1953”; Joshua Cutchin, “The Great Alien Bake-Off,” Fortean Times 332 (November 2015): 44)
August 19 — A small, fast-moving, ricocheting fireball rips a foot-wide hole through a metal billboard at Middlestone Avenue and Front Street in East New Haven, Connecticut. IFSB investigator August C. Roberts and Joseph Barbieri steal a piece of the sign during an investigation by Naval Ordnance personnel. IFSB sends the sample to Col. Robert B. Emerson, an Army physicist at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, who contacts friends at Oak Ridge Laboratory in Tennessee to have it analyzed, but nothing else is heard of this sample. APRO arranges for a separate analysis of the deposits on the sign performed by Anderson Laboratories in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and the Chicago Spectrographic Service Laboratory. They determine that the fragments consist of copper and copper oxide and are not meteoritic. Michael D. Swords suggests that Roberts’s retrieval of the metal fragments would have attracted the attention of federal officials. (NICAP, “New Haven Signboard Case”; Michael D. Swords, “Tales from the Barker Zone,” IUR 17, no. 6 (Nov./Dec. 1992): 5–7; Clark III 728–729)
August 20 — 9:05 p.m. The crew of a TB-29 sees a grayish oval object near Castle AFB [now Castle Airport Aviation and Development Center], northeast of Atwater, California. The UFO makes four passes at the plane, then dives vertically as if it consists of two objects. (NICAP, “TB-29 Crew Files CIRVIS Report”; Sparks, p. 203)
August 21 — Test pilot Lt. Col. Marion Eugene Carl reaches an unofficial altitude of 83,235 feet in a Douglas D-558-2 Skyrocket. (Wikipedia, “Marion Eugene Carl”)
August 23 — 12:00 noon. Tom P. Drury, deputy director of the Civilian Aviation Department at Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, takes 24 frames of 8mm color film of a silvery object that emerges from a cloud and climbs quickly, leaving a vapor trail. The Royal Australian Air Force and USAF intelligence are said to have studied the film, which has since disappeared, with only a few third-generation stills of poor quality remaining. Later researchers suspect a daytime meteor. (NICAP, “Drury Film / Saucer-Like Object Climbing”; Norman Cruttwell, “The New Guinea Sightings,” APRO Bulletin, July 1961, p. 6; Clark III 416–417; Sparks, p. 204; Good Above, pp. 162–163; Bill Chalker, “The Drury UFO Film Affair: A Study of a Celebrated Australian Case, Part 1,” 2001; Bill Chalker, “The Drury UFO Film Affair: A Study of a Celebrated Australian Case, Part 2,” 2001; Herbert S. Taylor, “Mystery Clouds and the UFO Connection,” IUR 29, no. 4 (July 2005): 17–18; Keith Basterfield and Paul Dean, “Cold Case Review of the 23 August 1953, Port Moresby Visual Sighting and Colour Movie Film,” April 2017)
August 24 — Contactee George Van Tassel gets to step, for the first time, inside a flying saucer, when an extraterrestrial named Solganda wakes him up and leads him to a waiting ship, giving him a tour of the interior and a technique for rejuvenating the human body before dropping him off and shooting back into space. (Jody Rosen, “Welcome to the Integratron,” New York Times Magazine, August 20, 2014; Lesla Miller Schnur, “G. W. Van Tassel’s Integraton,” The Haunted Librarian, August 27, 2021)
August 26 — USAF issues Air Force Regulation 200-2, which tightens UFO reporting and investigating procedures, further restricting the release of UFO information and superseding Air Force Letter 200-5. It directs that all confirmed UFO reports be sent electronically to air force intelligence. Tangible evidence must go to ATIC in Dayton. It also confines UFO investigations to three groups: USAF intelligence at the Pentagon, the 4602nd AISS, and ATIC (although ATIC only gets reports after they go to the 4602nd). Sightings are only to be discussed with “authorized personnel.” Reports by USAF personnel no longer go to Project Blue Book, which is now only a PR front. Some good cases still go there, but far fewer unidentifieds. Only solved cases are to be discussed publicly; those still unidentified are to remain classified at the Restricted level. (“Unidentified Flying Objects Reporting,” Air Force Regulation 200-2, August 26, 1953; Clark III 918; Swords 198–199)
August 27 — 9:45 p.m. A USAF pilot, M/Sgt, and others, all on the ground, see a meandering light for 50 minutes at Greenville AFB [now Mid-Delta Regional Airport], Mississippi. (Sparks, p. 204)
August 28 — A Ground Observer Corps volunteer watches 14 cigar-shaped UFOs silently moving over San Rafael, California. One appears to be leading the formation at about 200 mph. They are first seen heading west through breaks in the clouds, then turn north and disappear behind clouds. (Good Above, p. 278)
August 31 — Edward J. Ruppelt leaves Project Blue Book permanently, leaving Max Futch in charge as acting chief through December. (Sparks, p. 14; Clark III 55)
September — George Adamski’s account (ghostwritten by Clara John) of his meeting in the desert with the Venusian named Orthon is appended to an already completed manuscript on modern and historical UFO reports by Irish occultist Desmond Leslie and published as Flying Saucers Have Landed. Leslie asserts that the first spaceman (a Venusian) arrived on earth in 18,617,841 B.C. [in the early Miocene Epoch] and claims that early UFOs were called vimanas in Sanskrit epics like the Ramayana. He also argues that the Great Pyramid and megalithic structures were built with levitation techniques derived from space people. (Desmond Leslie and George Adamski, Flying Saucers Have Landed, British Book Centre, 1953; Clark III 40)
September — Airline stewardess Gloria Lee of Westchester, California, begins to hear a voice in her head that identifies itself as “J.W.,” a resident of Jupiter. Lee insists on a physical visit. Not long afterward, as she is hanging wash in her backyard, she hears the voice say, “Well, you’ve been wanting to see me.” She looks up and sees “a saucer, big as life, flying toward Santa Monica.” She has other experiences and founds the Cosmon Research Organization to publish and study J.W.’s teachings, much of which resemble philosophy in the 1882 book Oahspe, produced by automatic writing by John Ballou Newbrough. She goes on the contactee lecture circuit. (Clark III 682–683)
September — Genevieve A. Johnston begins publishing the contactee newsletter Interplanetary News Digest in Joshua Tree, California. It continues through spring 1955. (Interplanetary News Digest 1, no. 1 (September 1953))
September — Gray Barker starts publishing The Saucerian Bulletin in Clarksburg, West Virginia, which covers UFO reports, monster yarns, contactee tales, and the latest rumors about Albert K. Bender. It continues through October 1962. (Saucerian Bulletin 1, no. 1 (September 1953); Clark III 178)
September 7 — British pilot Neville Duke reaches 728 mph in a Hawker Hunter Mk.3 at Littlehampton, England. (Wikipedia, “Neville Duke”)
September 7 — 6:30 p.m. Don P. Hollister, a technical writer for Goodyear Aircraft, notices a grayish-blue object heading north directly over his backyard in Cleveland, Ohio, at less than 3,000 feet altitude. It is shaped like an equilateral triangle, but rounded somewhat on the sides and angles. It is rotating on a central axis. The object disappears after 5 seconds. (UFOEv, p. 70)
September 15–19 — Operation Top Hat, a “local field exercise,” takes place at the Army Chemical School [now the US Army CBRN School] at Fort McClellan [now closed], Alabama. The experiments use Chemical Corps personnel to test decontamination methods for biological and chemical weapons, including sulfur mustard and nerve agents. The personnel are deliberately exposed to these contaminants, are not volunteers, and are not informed of the tests. In a 1975 Pentagon Inspector General’s report, the military maintain that Operation Top Hat is not subject to the guidelines requiring approval because it is a line-of-duty exercise in the Chemical Corps. (Wikipedia, “Operation Top Hat”)
September 26 — British pilot Mike Lithgow attains an official world airspeed record of 736 mph in a Supermarine Swift F 4 at Castel Idris, Tripoli, Libya. (Wikipedia, “Mike Lithgow”)
September 28 — Albert K. Bender confides to Gray Barker and a few others that three menacing men dressed in black suits have called on him, told him the answer to the UFO mystery, and insisted that he will go to jail if he repeats it. The experience allegedly terrifies him, and he decides to close the International Flying Saucer Bureau. Barker immortalizes the episode in a 1956 book, They Knew Too Much about Flying Saucers, and Bender breaks his long silence in 1962 with Flying Saucers and the Three Men, in which he claims that the visitors are not government agents but monsters from the distant planet Kazik. Even Barker concedes privately that he cannot swallow Bender’s fantastic tale of abduction to the South Pole by monstrous space beings. Bender does little to promote the book and soon moves to Los Angeles and secures an unlisted telephone number. However, the book does reveal Bender’s long-time obsession with science fiction, horror movies, and the occult. (Gray Barker, They Knew Too Much about Flying Saucers, University Books, 1956; Albert K. Bender, Flying Saucers and the Three Men, Saucerian, 1962; Clark III 189–192, 623; Story, pp. 50–51; Michael D. Swords, “Tales from the Barker Zone,” IUR 17, no. 6 (Nov./Dec. 1992): 6)
September 28 — 7:10 p.m. In Palmdale, California, a UFO appears on an F-94C radarscope for a period of 15 seconds. The object is traveling on a 60° course at an estimated speed of 2,300 mph. It is 4 miles away when first seen and
compares with a C-47 in size on the radarscope. The F-94 was moving at 345 mph at 21,000 feet. The same or another object is observed visually from another F-94C for six seconds at 7:00 p.m. The object is described as round, orange in color, and traveling on the same course as the first object. (NICAP, “F-94C Tracks UFO at 200 Knots”; Sparks, p. 204)
Late September — Night. Baltimore, Maryland, astronomer James C. Bartlett Jr. is observing a transit of the star Fomalhaut when he notices four large lights moving slowly in the sky. He looks at them through binoculars and sees that they are on the noses of two enormous cigar-shaped objects at about 3,000 feet altitude. He can also see an apparent cabin and portholes and he hears a sound like a piston engine. (“Two Huge UFOs Sighted by Baltimore Astronomer,” UFO Investigator 1, no. 5 (Aug./Sept. 1958): 1, 3)
September 30 — Project Blue Book issues its Status Report #12. (US Air Force, Projects Grudge and Blue Book Reports 1–12, NICAP, 1968, pp. 215–235)
Autumn — Dusk. Cecil Tenney is driving near Dutton, Montana, when he sees a cigar-shaped object about 200 feet away. Apparently in trouble, it belches fire and smoke, and after a few minutes he hears an explosion. Balls of fire rain down from the sky. He tells the story to a highway patrol officer at a nearby bar before driving on to Conrad, Montana. That evening a colonel from Great Falls AFB [now Malmstrom AFB] calls and tells him to show up at the base in the morning. He is interrogated there for 30 minutes, and on the way out sees soldiers carrying bags that he thinks might contain body parts. (Leonard H. Stringfield, “Retrievals of the Third Kind: A Case Study of Alleged UFOs and Occupants in Military Custody,” MUFON 1978 UFO Symposium Proceedings, Mutual UFO Network, 1978, pp. 77–105; Clark III 342)
October — The final issue of Space Review edited by Albert K. Bender states that UFOs are “no longer a mystery. The source is already known, but any information about this is being withheld by orders from a higher source.” (“Statement of Importance,” Space Review 2, no. 4 (October 1953): 1; Clark III 189)
October 1— Donald E. Keyhoe’s Flying Saucers from Outer Space is published by Henry Holt. Excerpts appear in the October 20 issue of Look. His message is that aliens are here, the military knows it, and they are covering it up from the public to avoid panic. He has gotten clearance from Ruppelt and Chop to include 51 classified UFO reports from the Air Technical Intelligence Center, which runs Project Blue Book. The Air Force states that Keyhoe is misrepresenting their analyses, so he sends a telegram to USAF Secretary Harold E. Talbott and Gen. Sory Smith, saying that if he really misrepresented anything, as a Marine Corps officer he should be disciplined. The Air Force offers no comment. In the book, he takes note of a curious document (never published and now lost) prepared by USAF Col. William C. Odell titled “Planet Earth: Host to Extraterrestrial Life,” in which he speculates on aliens crossing space in search of new planets to live on once their own fails. (Donald E. Keyhoe, Flying Saucers from Outer Space, Holt, 1953; Wikipedia, “Flying Saucers from Outer Space”; Keyhoe, FS Conspiracy, p. 55; Michael D. Swords, “Colonel Odell and the Invasion of Earth,” IUR 30, no. 3 (May 2006): 3– 6)
October 3 — USN pilot James B. Verdin reaches 753 mph in a Douglas F4D Skyray over the Salton Sea, California. (Wikipedia, “Douglas F4D Skyray”)
October 9 — 3:50 p.m. A UFO is seen at Caulfield, Melbourne, Victoria, discharging a white trail described as “strange shiney filaments” that cover wires and trees. A sample turns out to be a “nylon-like amorphous mass with traces of magnesuim, calcium, boron, and silicon.” It shrinks from 3 inches to one-half inch in an air-tight container. (“Wispy Threads from Sky,” Australian Flying Saucer Review (UFOIC), no. 9 (November 1966): 12; Brian Boldman, “Angel Hair Physical Analyses: A Review,” JUFOS 9 (2006): 101; Keith Basterfield, “Angel Hair: An Australian Perspective,” IUR 27, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 6)
October 9 — 4:30 p.m. Three unidentified objects are tracked on radar at RAF Bawdsey [now Bawdsey Manor], Suffolk, England, at an altitude of 36,000 feet above the Netherlands. Soon they are tracked flying east to west over the Harwich area. Some jets at RAF Waterbeach [now Waterbeach Barracks], Cambridgeshire, are scrambled but can locate nothing. Airmen at Bawdsey can see nothing but four contrails heading north. The objects then reverse and move back across the English Channel at 32,000–34,000 feet. The apparent speed on the approach is 430 mph, increasing to 483 mph on the short leg over the UK and 564 mph on the return. (NICAP, “Three UFOs Flew over Area, Tracked on Radar”)
October 15 — 10:10 a.m. During the tracking of a Project Grab Bag balloon launch, a 40-foot object leaving a brief vapor trail is seen by three General Mills Aeronautical Lab research engineers (James A. Winker, Fletcher L. Bartholomew, and Richard J. Reilly) near Minneapolis, Minnesota. It is traveling south in horizontal flight at 1,100 mph, moving 10° in nine seconds at about 40,000 ft altitude and 25° elevation. The object goes into a vertical dive for about 10-15 seconds, then glows or flashes in the sun two or three times for 1 second each. It is seen in the
theodolite as a gray mass. It levels off and the vapor trail stops. (NICAP, “Project GRAB BAG Sighting”; Sparks, p. 205; Hynek, The UFO Experience, Ballantine eds., 1974, pp. 71–72; Hynek UFO Report, pp. 113–114)
October 16 — Harvard astronomer Donald Menzel writes to USAF Director of Intelligence Gen. John A. Samford that he would like to meet with ATIC officers in Washington, D.C. (Good Above, p. 278)
October 16 — 4:00–4:30 p.m. Emerson “Slim” F. Morris watches a large, cigar-shaped object as it approaches Brigantine, New Jersey, from over the Atlantic. It releases several smaller objects from both ends. The smaller discs are white, rotating counterclockwise, and rapidly speed away. Before the large object disappears, it emits a blinding ray of light toward the ground that hurts Morris’s eyes. (Herbert S. Taylor, “Satellite Objects: A Further Look,” IUR 29, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 7)
October 19 — 12:10 a.m. Capt. J. L. Kidd is flying an American Airlines DC-6 between Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., when over the Conowingo Dam, Maryland, his copilot sees something gleaming in the moonlight dead ahead and closing rapidly. Kidd blinks on his landing lights and the UFO beams back a blinding light back at the DC-6. Kidd puts the plane into a steep dive. Caught unaware, the passengers are tossed about the cabin, many suffering injuries. Kidd radios Washington National Airport [now Ronald Reagan International Airport] to report a near collision and complain about air traffic. Air traffic control reports no known aircraft in his vicinity. (Keyhoe, FS Conspiracy, pp. 60–61; Loren E. Gross, UFOs, a History: 1953, August–December, The Author, 1990, pp. 34, 38; Good Above, p. 282)
October 20 — The NSA Robertson Committee report is completed and classified top secret. It recommends better and faster use of electronic intelligence in radar activity that might indicate an imminent attack, noting that the Air Force is not cooperating with the Army or Navy on these matters. (Clark III 55–56)
October 22 — Menzel meets with USAF headquarters personnel (including Col. George E. Perry) and ATIC at the Pentagon. (Good Above, p. 279)
October 25 — 8:15–8:30 p.m. Air Force weather observers at Lubbock, Texas, notice a V formation of 5–7 dull white lights sweep north to south. In three seconds, the formation goes from a point overhead to 3° above the horizon where they disappear. Other groups of two or more lights follow at about 5-minute intervals. (Loren E. Gross, UFOs, a History: 1953, August–December, The Author, 1990, pp. 35–36)
October 29 — USAF pilot Frank Kendall Everest Jr. reaches 755 mph in a North American F-100 Super Sabre over the Salton Sea, California. (Wikipedia, “Frank Kendall Everest Jr.”)
November — Capt. Charles A. Hardin takes charge of Project Blue Book. (Sparks, p. 14)
November — 6:30 p.m. Trygve Jansen and two other witnesses are driving north on the Gamle Mossevei road at the Gjersjøen bridge, Norway, when they see an object rise from behind a hill, swing out over the lake, and move back to the road, circling and following their car. Suddenly it stops and hovers above the road 30 feet in front of them, emitting a green light. Jansen stops, and all three witnesses experience mild electrical shocks until the object rises and disappears. When he returns home, Jansen’s wife points out that the car’s beige paint has turned a bright green. (Carl Olsen, “Chased by a Flying Saucer!” Flying Saucer Review 2, no. 5 (Sept./Oct. 1956): 16; K. Gösta Rehn, “Saucer Blocked Road in Norway,” APRO Bulletin, March 1962, pp. 1, 3)
November 3 — 10:00 a.m. An RAF NF.10 Vampire pilot (Flight Lt. Terry S. Johnson) and navigator (Flying Officer Geoffrey Smythe) flying at 30,000 feet near RAF West Malling [now closed], Kent, England, see a star-like light far above them. Suddenly it moves toward them at tremendous speed. They see it as circular and emitting a bright light around its periphery. The duration is 30 seconds. Air Minister George Ward calls it a “balloon”; when author Desmond Leslie calls him up to suggest this is incorrect, Ward tells him: “I know it wasn’t a balloon. You know it wasn’t a balloon. But until I’ve got a saucer on the ground in Hyde Park and can charge the public sixpence a go to enter, it must be balloons, otherwise the government would fall and I’d lose my job.” It is possible that this object was a Skyhook balloon launched from Holloman AFB in New Mexico on October 27 that failed to drop into the Atlantic after a 12-hour flight. (Desmond Leslie, “Politicians and the UFO,” Flying Saucer Review 9, no. 3 (May/June 1963): 8–9; Good Above, pp. 35, 53; Good Need, p. 154; UFOFiles2, pp. 57, 62–63; David Clarke, “The Prince and the Saucers,” Fortean Times 406 (June 2021): 18)
November 3 — 2:45 p.m. In Lee, southeast London, a solid target is tracked on radar by the 256th Heavy Anti-Aircraft Regiment moving slowly at a distance of 17 miles. Through a telescope it appears to be a circular white object. The target is tracked for 25 minutes by four aircraft technicians, including Sgt. H. Waller, who says it is about 350–450 feet in diameter and definitely not a balloon. The War Office claims the object is a radiosonde balloon. (NICAP, “Heavy Anti-Aircraft Regiment Tracks UFO”; Good Above, pp. 35–36; Keyhoe, FS Conspiracy, p. 79)
November 5 — President Eisenhower issues Executive Order 10501, abolishing the classification of “Restricted.” UFO sightings are unaffected, as meaningful sightings are classified at higher levels. There are now explicit guidelines for the remaining three classification levels to prevent a systematic flood of classified documents coming from the
Pentagon and other agencies. The Pentagon responds by creating its own “special access” labels to further insulate classified information from outside influence. (“Executive Order 10501”)
November 16 — A fluffy material streams out of a UFO over the San Fernando Valley, California, and falls to the ground. A reporter who examines it describes it as “dead-white, almost ephemeral in its delicacy and apparently electrically charged.” A similar fall occurs in the same area on February 1, 1954. (Keyhoe, FS Conspiracy, pp. 227–228; Clark III 124)
November 19 — Bacteriologist Frank Olson is a leading scientist at the army’s Chemical Corps, Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick, Maryland. SOD supplies the CIA with an array of deadly microbes and chemicals that cannot be detected in an autopsy. It also supplies delivery methods for anthrax. The CIA pays SOD $200,000 a year for these services until 1969. Olson is duped into a meeting with MKUltra Director Sidney Gottlieb at a secluded cabin. Olson has a very bad trip and still hasn’t recovered after several days. (H. P. Albarelli Jr., A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Cold War Experiments, Trine Day, 2009; Stephen Kinzer, “The Secret History of Fort Detrick, the CIA’s Base for Mind Control Experiments,” Politico Magazine, September 15, 2019)
November 20 — Australian Minister for Air William McMahon tells Parliament that all UFO reports “are still being investigated closely and recorded as an aid to further research,” but the RAAF’s approach is a bit more ad hoc. (Swords 377)
November 22 — Navy Capt. Walter Karig, author of the 1947 novel Zotz!, writes “Operation UFO: The Official Truth about Flying Saucers” for The American Weekly newspaper insert. He covers Secretary of the Navy Kimball’s 1952 UFO sighting and the ONR saucer probe. He emphasizes the Air Force’s 20% unexplained rate and does not rule out the extraterrestrial hypothesis. (Walter Karig, “Operation UFO: The Official Truth about Flying Saucers,” American Weekly insert, San Francisco Examiner, November 22, 1953, pp. 4–5; Swords 217)
November 22 — 10:00 p.m. A man who works in the supply transport office of the RAAF Woomera Rocket Range near Woomera, South Australia, sees a green object like a saucer fly to the north between Woocalla and Birthday Siding. It is emitting blue exhaust. Another man driving the same route around 2:00 a.m. about 50 miles from Woomera sees a bluish-green circular object moving north. It is seen again by another man in the same area around 2:30 a.m. A fourth party sees two orange flares dropping from the sky near Pimba at 3:15 a.m. All of the objects are at an altitude of more than 5,000 feet. (Keith Basterfield, “Listing of Reports from Woomera, South Australia,” 2008)
November 23 — Evening. ADC radar detects an unknown object moving at 500 mph over Lake Superior. An F-89C Scorpion interceptor, piloted by Lt. Felix Moncla Jr., with radar observer Lt. Robert L. Wilson in the rear cockpit, is dispatched from Kinross AFB [now Chippewa County International Airport], south of Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. The jet heads toward the target under radar guidance. At 8,000 feet, 160 miles northwest of the Soo Locks, the blips of the F-89 and the UFO merge then fade from the screen. Nothing more is heard from the plane and no trace of it is found. A Pentagon spokesman claims the UFO was an RCAF C-47 that was never closer than 3-4 miles to the F-89, which has crashed for unknown reasons. In 2006, a group of divers claimed to have discovered the F-89 and taken photos on side-scan sonar, but the claim is a hoax. (NICAP, “UFO Intercept / Missing F-89 Case”; Keyhoe, FS Conspiracy, pp. 13–23; UFOEv, pp. 114–115; Yurko Bondarchuk, UFO Sightings, Landings, and Abductions, Methuen, 1979, pp. 106–109; Good Above, p. 273; Andrew Griffin, “Missing! Avoyelles Parish Man’s Disappearance Still a Mystery after 50 Years,” Alexandria (La.) Town Talk, July 20, 2003, pp. E1, E3; Clark III 654–656)
November 24 — The British Parliament discusses the November 3 Lee case and others. Nigel Birch, Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Defence, explains the sightings as experimental weather balloons. MP George Isaacs asks, “Will the Minister agree that this story of flying saucers is all ballooney?” (Good Above, p. 36)
November 28 — Frank Olson is depressed, incoherent, and uncommunicative after his LSD dose nine days earlier. His CIA contacts take him to a “doctor” in New York City, who prescribes him alcohol. He then plunges to his death from the 10th floor window of the Hotel Statler in New York City. The US government calls it a suicide, the Olson family alleges murder because, especially in the aftermath of his LSD experience, he has become a security risk who might divulge state secrets associated with highly classified CIA programs of which he has direct personal knowledge. A few days before his death, Olson quits his position as acting chief of the Special Operations Division at Camp Detrick [later Fort Detrick] in Frederick, Maryland, because of a severe moral crisis concerning the nature of his biological weapons research. Among Olson’s concerns are the development of assassination materials used by the CIA. The CIA’s use of biological warfare materials in covert operations, experimentation with biological weapons in populated areas, collaboration with former Nazi scientists
under Operation Paperclip, LSD mind-control research, and the use of psychoactive drugs during “terminal” interrogations under a program code-named Project ARTICHOKE. Later forensic evidence conflicts with the
official version of events; when Olson’s body is exhumed in 1994, cranial injuries indicate that Olson was knocked unconscious before he exited the window. The medical examiner terms Olson’s death a “homicide.” (Michael Ignatieff, “What Did the C.I.A. Do to His Father?” New York Times Magazine, April 1, 2001, pp. 56– 61; H. P. Albarelli Jr., A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Cold War Experiments, Trine Day, 2009; Stephen Kinzer, “The Secret History of Fort Detrick, the CIA’s Base for Mind Control Experiments,” Politico Magazine, September 15, 2019)
December — Wilbert B. Smith sets up his Department of Transport observatory at Shirley’s Bay, Ontario. His equipment includes an ionospheric reactor, electronic sound measurement devices, gamma-ray detector, gravimeter, magnetometer, and radio set. (Wikipedia, “Project Magnet (UFO)”; Good Above, pp. 185–186)
December — Noall Bryce Cornwell (who uses the pseudonyms Mel Noel and Guy Kirkwood) claims to have been stationed at Lowry AFB [now Wings Over the Rockies Air and Space Museum] in Denver, Colorado, and engaged in several dogfight-type maneuvers with UFOs involving gun-camera film. His stories are bogus, and later he runs phony investment scams and becomes a contactee who describes meeting pink-haired, platinum- skinned, fish-eating Martians said to be running a Mars-Earth transportation system. (Mel Noel, The Mel Noel Story, Saucerian, 1960; Good Above, pp. 273–277; Kevin D. Randle, “Mel Noel / Guy Kirkwood in the 1960s,” A Different Perspective, December 20, 2010; Adam Gorightly, “Mel Noel’s Phony Flying Saucer Trip to the Stars,” Chasing UFOs, April 17, 2020)
December — Australian UFO researcher Edgar Jarrold is visited four times by a mysterious man who swears him to secrecy. What the visitor tells him amazes him “beyond belief,” but he never publicly reveals who the man is. However, it turns out that the man is Gordon Deller, a minor figure in Australian ufology who has some quaint and original theories about the saucers. He believes that UFOs are piloted by etherians from another dimension. He tells Jarrold this, along with some insights into a geological cataclysm and telepathic communication. Harold Fulton, a ufologist from New Zealand, suspects Deller is a nut. However, Jarrold’s obsession with UFOs leads to the breakup of his family and the disintegration of his personal life by 1955. (Clark III 632–633)
December 7 — 9:30 p.m. Pfc Alfred V. De Bonise and Sgt1C James Conley of the 89th Anti-Aircraft Battalion at Fort George G. Meade, Maryland, spot a white object, “shining like a star.” It makes a noise like an artillery shell in flight. It moves erratically and eventually falls out of sight. (Good Above, p. 280; Loren E. Gross, UFOs, a History: 1953, August–December, The Author, 1990, p. 60)
December 7 — Radio Moscow proclaims that saucers are “figments of the imagination of western warmongers.” (Frank Edwards, FS Serious Business, Bantam ed., 1966, p. 156)
December 8 — The CIA reports that UFO sightings have fallen dramatically in 1953, though there are some of “possible scientific intelligence value.” (Jenny Randles, UFO Conspiracy, Cassell, 1987, p. 45)
December 9 — 3:45 p.m. Charles Huaut sees a luminous, golden, round object poised motionless at a high altitude over Saint-Émilion, Gironde, France. After 10 minutes it noiselessly changes position and assumes the form of several horseshoes enveloped in smoke trails. Then it disappears. (Central Intelligence Agency, “Sightings of Unidentified Flying Objects,” April 20, 1954, p. 2; ClearIntent, p. 130)
December 15 — 2:37 p.m. While flying a Transair Sweden DC-3 in the vicinity of Hässleholm, Skåne, Sweden, pilot Ulf Christiernsson and flight mechanic Olle Johansson encounter an “unorthodox, metallic, symmetric, round object” closing in on their aircraft for about 10 seconds. It passes about 1,970 feet under the DC-3 at an altitude of 7,055 feet. Air Force Gen. Bengt Nordenskiöld calls in reports from all relevant Swedish radar stations to identify the object, and the Defence Research Institute spends many hours reconstructing the event. However, the owner of a local perfume company confessed in late December to releasing 300 hydrogen-filled balloons south of Hässleholm as an advertising promotion around 12:30 p.m. that day. (Swords 365)
December 16 — The British Air Ministry sends orders to all RAF stations saying that UFO reports are to be classified “Restricted” and personnel must not communicate any sighting information to unauthorized persons. Reports must be sent to the air intelligence branch DDI (Tech) that is now responsible for UFO investigations. (UFOFiles2, pp. 57–60)
December 16 — 4:58 p.m. Lockheed Skunk Works chief Clarence L. “Kelly” Johnson and his wife Althea (near Agoura, California) and a Lockheed crew (Rudy Thoren, Roy Wimmer, and 3 others) flying the WV-2 Warning Star aircraft near Long Beach, California, independently of each other observe a black flying-wing (or ellipse or crescent-shaped) object about 170–230 feet wide flying at about 15,000 ±2,000 feet altitude to the west, hovering about 30–60 miles away. At 5:04 p.m., after four minutes (to the Johnsons) and six minutes (to WV-2 crew) the UFO suddenly takes off in a shallow climb accelerating to approximately earth escape velocity (25,000 mph) to the west over the Pacific. It disappears in 10–13 seconds (to WV-2 crew) or in 90 seconds (to Johnson using 8x binoculars) after reaching 90+
miles altitude. (NICAP, “The Lockheed UFO Case”; Joel Carpenter, “The Lockheed UFO Case, 1953,” IUR 26, no. 3 (Fall 2001): 6–9, 33; Joel Carpenter, “The Lockheed UFO Case,” 2001; Sparks, p. 206)
December 17 — After the crew of a Swedish airliner reports a wingless circular UFO over Hässleholm, Sweden, the Swedish Armed Forces orders a full-scale investigation. Capt. Ulf Christiernsson says the object is an “entirely unorthodox, metallic, symmetrical, and circular object.” Later reports claim it is a radiosonde balloon. (UFOEv, p. 121; Sparks, p. 206)
December 17 — A memo from Todos M. Odarenko, chief of the CIA/OSI physics and electronics division, condescendingly reviews the status of various government UFO efforts. (Todos M. Odarenko, “Current Status of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOB) Project,” December 17, 1953)
December 23 — USAF Intelligence Col. George E. Perry writes to Gen. Woodbury M. Burgess, ADC Deputy for Intelligence at Ent AFB [now the US Olympic Training Center] in Colorado Springs, Colorado, recommending that when the 4602nd investigates a UFO sighting and it is not a conventional object, personnel should state “The information on this sighting will be analyzed by the Air Technical Intelligence Center at Dayton, Ohio,” and leave it at that. (Col. George E. Perry, Letter to Brig. Gen. W. M. Burgess, December 23, 1953)
December 24 — 8:04 a.m. US Navy Lts. J. B. Howard and L. D. Linhard, flying F9F-2 jet fighters, see 10 silver oval objects flying in formation at 450+ mph, straight and level, over El Cajon, California. (NICAP, “Navy Lts.
Encounter 10 Oval Objects”; Sparks, p. 206)
December 26 — The first of a series of articles in the Washington (D.C.) Times-Herald by Richard Reilly questions the Air Force’s openness about UFOs. (Dolan, p. 145)
December 29 — Keyhoe has a confrontation with Delos Smith, the science editor of the United Press wire service, and a UP executive editor. Smith is preparing a three-part series debunking Keyhoe’s claims because a “certain Air Force general swears your book is a complete fraud.” Forewarned by Frank Edwards, Keyhoe counters his arguments with documentation. (Keyhoe, FS Conspiracy, pp. 85–88)
December 30 — 9:05 p.m. Pfc Norman Viet, on guard duty at the tank park in Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia, watches a blinking red light about 18 inches in diameter moving slowly over a tree line about 200 feet away. It soon drops down out of sight. Fifteen minutes later it is seen again, rising up and floating toward the tank shed. Viet says it is completely soundless. At 10:15 p.m. it returns, also witnessed by Sgt. Francis R. Salinder, who alerts the base and a combat team searches the area. At midnight, a red light appears above the search area, spooking a guard. (Wilkins, FS Uncensored, Citadel, 1955, p. 202; Washington (D.C.) Daily News, January 5, 1954; Loren E. Gross, UFOs, a History: 1953, August–December, The Author, 1990, p. 75)
1954
1954 — Jim and Coral Lorenzen move from Wisconsin to Alamogordo, New Mexico, to work as civilian employees at Holloman AFB. (Clark III 50)
1954 — Contactee George Van Tassel begins building the Integratron at Giant Rock, California, based on the rejuvenation techniques imparted to him by space aliens from Venus. (Wikipedia, “Integratron”; Jody Rosen, “Welcome to the Integratron,” New York Times Magazine, August 20, 2014; Lesla Miller Schnur, “G. W. Van Tassel’s Integratron,” The Haunted Librarian, August 27, 2021)
1954 — An official in the UK Deputy Directorate of Intelligence (Technical) mentions to investigator Ronald N. Russell that the DDI has 15,000 reports on file since 1947 stored in nine drawers in three wooden filing cabinets with Yale locks, doubly secured by a hinged plate locked with a large padlock. (John Pitt, “‘Tell Us Please, Mr.
Birch,’” Flying Saucer Review 2, no. 5 (Sept./Oct. 1956): 10–13; Good Above, p. 33)
1954 — A promotional photo of a Martin B-57 Canberra bomber taken near Edwards Air Force Base in California shows a saucer-like object in the upper right portion of the frame. No one actually reports seeing the object, which seems to be trailing the B-57 in flight. NICAP photoanalyst Ralph Rankow points out that the object has dimension, does not appear to be a scratch or rub on the film, and has a pattern of light and shadow consistent with the rest of the photo. (Story, pp. 36–37; Robert A. Schmidt, “The Strange Case of the B-57 Photographs,” Flying Saucer Review Case Histories, no. 6 (August 1971): 1–2)
1954 — The powerful Type 80 centimetric radars introduced in the UK this year are plagued by radar “angels” that become a hazard for air traffic controllers. A Fighter Command investigation concludes that most of them are caused by migrating seabirds, and others are the result of “anomalous propagation.” Later computers filter out smaller echoes and increase the strength of those created by aircraft. (David Clarke, “Gremlins and Black Projects,” Fortean Times 291 (August 2012): 26–27)
1954 — After RCAF pilots fail to intercept several UFOs in Canadian air space, the Defence Research Board sets up a restricted landing field near the Suffield Experimental Station [now CFB Suffield], Alberta. All RCAF planes and commercial aircraft are restricted from the area. However, the effort is abandoned after the government determines that UFOs are not a national security risk. The project is kept secret until July 1967 when it is revealed by Defence Minister Paul Hellyer. (“UFO Landing Site was 13-Year Secret,” Ottawa (Ont.) Journal, July 20, 1967, p. 5)
January — Ed J. Sullivan‘s Civilian Saucer Investigation Los Angeles disbands. (“CSI Conclusions,” Civilian Saucer Investigation Quarterly Bulletin 1, no. 4 (Winter 1954): 7–9)
January — 5:00 a.m. A strange object streaks across the sky over Harts Range, Northern Territory, Australia, seen and heard by four Native Australians. On the same day, an anonymous photographer is taking photos of Mount Gillen, Northern Territory, when suddenly an enormous (150 feet) round object appears from behind it. It moves high, then drops low. He takes a photo, then it shoots off at high speed to the west. The photo, reproduced in the newspaper, shows a dubious-looking round object on edge with six spokes. (Alice Springs Centralian Advocate, January 15, 1954; Alice Springs Centralian Advocate, February 5, 1954; Keith Basterfield, “Cold Case: The Mount Gillen Photograph, Alice Springs, 1954,” Unidentified Aerial Phenomena–Scientific Research, January 12, 2012)
January 1 — 10:15 a.m. Capt. Douglas Barker, a pilot with Australian National Airways, is at his home in Doncaster East, Melbourne, Victoria. He sees a “metallic, mushroom-shaped object” flying over the Yarra River valley toward the Templestowe brickworks in the northwest. He estimates it is traveling at 700 mph at a height of 2,000 feet. Its apparent size is four times that of a DC-4 aircraft. It is oscillating rapidly in and out of thick cloud. It is elliptical with a “long shaft about the same length as its body hanging below it.” Total duration of the sighting is 12 seconds. (NICAP, “Mushroom Flying over Yarra Valley”)
January 1–2 — 10:35 p.m.–12:05 a.m. Navy pilot Lt. JG George G. Morgan of Naval Air Station Lakehurst [now Joint Base McGuire–Dix–Lakehurst], Toms River, New Jersey, police chief Richard Clement, police officer Oliver G. Osborne, and other witnesses see 3–12 round white objects with fuzzy edges slightly smaller than the full moon hovering in the south for 90 minutes as 2 objects circled around another one. They then switch places. Some witnesses attempt to drive toward the objects to investigate. The objects suddenly depart to the southwest at extremely high speed, growing smaller until they disappear in 1–2 seconds. Multiple independent witnesses across a baseline of at least 12 miles allow for triangulation that locates the objects near Beach Haven, New Jersey, from distances of 15–40 miles. At least five witnesses use binoculars. Hynek calculates a departure speed of 90,000 mph, a hovering altitude of 4 miles, and a diameter of 1,500 feet. (NICAP, “Multiple-Witness Sightings Triangulate Location”; Sparks, p. 207; Swords 223–224)
January 4 — Shortly after 9:00 p.m. A round luminous machine, coming from the south, lands at the Marignane Airfield [now Marseille Provence Airport], Bouches-du-Rhône, France. There is only one witness present, a fireman at the airport named Chesneau. The machine disappears while he is telephoning the control tower. Careful scrutiny of the runway the next morning turns up a few pieces of metallic debris. The story is confirmed by a Marseille resident who is driving from Arles to Marseille and sees a large, round, reddish fireball, but places the time at 10:45 p.m. (Jimmy Guieu, Les soucoupes volantes viennent d’un autre monde, Fleuve Noir, 1954; ClearIntent, p. 132; Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” March 15, 2003)
January 6 — The Cleveland Press runs the headline “Brass Curtain Hides Flying Saucers” and reveals that ATIC will no longer allow reporters seeking UFO information into Wright-Patterson AFB in Ohio. Its reporter is given the runaround on the Utah film. (“Air Force Closes Brass Curtain,” Knoxville (Tenn.) News-Sentinel, January 14, 1954, p. 3; UFOEv, p. 134)
January 7 — 4:27 a.m. A fiery disk, followed by a luminous trail, is seen in Arras, Pas-de-Calais, France. The disc remains motionless in the sky for an instant, after which it flies away and disappears over the horizon. (ClearIntent, p. 133; Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” December 4, 2005)
January 9 — Three residents of Lunéville, Meurthe-et-Moselle, France, see a round object flying from north to south. The object flies more slowly than a jet plane and leaves a luminous yellow trail. It flies noiselessly, although it appears to be at a low altitude. Several students of the College de Lunéville also see the object. (ClearIntent, p. 132; Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” December 28, 2004)
January 10 — 5:25–5:40 p.m. James E. McDonald, two other University of Chicago meteorologists, and another passenger are driving on Hwy 83 north of Sonoita, Arizona, when McDonald spots a brilliant white stationary object in the southwest above the Santa Rita Mountains about 10 miles away. They lose sight of it as the car moves on. McDonald searches carefully for alternate explanations, but can find none, so he reports the sighting to the Air Force in a 4-page letter. (Clark III 695; Sparks, p. 207)
January 13 — Mutual Radio broadcaster Frank Edwards alleges on his show that the wreckage of a flying saucer is being held in a “West Coast military field.” (Clark III 330–331)
January 13–16 — Gen. Woodbury M. Burgess chairs a conference at Ent AFB [now the US Olympic Training Center] in Colorado Springs, Colorado, with 4602nd officers Capt. Joseph A. Cybulski and Capt. Bellovin and emphasizes that it is now the agency responsible to ATIC for investigating UFOs. Cybulski says that “We here in Headquarters will keep a complete file on all the sightings. That’s why we want the information copied. We will file them under separate headings, such as the type of personnel involved, military or civilian, or air-lines. We will record it under the type of object it was eventually determined to be.” Capt. Cybulski leaves for Dayton, Ohio, the next day to coordinate activities more closely. He reports that Hynek is “ready to quit” because he is “ridiculed by members of my profession for chasing these imaginary objects.” But Burgess persuades him to stay. (CUFON, “4602d AISS Unit History Sampler, Part 3 of 7 Parts”; Brian Skow and Terry Endres, “The 4602d Air Intelligence Service Squadron and UFOs,” IUR 20, no. 5 (Winter 1995): 9–10; Capt. Joseph A. Cybulski, “How the Air Force Investigated UFOs,” IUR 20, no. 5 (Winter 1995): 11, 30–32)
January 18 — Cosette Weiss of Las Cruces, New Mexico, is visiting the Kilbourne Hole, a maar volcanic crater in the Potrillo Volcanic Field of southern New Mexico, to collect gemstones with a companion, Mrs. Sanders. They discover 25–30 disc-shaped tracks in the sand. The largest are about 2 feet in diameter, perfectly round, and consist of four concentric rings. They find more fresh tracks on January 22. Sanders reports this to White Sands Proving Grounds. Two Army security agents, Capt. Ross Orcutt and CID agent Henry Herman, spend the night of February 6 at the location and report that the tracks are “nothing more than a combination of wind, sand, and roots.” The mystery lights seen in the area by Weiss are labeled “vehicular traffic.” (“Report from the Readers,” Fate 7, no. 6 (June 1954): 109–129; Michael D. Swords, “Fun and Games in the Desert near Las Cruces,” IUR 30, no. 3 (May 2006): 21)
January 18 — 1:30 p.m. Many people in Saint-Arnaud [now El Eulma], Algeria, observe an object that leaves a double trail of white smoke, making an immense circle over the town. Several officers at Bordj de la Remonte fort (southwest of Magra) hear the object make a strange sound. It seems to arrive from the north. A meteorological station near Oued Hmimim (southeast of Constantine) observes a double trail of smoke at 2:00 p.m., but it concludes that the smoke comes from a plane flying at great altitude. At 2:30 p.m., inhabitants of Sétif see an object arrive from the east, emitting bluish smoke trails and moving relatively slowly. After circling above the town for several seconds, it suddenly heads back in the direction of Saint-Arnaud at great speed. Witnesses describe it as it being cigar-shaped and flying at high altitude. Finally, at 4:45 p.m., a large, luminous, rectangular- shaped object is seen over Ouled Djellal (125 miles southwest of Sétif) for over 30 minutes following a rectilinear course. The object comes from the east and disappears toward the west. (ClearIntent, p. 133)
January 25 — The British Air Ministry and the British War Office order airmen and soldiers to tell the public nothing about UFOs. (Harold T. Wilkins, Flying Saucers on the Attack, Citadel, 1954, p. 318)
January 25 — 10:00 p.m. A civilian employee and astronomer, Robert D. Schaldach in the Technical Service Unit at White Sands Proving Grounds, New Mexico, is setting up his ballistic camera to monitor a missile test. As he looks at the stars to calibrate his instrument, he notices a yellow-white light moving from northeast to southeast in a shallow arc. It pulses in brightness at regular intervals. At the same time, another observer 17 miles to the southeast also sees the object. They perform some triangulation measurements and determine that the object is about 12 miles distant and moving at 12,000 mph. Schaldach says it is not a meteor. Blue Book, no doubt Hynek, labels it as a meteor. (Michael D. Swords, “Fun and Games in the Desert near Las Cruces,” IUR 30, no. 3 (May 2006): 20–21)
January 27 — The US successfully launches a Redstone surface-to-surface missile that flies 55 miles from Cape Canaveral, Florida. (Wikipedia, “PGM-11 Redstone”)
January 28 — Australian Minister for External Affairs Richard Casey suggests there is a correlation between UFO sightings and “periods of intense meteorite activity.” (Swords 374)
January 29 — Afternoon. Mr. and Mrs. J. A. Whitaker are driving 6 miles south of Santa Ana, California, when they see a round object emitting a blurry light-blue light moving off a hilly field. It passes over their car at an altitude of 25 feet. The radio goes blank and the motor coughs and continues to act roughly after the UFO had gone. Whitaker estimates it is 60 feet in diameter and traveling at 600 mph. It makes a vertical ascent and disappears. (Schopick, p. 5)
February — Civilian Saucer Intelligence of New York is founded by Ted Bloecher, Isabel Davis, and Alexander Mebane. The group holds regular meetings, sponsors lecturers, and begins publishing a CSI Newsletter in February 1955. It disbands in 1959. (Wikipedia, “Civilian Saucer Intelligence”; CSI Publication, no. 0 (April 23, 1954); Clark III 241)
February — Clara John begins publishing The Little Listening Post newsletter in Washington, D.C. It continues through August 1965. (Little Listening Post, February 9, 1954)
February — Mr. and Mrs. Forster of Peekskill, New York, see a UFO on the ground with a woman close by. She holds a tube in one hand and a box in the other, wears luminous clothing and a hood over part of her head. Mrs. Forster has to be taken to the hospital in a state of shock. (Dominick C. Lucchesi, “They Saw a Saucer Woman,” The Saucerian 2, no. 2 (September 1954): 12–17; Vallée, Magonia, p. 205; Clark III 267)
February — Newlyweds Ernest L. Norman and Ruth E. Norman found a contactee group, the Unarius Academy of Science, in Los Angeles, California. Ernest, a spiritualist medium, wants the group to promote the interdimensional science of life expounded in the books he has written, all of them channeled psychically from extraterrestrial intelligences. Both claim impressive credentials from past lives. Ruth styles herself the Archangel Uriel and after the death of Ernest in 1971, she becomes the public face of Unarius. Before her death in 1993, she predicts a mass landing of flying saucers in 2001 on a piece of scrubland near the Unarius headquarters in El Cajon, California. (Wikipedia, “Unarius Academy of Science”; Clark III 1186–1187; Douglas Curran, In Advance of the Landing: Folk Concepts of Outer Space, Abbeville, 1985, pp. 27–37)
February 1 — 10:00 a.m. Mrs. W. J. Daily of La Puente, California, sees a silvery, bright, round object through binoculars. It tilts, revealing a fiery-red bottom. The UFO spins and drifts away with an odd-looking vapor trail. A large amount of cobwebby substance falls on her property. She takes three samples to the Mount Wilson Observatory. (San Fernando (Calif.) Valley Times, February 15, 1954; James C. McNamara, “Angel’s Hair,” Pageant 10 (November 1954): 52–56; Loren E. Gross, UFOs, a History: 1954, January–May, The Author, 1990,
pp. 24–25; Story, p. 19; Michael D. Swords, “Angel Hair: Spindrift between Worlds,” IUR 32, no. 1 (August 2008): 4–5)
February 4 — 11:00 p.m. A target is detected by the Carswell AFB [now Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base Fort Worth] Ground Control Approach radar, near Fort Worth, Texas, at a distance of 13–15 miles to the southwest. A “mystery aircraft” passes over Carswell tower at just over 3,000 feet. Seen through binoculars, the UFO has a long fuselage, elliptical wings, some kind of stabilizer, a bright light on its nose and tail, two yellowish lights on the bottom, and possible lights on each wing tip. It is silent. The report is sent directly to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, CIA, and NSA. (NICAP, “Radar/Visual with Two Radars”; Good Above, pp. 281–282, 495–496; Sparks, p. 208)
February 13 — Jim G. Lucas of Scripps-Howard papers reports that representatives of major US airlines will meet in Los Angeles with Military Air Transport Service intelligence officers to discuss speeding up UFO reporting procedures. “Airline pilots are asked not to discuss their sightings publicly or give them to newspapers.” (“Airline Pilots Sighting 5–10 ‘Saucers’ Nightly,” Pittsburgh (Pa.) Press, February 13, 1954, pp. 1, 3; UFOEv, p. 134)
February 13 — Astronomer Clyde Tombaugh gives a talk to the Astronomical Society of Las Cruces, New Mexico. He predicts an increase in UFO sightings and tells the audience to keep its eyes open and be ready to report sightings. (Keyhoe, FS Conspiracy, p. 99)
February 15 — American syndicated columnist Dorothy Kilgallen writes: “Flying saucers are regarded as of such vital importance that they will be the subject of a special hush-hush meeting of world military heads next summer.” (Dorothy Kilgallen, “Voice of Broadway” column, Dover (Ohio) Daily Reporter, February 15, 1954, p. 8)
February 15 — Aviation Week publishes an article describing new Soviet jet bombers capable of carrying a nuclear bomb to the US. The aircraft is the Myasishchev M-4 Bison. The rumors are soon debated publicly in the press and Congress. The Air Force begins promoting its unfounded myth of a bomber gap, in which the Soviet Union has 500 bombers capable of delivering nuclear weapons. (Wikipedia, “Myasishchev M-4”; David A. Anderton, “Pictures Reveal Reds’ New ‘Sunday Punch,’” Aviation Week, February 15, 1954, pp. 12–13)
February 15 — Morning. Stephen Darbishire, 13, and his cousin Adrian Meyer, 8, set off for an expedition to the Old Man of Coniston, a fell in the Lake District, England, armed with a Kodak box camera. Meyer notices an object above Dow Crag with a silvery, glassy appearance, shining like aluminum. It glides toward them and approaches within 400 yards, travelling at tremendous speed, and then stops suddenly and hovers noiselessly, in the sky.
Darbishire takes two photos, which resemble those of scoutships taken by George Adamski in the US. A probable hoax, although Darbishire still refuses to say anything explicit about the photos, which no longer exist. (Clark III 42; Leonard G. Cramp, Space, Gravity, and the Flying Saucer, British Book Centre, 1955; Good Above, p. 377; David Clarke and Andy Roberts, “UFO Hoaxing and the Story of Stephen Darbishire,” Magonia, no. 75 (July 2001)
February 17 — Commercial airline representatives meet with Military Air Transport Service officers at the Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles, California, and are told that pilots are subject to JANAP 146 (CIRVIS) and must radio reports to the nearest airport and make no public statements or face a prison term of 10 years and/or a fine of
$10,000. (Good Above, pp. 146, 283)
February 19 — CIA agent Morris “Morse” Allen simulates the ultimate experiment in hypnosis: the creation of a “Manchurian Candidate,” or programmed assassin. Allen’s victim is a secretary whom he puts into a deep trance and tells to keep sleeping until he orders otherwise. He then hypnotizes a second secretary and tells her that if she cannot wake up her friend, “her rage would be so great that she would not hesitate to ‘kill.’” Allen leaves a pistol nearby, which the secretary has no way of knowing is unloaded. Even though she has earlier expressed a fear of firearms of any kind, she picks up the gun and pulls the trigger on her sleeping friend. After Allen brings the “killer” out of her trance, she has apparent amnesia for the event, denying she could ever shoot anyone. (John D. Marks, The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate”: The CIA and Mind Control, Times Books, 1978, pp. 182– 186)
February 20–21 — President Eisenhower is on a golf vacation at Smoke Tree Ranch in Palm Springs, California, when he breaks the porcelain cap of his “upper left central incisor” and has it repaired by Dr. Francis A. Purcell. However, the incident is not reported in the press, and rumors start buzzing that he made a secret trip to Edwards Air Force Base to view the remains of aliens who had crashed at Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. Later stories claim he actually visited with live aliens and conducted a treaty with them. The lack of any dental record from Purcell’s office has fueled the rumors, but Ike’s dental history is thoroughly covered in the November 1995 issue of the Bulletin of the History of Dentistry. (“‘Object’ Studied at Edwards Air Base as ‘Brass Curtain’ Falls around Saucer Data,” Flying Saucer News-Service Research Bulletin 1, no. 9 (August 20, 1955): 3; Wilkins, FS Uncensored, Citadel, 1955, pp. 45–48; Riley Crabb, Flying Saucers and the Coming Space Probes, The Author, 1959; Michael D. Swords, “Tales from the Barker Zone,” IUR 17, no. 6 (Nov./Dec. 1992): 4–10; Jerome Clark, “A Catalog of Early Crash Claims,” IUR 18, no. 4 (July/Aug. 1993): 18, 24; James M. Mixson, “A History of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Oral Health,” Journal of the History of Dentistry 43, no. 3 (November 1995): 93–103; Good Need, pp. 208–209; Juan A. Lorenzo Rivas, “President Eisenhower’s ‘E.T.’ Encounter: What Really Happened at Muroc Base?” Flying Saucer Review 44, no. 3 (Autumn 1999): 2–6; Gordon Creighton, “More on the ‘Muroc’ Story,” Flying Saucer Review 44, no. 3 (Autumn 1999): 6–10; Michael E. Salla, “Eisenhower’s 1954 Meeting with Extraterrestrials: The Fiftieth Anniversary of First Contact?” Research Study No. 8, Exopolitics, February 12, 2004; Peter Carlson, “Ike and the Alien Ambassadors,” Washington Post, February 19, 2004; John Joyce, “Ike’s Space Alien Encounter,” The Ike Blog, November 10, 2011; Clark III 330–331)
February 23 — Scripps-Howard papers report that the “nation’s 8,500 commercial airline pilots have been seeing a lot of unusual objects while flying at night, here and overseas.” They confirm that plans for a detailed reporting system were agreed upon at the February 17 meeting in Los Angeles, California, so that the Air Force can investigate quickly. Each airline is to have an “internal security specialist” as a liaison with the military. (“Flying Saucers Reports System to Be Organized,” Albuquerque (N.Mex.) Tribune, February 23, 1954, p. 10; UFOEv, p. 134)
March? — Two Native Australians, employees of Arthur Pope, see a UFO at close range 100 miles south of Alice Springs, Northern Territory. One named Sonny is riding up over a ridge when a spherical object flies directly toward him then veers away. Sonny feels a heavy wind when the UFO passes. Others see the object, which has a glassy appearance, with four trails of smoke coming from each side. (Alice Springs Centralian Advocate, April 2, 1954; Keith Basterfield, “Alice Springs: 1954 Encounter,” Unidentified Aerial Phenomena—Scientific Research, February 7, 2012)
March — Cincinnati, Ohio, businessman Thomas B. Eickhoff informs Keyhoe that Flying Saucers from Outer Space was “not submitted to the air force for authentication prior to publication,” although it contains official UFO reports. (Keyhoe, FS Conspiracy, p. 108)
March 1 — 6:45 a.m. Castle Bravo is the most powerful nuclear device detonated by the US and its first lithium deuteride–fueled thermonuclear weapon. The test’s yield is 15 megatons of TNT, 2.5 times the predicted 6.0 megatons (due to unforeseen additional reactions involving lithium-7), which leads to the unexpected radioactive contamination of areas to the east of Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. At the time, it is the most powerful artificial explosion in history. Fallout, the heaviest of which in the form of pulverized surface coral from the detonation, falls on residents of Rongelap and Utirik atolls, while the more particulate and gaseous fallout spreads around the world. The inhabitants of the islands are not evacuated until three days later and suffer radiation sickness. Twenty-three crew members of the Japanese fishing vessel Daigo Fukuryū Maru are also contaminated by the heavy fallout, experiencing acute radiation syndrome. The blast incites international reaction over atmospheric thermonuclear testing. (Wikipedia, “Castle Bravo”)
March 1 — Morning. Airborne Radar Operator W/O Olin H. Hasty is aboard an RB-36 controller aircraft monitoring the Castle Bravo test at Bikini Atoll. Shortly after the detonation, the RB-36 is flying at 40,000 feet and Hasty picks up two or three unidentified targets operating above 60,000 feet. From the cockpit the pilot and copilot can see the objects, which are flying in holding patterns above the area of the blast. Task force headquarters advises them that
the objects are Canberra aircraft flown by the Royal Australian Air Force on air-sampling missions. However, there is only one British Canberra in the area at the time. (Nukes 110–113)
March 1 — An article in American Aviation planted by the Air Force attributes the latest wave of sightings to Keyhoe’s 1953 book Flying Saucers from Outer Space. (“The Saucers Again,” American Aviation 17 (March 1, 1954): 3; Keyhoe, FS Conspiracy, p. 104; Loren E. Gross, UFOs, a History: 1954, January–May, The Author, 1990, p. 49)
March 1 — Numerous bathers at the beaches near Montevideo, Uruguay, observe a metallic disc emitting yellowish reflections. It remains stationary for 2 minutes at an altitude of several thousand feet. (ClearIntent, p. 133; Lorenzen, The Whole Story, Signet, 1969; Loren E. Gross, UFOs, a History: 1954, January–May, The Author, 1990, p. 45)
March 1 — 2:30 p.m. Employees at Carrasco International Airport in Montevideo, Uruguay, watch a strange oval object above the northeast horizon. It changes shape and ejects a smaller body that moves below and behind. An operator named de Rizzardo in the control tower sees an oval object with protuberances, accompanied by a pair of smaller bodies. Chief Controller Pedro V. Ocamp is still fumbling with binoculars as the objects speed away. (Loren E. Gross, UFOs, a History: 1954, January–May, The Author, 1990, p. 45)
March 5 — Evening. At Nouasseur Air Base [now closed] near Casablanca, Morocco, crews of USAF KC-97 aerial tanker planes and a C-54 transport see one or two white or amber objects or lights make passes at the aircraft on collision courses as they practice ground-controlled approach landings. At 7:15 p.m., KC-97 pilots Capt. G. E. Brown, 1st Lt. L. B. Gordon, and 1st Lt. J. P. Glover, 301st Air Refueling Squadron, 301st Bomb Wing, while flying a KC-97 to a practice landing at 1,500 feet about 5-8 miles southwest of the base, see two white lights to the right on an apparent collision course. The KC-97 takes evasive action. Later [at 8:20 p.m.? 9:20 p.m.?], after landing and takeoff, they see the same or similar two white lights on the same course from the south on a collision course and they made an evasive 360° turn. At 7:38 p.m., pilots Capt. Robert R. Zadnick, Lt. Paul R. Fisher, and Lt. George A. Kerr flying another KC-97 at 1,500 feet about 5 miles southwest of Nouasseur base see a light at about the same altitude and to the left, apparently headed west on a collision course. As it crosses, they see 2 lights like jets but with no aircraft running lights. One light passes over and one under the KC-97. At 9:55 p.m., senior pilot Capt. William M. Pond, copilot Lt. I. W. Gilchrist, and navigator Capt. James F. Pullen, while flying a C-54 at 2,000 feet at Nouasseur base see a white or amber light like an aircraft landing light at about the same altitude approaching on a collision course heading west 2–3 miles away. It then turns onto a direct head-on course, passing within 2 miles, then suddenly disappears like turning off a light. It then reappears 10–15 seconds later, hovers, descends to the ground, then rises and disappears behind the C-54 after completing its turn onto final landing approach. No radar or other visual contact is made. (NICAP, “Aircraft (2) Encounter Lights on Collision Course”; Sparks, p. 210)
March 5 — A photo supposedly taken near Rouen, France, by a fighter pilot is actually a retouched photo showing the 1950 McMinnville, Oregon, UFO photo taken by Paul Trent. (NICAP, “RAF Flying Review Photo”)
March 8 — 11:07 p.m. A red disc-shaped UFO flies over Laredo AFB [now Laredo International Airport], Texas. It tilts to a vertical orientation and then shoots straight up into the sky. It is reported by a pilot. Ten to twenty nocturnal lights in a crescent formation—possibly a single crescent-shaped object—fly over San Antonio, Texas. They make no sound. (Keyhoe, FS Conspiracy, p. 110)
March 10 — JANAP 146 (C), “Communications Instructions for Reporting Vital Intelligence Sightings from Aircraft and Waterborne Sources.” This directive allows waterborne sources for CIRVIS and adds MERINT reports. Civilian pilots must also report UFOs to the Air Force and refrain from talking about it. (Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Communications–Electronics Committee, “JANAP 146(C) Communications Instructions for Reporting Vital Intelligence Sightings from Airborne and Waterborne Sources,” March 10, 1954; Good Above, p. 283; Antonio F. Rullán, “Blue Book UFO Reports at Sea by Ships,” December 10, 2002)
March 10 — Leonard H. Stringfield founds Civilian Research, Interplanetary Flying Objects (CRIFO) in Cincinnati, Ohio. (Clark III 1114)
March 12 — 9:35 a.m. USAF 1st Lt. Robert Johnson, flying an F-86 over Nouasseur Air Base [now closed] near Casablanca, Morocco, chases an object at more than 530 mph for 30 seconds, but is unable to catch it. The object appears to be the size of a fighter plane but has neither tanks nor vapor trails. (NICAP, “F-86 Chases Object at 500 MPH”; Sparks, p. 210)
March 15 — A memo about a recent Project Second Storey meeting show that experiments at Wilbert B. Smith’s Shirley’s Bay detecting station is running experiments correlating UFO reports with magnetic disturbances and gamma radiation. It recommends looking into as yet undiscovered gravity waves. (Good Above, pp. 187–188)
Mid-March — Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, invites probable UFO photo hoaxer Stephen Darbishire to Buckingham Palace in London, England, to relate his story to an aide. A full report of the interview is sent to the duke, who is in Australia. (Good Above, p. 39)
March 18 — 4:25 p.m. Two conservation officers stationed on Hecla Island in Lake Winnipeg, Manitoba, are driving their snowmobile across the frozen lake when they see a slim silver object 100 feet long and only 8 feet thick. They watch the object as it changes orientation from vertical to horizontal and back again. They estimate it is 15,000 feet high and 10 miles away. (Chris Rutkowski, Canada’s UFOs: Declassified, August Night, 2022, p. 69)
March 23 — Capt. William B. Nash gives a talk at a Greater Miami (Florida) Aviation Association luncheon at the Seven Seas Restaurant and offers his assessment of the Air Force’s handling of UFO investigations. He suspects that the Air Force has concluded that UFOs are a real phenomenon, but they fear creating a state of panic by admitting as much. (Michael Hall, “Was There a Second Estimate of the Situation?” IUR 27, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 11)
March 24 — Night. Civil Defense Deputy Coordinator Adolph Wagner sees 13 sharply defined triangular objects moving west to east over Baltimore, Maryland, in a V formation. They are glowing a fluorescent blue. From the north, a larger object approaches and stations itself in front of the V. When a commercial airliner appears, the objects split formation. Six execute a sharp turn, the color shifts to purplish, and they head toward the airplane in single file.
The other 8 objects continue flying east. (“Multiple Object Sightings by Creditable Observers Continue,” CRIFO Orbit, July 2, 1954, p. 3; UFOEv, p. 66)
March 25 — 3:20 p.m. USMC Capt. Dan C. Holland is flying one of three jets with the 3rd Marine Air Wing on an easterly heading at Fort Lauderdale, Florida, at about 26,000 feet and 400+ mph. He sees a gleaming white, ball- shaped object with a gold ring around the lower third, about 2 times size of his jet, descending vertically on a collision course. He takes evasive action and radios the other jet pilots to look. The object suddenly stops 3,000– 4,000 feet above his jet. He banks toward it and activates the gun camera, but the UFO accelerates and disappears to the east at tremendous speed in about 15 seconds. The other two pilots flying ahead of him do not see the object. (NICAP, “Ball with Golden Rings Stops near F-9F”; Sparks, p. 211; Loren E. Gross, UFOs, a History: 1954, January–May, The Author, 1990, pp. 61–62)
March 28 — 1:25 a.m. Capt. Willis T. Sperry and his copilot on United Air Lines Flight 600, flying east at 19,000 feet 12 miles east of Cherokee (near Creston), Wyoming, spot a bright green glowing object at 12°–15° above the horizon coming downward at an angle of 30° to the left of vertical and disappearing behind a cloud bank. It is also seen by the pilot of a DC-3 west of Sinclair, Wyoming, at 13,000 feet. (Good Above, pp. 283–284; Sparks, p. 211)
March 28 — Following the success of Flying Saucers Have Landed, George Adamski gives a talk to the Detroit Flying Saucer Club at the Masonic Temple in Detroit, Michigan, which draws 4,700 people. (“Palomar Mountain, 1940– 1960: From Obscurity to World Fame,” The Adamski Case, September 22, 2019)
Late spring — Noon. A family living in a cottage on the outskirts of Norco, California, is sitting down for lunch when they hear a metallic droning sound. The mother and daughter go outside and see an object like a rowboat with a transparent dome, 20 feet long and 10 feet wide, pass slowly overhead, then stop and hover over a nearby tree. Inside the dome are five helmeted men staring at the witnesses. Their “rather long faces” are olive-colored, and their eyes and hair are dark. After a minute the droning sound resumes, and the object takes off slowly. (Donald
B. Hanlon, “Occupants Observed at Norco,” Flying Saucer Review 14, no. 3 (May/June 1968): 15–16; Clark III 267)
April — 2:00 p.m. Two male witnesses watch through binoculars a vividly white object hovering high in the sky for 10 minutes above Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. A cone-shaped mist appears on its leeward side, then the object shoots straight up and disappears. (Jessup, The UFO Annual, Citadel, 1956; Nukes 114)
April — The Royal Australian Air Force issues its first statement of policy on UFOs, admitting that it does attempt to evaluate reports: “There is no doubt that reliable observers have reported sightings which today are inexplicable within the resources available to the RAAF.” (Project 1947, “The Former Air Board / Department of Air / Current RAAF”)
April — Oak Park, Illinois, contactee Dorothy Martin has been channeling entities through automatic writing. One introduces himself as Sananda, who lives on the utopian planet Clarion. She begins typing up the messages in newsletters and distributing them to readers, including Charles and Lilian Loughead from Detroit, Michigan, whom she met in March. (Clark III 717)
April 4 — Keyhoe meets with Ruppelt at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in Los Anegels, California, and shares recent UFO reports. Ruppelt agrees to write a letter supporting the claim that Keyhoe has used genuine ATIC reports for his book. (Keyhoe, FS Conspiracy, pp. 116–120)
April 4–5 — Contactee George Van Tassel holds the first Giant Rock Interplanetary Spacecraft Convention at Giant Rock, a huge boulder in the Mojave Desert near Landers, California. Speakers include Orfeo Angelucci, Truman Bethurum, Daniel Fry, and George Hunt Williamson. It draws a crowd variously estimated at 2,500–6,000. (“Interplanetary Spacecraft Convention Draws 6,000,” San Bernardino County (Calif.) Sun, April 5, 1954, p. 9; Clark III 531, 717)
April 5 — Keyhoe appears on The Betty White Show and asserts that, contrary to what the Air Force claims, some UFO reports are kept secret. (Keyhoe, FS Conspiracy, pp. 117–118)
April 7 — Leonard H. Stringfield publishes the first issue of CRIFO Newsletter. (CRIFO Newsletter 1, no. 1 (April 7, 1954; Clark III 1114)
April 7 — 11:05 p.m. US Navy sailors and Marines, as well as nuclear scientists from Los Alamos and Sandia Laboratories in New Mexico, are aboard the AEC flagship USS Curtiss cruising between Bikini and Enewetak atolls in the Marshall Islands just hours after the Castle Koon thermonuclear test on Bikini. An unidentified oval- shaped luminous object, yellowish-orange in color, passes silently over the ship from bow to stern, traveling at a high rate of speed and low altitude. Once it is clear of the ship, the object performs some zigzag maneuvers before racing away at high speed. (Nukes 107–109)
April 8 — 4:30–5:00 p.m. Lelah H. Stoker of 3121 N. Sheridan Road, Chicago, Illinois, sees a brilliant white round- topped disc, parachute-shaped, with a humanoid suspended beneath it, skim back and forth over the water of Lake Michigan. Stoker calls the Coast Guard. A cutter appears after 10 minutes, then the UFO approaches the shore.
Stoker sees a short human-like occupant in a green, tight, one-piece suit suspended below the object. It gets out in undergrowth along the shore then walks around. When the cutter gives up searching, the occupant returns to the object which moves back over the lake then takes off at high speed to the east. (NICAP, “Lady Observes Saucer / Small Entity Gets Out”; Clark III 270; Sparks, p. 211)
April 11 — Ruppelt’s letter to Keyhoe states that the request to clear classified UFO reports came from both AF Intelligence and the Office of Public Information, after which his superiors cleared them; Keyhoe has correctly quoted the ATIC material; the Utah film analysis is classified; a 1953 letter from Al Chop to Henry Holt & Co. attacking the “silence group” is quoted accurately; and except in a very few cases, ATIC rejects Donald Menzel’s explanations of halos, sundogs, and mirages for UFOs. (Keyhoe, FS Conspiracy, pp. 119–120, 307–308)
April 14 — Night. Capt. John M. Schidel of United Air Lines Flight 193 is forced to make a sharp climbing turn in order to avoid colliding with an unknown object over Long Beach, California. One passenger (Coles Barber) is thrown to the floor and suffers a knee fracture, and stewardess Naomi J. Penaat breaks an ankle. The object is only in sight for 2 seconds. (“Two Injured As Airliner Banks in Sudden Turn,” Los Angeles Times, April 16, 1954, p. II- 3; Keyhoe, FS Conspiracy, pp. 130–132)
April 18 — Colin McCarthy and two other men are driving an Austin sedan in the Australian outback near the border of Western Australia and South Australia when a UFO begins pacing them. They snap some 200 photos and take some ciné film of the object. Shortly after they report the incident, a helicopter suddenly appears and lands in front of their car. An RAAF officer gets out, walks over to their car, and confiscates the photos and film. They are never returned. (Stan Seers and William Lasich, “North Queensland UFO Saga, 1966,” Flying Saucer Review 29, no. 1 (October 1983): 20–21; Good Above, p. 163)
April 18 — Airline pilot William B. Nash writes to his friend Capt. William Joseph Hull about the emphatic denials of UFO reality issued by the Air Force shortly after his March 23 speech. He reveals that in August 1952 he was participating in a TV panel in New York City when someone in the WJZ-TV studio said he had just gotten back from Washington, D.C., where he has been given the “whole story” about the National Airport sightings. He claims the Air Force had operated a radio found in a retrieved saucer and that had caused the flurry of sightings. Nash also admits hearing rumors, especially one from syndicated aviation columnist Robert S. Allen, about a pro- UFO report that USAF was going to release in the fall of 1952 but never did. (Michael Hall, “Was There a Second Estimate of the Situation?” IUR 27, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 11–12)
April 22 — 2:00 p.m. USN Seaman Apprentice James B. Stephens Jr. and Seaman Bernard G. Klein Jr., are driving a vehicle on the Naval Outlying Field San Nicolas Island, California, when they see a 4–6-foot long, gray, cigar- shaped object with a pointed nose traveling just above the ground on a near-parallel course. The object suddenly hits the ground, sends up a cloud of dirt, and disappears from sight. They stop and search for 20+ minutes but find nothing. (NICAP, “April 22, 1954: San Nicholas Island, Calif.”; Sparks, p. 212)
April 22 — 10:30 p.m. Six workers from the Reynolds Metals plant in Jones Mills, Arkansas, are waiting on a carpool near Pearcy, Arkansas, to go to work when they see a gleaming white ball about 10 feet in diameter float 50 feet above a house. It appears alternately as a sphere and an oblong, and sometimes circles and sometimes hovers above the house for a total of 20 minutes. One man claims it approaches him to within a few feet, causing him to duck behind a car. One of the vehicles has a spotlight that they try to point at the object, but it always avoids the beam. (Hot Springs (Ark.) Sentinel-Rhview, April 23, 1954, pp. 1, 3; “Fire Ball Sighted in Arkansas Skies,” Montgomery Alabama Journal, April 23, 1954, p. 11)
Late April — Afternoon. Roger Mougeolle and Gilbert Doridant are logging in a clearing in a forest area near Bois-de- Champ, Vosges, France, when they hear a noise above them “like the sound of a train passing over a metal bridge.” They then see three metallic, cigar-shaped objects silently approaching them from over a nearby hill.
Two pass over them, but the third slowly descends above their clearing and stops only a few feet from the ground. It is over 600 feet long. Doridant flees, but Mougeolle walks toward it and touches it. The object is smooth, cold, and hard like steel. He touches it with his woodsman’s axe, and he is instantly thrown about 18 feet away toward the base of a large rock. He feels paralyzed for a few minutes, but the object ascends and disappears, and he can move again. (Joël Mesnard, “The ‘Steel Airship’ at Bois-de-Champ (April 1954),” Flying Saucer Review 32, no. 5 (August 1987): 16–19)
April 29 — 10:11 p.m. An unidentified illuminated object is seen above the Second Army Radio Station, Fort George G. Meade, Maryland, by the supervisor radio operator and two coworkers, Cpl. Flath and Pfc. Hough. Described as round, the color of the sun, and 3–4 times the size of a star, the UFO appears in the southwest, blinking on and off. As it reaches the station, it stops blinking and disappears by going straight up. The sighting lasts 7 minutes. (Loren E. Gross, UFOs, a History: 1954, January–May, The Author, 1990, p. 86; Good Above, p. 281)
May — Ruppelt’s article appears in True magazine. (Edward J. Ruppelt, “What Our Air Force Found Out about Flying Saucers,” True, May 1954, pp. 18–30, 124–134)
May 1 — 11:55 p.m. A large explosion is heard, felt, and seen over an 8-mile area near Logan, Utah. The blast nearly upsets cars, throws open heavy doors, and sends an earthquake-like shock through the area. Some people report seeing a glowing ball before the explosion; other witnesses report a flash of light at ground level. Lincoln LaPaz investigates, along with J. Stewart Williams and Clyde T. Hardy at Utah State Agricultural College [now Utah State University]. LaPaz says it is either a falling object of an explosive nature or buried high explosives set off by pranksters. A crater 16 feet in diameter and at least 6 feet deep is found, but no debris, even though LaPaz digs down 25 feet for five days. Nearly 50 years later, Theron Blazzard admits to the Logan Herald-Journal that as a geology student at Utah State he had detonated some dynamite at the spot because he had to dispose of it in order to move out of state. (“Meteor Sought in Crater after Logan Explosion,” Salt Lake Tribune, May 3, 1954, p. 21; Keyhoe, FS Conspiracy, pp. 138–139; Wilkins, FS Uncensored, Citadel, 1955, pp. 223–224; “Friday Finishers: When Meteor Mania Struck Cache Valley,” Logan (Utah) Herald-Journal, November 30, 2018)
May 5 — 4:45 p.m. Sydney Baker is at a radar post in the RAAF Woomera Range Complex in South Australia when he notices a gray, circular object at 60,000 feet maneuvering around an English Electric Canberra aircraft he is monitoring from about 35 miles away. It appears to be traveling three times as fast as the Canberra. He watches it for about 5 minutes before it shoots out of sight to the south at about 3,600 mph. The same object is apparently tracked on Woomera radar at approximately the same time. (NICAP, [case documents]; Bill Chalker, The Oz Files: The Australian UFO Story, Duffy and Snellgrove, 1996, p. 85; Swords 381–383)
May 7 — Naval radar around Washington, D.C., tracks a huge object maneuvering at 90,000 feet and moving down to 15 miles altitude. (Keyhoe, FS Conspiracy, pp. 144–145)
May 8 — George King is washing dishes in his flat in Maida Vale, London, England, when he receives a psychic message telling him that he has been chosen to be the voice of the Interplanetary Parliament. Several days later, while he is in a meditative trance, an Indian yoga master enters his flat and tells him he has been selected to act as the Primary Terrestrial Channel for messages from cosmic intelligences who are visiting Earth. (Douglas Curran, In Advance of the Landing: Folk Concepts of Outer Space, Abbeville, 1985, p. 63)
May 12 — 4:45 a.m. Three USAF Air Policemen (A/1C Mason W. Augst, A/1C George F. Wright, and A/1C Elmer A. Cruver) are standing guard next to a hangar at National Airport in Washington, D.C. They see a formation of two UFOs fly over the Capitol building, and again at 5:15 a.m. and 6:10 a.m. The objects are glowing white. They appear just above the horizon to the northeast in a straight line, make a 90° turn, then move away to the south.
Each pass takes 45 seconds. (Loren E. Gross, UFOs, a History: 1954, January–May, The Author, 1990, p. 94; Sparks, p. 212; Edwards, FS—Here and Now!, Lyle Stuart, 1967, pp. 84–85)
May 12 — 4:00 p.m. White, silky filaments fall in strands averaging 30 feet in length over Shepparton, Victoria, Australia. A witness gathers some and, although they become wrinkled, they do not disintegrate. An analysis indicates in is a “pure white, silky, odorless, warm on touch like cotton, and different from cobwebs.” The threads are not sticky and stretch easily. It resembles raw silk or nylon, is not water soluble, and burns rapidly. (Keith Basterfield, “Angel Hair: An Australian Perspective,” IUR 27, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 6–7; Brian Boldman, “Angel Hair Physical Analyses: A Review,” JUFOS 9 (2006): 101)
May 14 — Around 12 noon. A flight of Marine Reserve jets led by Maj. Charles Scarborough is headed north near Dallas, Texas. At a point 6 miles west of the city, Scarborough sights 16 unidentified objects in groups of four, dead ahead but at higher altitude, 15° above. He radios Capt. Roy L. Jorgensen, whose jet he has in sight by its contrail. Jorgensen, at a higher altitude, sees the UFOs below his left wing. Just as the two pilots try to box in the UFOs, Scarborough sees them fade from glowing white to orange and disappear, apparently speeding away due north.
Triangulation shows that the UFOs were at about 32,000 feet. (“4 Jet Fighters Report Race with ‘Saucers’ over
Dallas,” Dallas (Tex.) Times Herald, May 18, 1954; NICAP, “Four Navy Fighters Encounter 16 UFOs”; UFOEv,
May 15 — Gen. Nathan F. Twining, USAF Chief of Staff, speaking at an Armed Forces Day dinner at Amarillo AFB [now Rick Husband Amarillo International Airport], Texas, says that the Air Force has the best brains in the country working on the “flying saucer problem.” He adds that about 90% of the reports are pure imagination, with the rest unexplained. (“Air Force Looks into ‘Saucers,’” Miami (Fla.) Herald, May 17, 1954, p. 38; Keyhoe, FS Conspiracy, pp. 145–146)
May 18 — Frank Edwards mentions CRIFO on his radio program, and within a week Stringfield gets 6,000 letters. (Stringfield, Situation Red, Fawcett Crest, 1977, pp. 10–11)
May 20 — FBI officials recommend that Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr. authorize FBI break-ins to install bugs during national security investigations. The FBI would seek the Attorney General’s prior approval, as with wiretaps. Brownell concurs, but concludes that he “would be in a much better position to defend the Bureau in the event there should be a technical trespass if he had not heretofore approved it.” His directive empowers the FBI to break into homes and offices and install surveillance microphones without having to notify him or obtain advance approval in each case. The FBI has carte blanche on this until 1965. (Bernie Horowitz, “Wiretapping and J. Edgar Hoover,” Unredacted, December 20, 2010)
May 24 — 12:25 p.m. While flying on a photographic mapping mission 10 miles west-northwest of Richmond, Indiana, in a B-17, USAF Maj. Leo N. Brubaker observes and photographs a bright object below the plane for 45 seconds. The aircraft is flying at an altitude of 18,500 feet at 253 mph. The speed of the object is estimated at 506 mph.
The object travels six miles at that speed. The photos are taken with a USAF T-11 mapping camera. Brubaker denies the object is a sundog. (NICAP, “B-17 Photographic Mission Case”; Sparks, p. 213)
May 28 — Test pilot Arthur W. Murray reaches an unofficial record altitude of 90,440 feet in a Bell X-1A. (Wikipedia, “Arthur W. Murray”)
May 29–31 — The first conference of European and North American political, business, finance, academic, and media leaders later to become known as the Bilderberg group, meets at the Hotel de Bilderberg in Oosterbeek, Netherlands. Its agenda, originally to prevent another world war, is now defined as bolstering a consensus around free market Western capitalism and its interests around the globe. The first meeting is initiated by several people, including Polish politician-in-exile Józef Retinger who, concerned about the growth of anti-Americanism
in Western Europe, proposes an international conference at which leaders from European countries and the United States would be brought together with the aim of promoting Atlanticism. Retinger approaches Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands who agrees to promote the idea, together with former Belgian prime minister Paul van Zeeland and the then-head of Unilever, Paul Rykens. (Wikipedia, “Bilderberg meeting”)
May 30 — 12:25 a.m. David Reese, Christopher Muir, and four others are at the doorstep of a house in East Malvern, Victoria, Australia, when they see an orange, oval-shaped UFO appear in the sky at close range. The UFO maneuvers in a downward curve and then pulls up. A cloud of yellow smoke and flame is seen at the rear. Three of the witnesses see shapes that look like human-shaped shadows inside the craft. (Bill Chalker, The Oz Files: The Australian UFO Story, Duffy and Snellgrove, 1996; UFO Evidence, “Human Figures Seen in Saucer”; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1954 January–May, Supplemental Notes, The Author, 2002, pp. 46–50)
Summer — George Hunt Williamson spends a few months in Noblesville, Indiana, working at Soulcraft Publications, run by mystic and fascist William Dudley Pelley. Mostly he contributes UFO news for the magazine, but some of Pelley’s anti-Semitic attitudes creep into Williamson’s later writings. (Clark III 1285; Zirger and Martinelli, The Incredible Life of George Hunt Williamson, Verdechiari, 2016, pp. 100–103)
Summer — Late night. A young girl in Arbutus, Maryland, wakes up when a bright light shines into her bedroom window. Looking outside, she sees a triangle of brilliant white lights parallel to the ground, illuminating everything, hanging in the air, and pointing directly at her. All of a sudden they are gone. Fort the next two days, she has a fever that forces her to stay home from school. (Michael D. Swords, “Timmerman’s Triangles,” IUR 29, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 17)
June 1 — 9:30–9:40 a.m. TWA pilot Capt. Charles J. Kratovil, copilot W. R. Davis, and flight engineer Harold Raney, on a Paris to New York TWA Constellation heading southwest, spot near Boston, Massachusetts, “a large, white- colored disc-like object” overhead, occasionally losing it behind overlying clouds. Flying into west-southwest headwinds at 300 mph, they conclude it cannot be a balloon, and radio Boston airport control tower, which tells them jets are scrambled. They then see the object at about 10,000 feet higher than their 10,000 feet altitude but cannot close with the object. (NICAP, “TWA Crew Spot White Disc / Kratovil Case”; Sparks, p. 214; James E.
McDonald, “Statement on Unidentified Flying Objects,” in Symposium on Unidentified Flying Objects, Hearings, US House Committee on Science and Astronautics, 90th Cong., 2nd Sess., July 29, 1968, pp. 68–69)
June 1 — The Air Force announces that it only received 87 UFO sightings in January–April. (“Most ‘Saucers’ Explainable,” Traverse City (Mich.) Record-Eagle, June 1, 1954, p. 5)
June 5 — 6:23 p.m. Janette Brown, 16, is standing on Princes Highway (M1) at Dandenong, Victoria, Australia, when she hears a loud drumming noise. A large, dark cylinder, about 30 feet long and 15 feet high with a canopy and window on top and a window at each end, appears above a nearby factory. She shines a flashlight on it, and it whirrs toward her. It hovers about 60 feet away. Her friend, Jeanette Johnston, 13, arrives and watches it before it disappears behind trees. Janette’s wristwatch stops, although it starts running again when it is demagnetized. The case is investigated for the RAAF by University of Melbourne physicist O. H. “Harry” Turner. (UFO Evidence, “Teenage Girls See Saucer”)
June 7–8 — PIO Capt. Robert White at the Pentagon repeats the 87 reports statistic from June 1 and counters that reports are at a three-year-low because of less publicity. Stringfield’s colleague, Cincinnati, Ohio, businessman Tom Eickhoff, storms into the office of ATIC Deputy Commander of Intelligence Col. John O’Mara and demands that ATIC press legal action against contactees Truman Bethurum, George Adamski, and George Hunt Williamson. O’Mara replies that these people are obvious hoaxers and need no special action. But he lets slip that USAF fighters regularly carry movie cameras to take photos of UFOs. Eickhoff says that is a big waste of money if there is nothing to UFOs. O’Mara then states to Stringfield the next day that the Air Force actually receives 700 UFO reports a week, the 87 figure only applies to cases under “special analysis,” over 1,000 leading scientists are working on government UFO projects, the material used by Keyhoe in his book was not cleared through official channels, and the Utah film exists but only shows conventional objects. (Keyhoe, FS Conspiracy, pp. 157–160; “700 ‘Saucer’ Sightings Weekly Reported to Air Force,” CRIFO Newsletter 1, no. 4 (July 2, 1954): 1; “Proof of Air Force Cover-Up,” CRIFO Newsletter 1, no. 4 (July 2, 1954): 1–2; Stringfield, Situation Red, Fawcett Crest, 1977, pp. 85, 167–168; Frank Edwards, FS Serious Business, Bantam ed., 1966, pp. 137–138; Frank Edwards, Flying Saucers—Here and Now! Lyle Stuart, 1967, p. 86)
June 8 — Contactee Frances Swan of Eliot, Maine, has been in telepathic contact with Affa, a spaceman from Uranus, since 1954. She manages to impress her next-door neighbor, retired Adm. Herbert B. Knowles, sufficiently for him to write Rear Adm. Carl F. Espe, head of the Office of Naval Intelligence. He encloses some of Affa’s transcribed messages and suggests that ONI try to communicate with Affa through Band CMM-306, repeating the signal M4M4 AFFA. Two ONI officers, Captains John Bromley and Harry Baltazzi, visit Swan and through her interview Affa, who agrees to communicate with them by radio on June 10. When that does not happen, Espe writes to Knowles saying that ONI will pursue the matter no further. He turns the letters over to the Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics. (Clark III 1118)
June 9 — Col. Frank Milani, director of Civil Defense in Baltimore, Maryland, demands that the Air Force ease its restrictions on UFO information and blasts its policy on Lou Corbin’s radio show. (“A Lot of People Are Upset,” Washington (D.C.) Daily News, June 10, 1954; Project 1947, “UFO Reports, 1954”)
June 12? — Keyhoe and Edwards find out about the O’Mara interview, and Edwards puts it on his radio broadcast, generating more press calls to ATIC. Capt. Charles A. Hardin, head of Blue Book, states that “Colonel O’Mara’s words were misinterpreted. What he meant to say was that if all the sightings were reported to the Air Force, they would total about 700 a week.” (Keyhoe, FS Conspiracy, pp. 157–160; Loren E. Gross, UFOs, a History: 1954, June–August, The Author, 1990, pp. 11–14)
June 12 — 11:30 p.m. Walter L. Tatspaugh of Hyattsville, Maryland, observes a large bluish-green oval or round object circling and hovering in the sky for at least 45 minutes. The Baltimore GOC Filter Center allegedly tracks an object on radar over Wilmington, Delaware, for an hour. Two F-86D fighters are scrambled but cannot reach it. (NICAP, “Object Tracked / Jets Scrambled”; Keyhoe, FS Conspiracy, pp. 161–162)
June 14 — A UFO is again tracked over Wilmington, Delaware, flying in a rectangular course at 75,000 feet for more than 2 hours. (Keyhoe, FS Conspiracy, pp. 161–162; UFOEv, p. 66)
June 18 — 7:35 p.m. Monsignor Émile Élie Verhille, Apostolic Vicar of Fort-Rousset [modern Owando, Republic of the Congo], reports in the Brazzaville newspaper La Semaine de L’akf that he and others had seen a UFO over Laketi Mission in the Mossaka District. A luminous globe arrives from the north and heads towards Laketi. It suddenly stops, rises and falls, stops again, gyrates, and seems to shake. A noise like that of an airplane engine is heard until the moment when it also stops. Seen through binoculars, the object has a dark mass in the center with light rays of unequal length coming out of it alternately. It goes through its maneuvers for 15 minutes then shoots back over the northern horizon. (ClearIntent, p. 134)
June 21 — 1:00 a.m. Near Ridgeway, Ontario, Guy and Valeria Baker see a hovering, domed disc about 40 feet in diameter with several rotating, flashing lights around the rim. They drive to get a closer look. The object crosses
the road in front of them and lands in a field. The car stalls, and they watch as the lights move around the area. They find a large, brown, circular spot in the pasture where the disc has been resting. (Schopick, pp. 6–7; Mark Rodeghier, UFO Reports Involving Vehicle Interference, CUFOS, 1981, p. 2; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1954 June–August, Supplemental Notes, The Author, 2002, pp. 12–13)
June 21 — 8:14 p.m. An unidentified radar blip located over central Vancouver Island, British Columbia, responds to coded IFF Mode 1 signals from the Naselle Air Force Station radar site [now Fort Stevens Historic Site] in southwestern Washington State, and instantly transmits back the correct coded responses. The blip is tracked on 3 ground radars at both Naselle and McChord AFB [now Joint Base Lewis-McChord] in Tacoma. The UFO splits into two (or consists of two objects in close formation), separates, and outmaneuvers one of two F-86D jet interceptors, both of which also radar-tracked the UFOs. Possible visual sightings of the radar target are called in to sheriff’s offices and news media. The case is forwarded to Project Blue Book, but it does not appear in its files. (NICAP, “Coded IFF Signal from UFO”; Sparks, p. 215)
June 23 — 8:00 or 9:00 p.m. Pilot Capt. Harry Roe Jr., flying an Ohio Air National Guard F-51 Mustang fighter at 240 mph from Dayton to Columbus, Ohio, sees a round white object with no exhaust trailing him in the same position a little above and behind at close range, possibly detected on airborne radar. Roe maneuvers to try to lose it or collide with it, but the UFO remains in relatively the same position until it departs to the southeast. S/Sgt Maynard Harris at Wright-Patterson AFB picks up the plane and the UFO on radar. He scrambles two F-86s in the Columbus area to check it out, but they see nothing. At 10:00 p.m., Maj. Frank J. Gshwandtner and 2nd Lt.
Robert P. Lommori, flying in the Columbus area in an RB-47E aircraft, observe a white object the size of a baseball at 25,000 feet. The object is extremely fast and makes a gradual turn to begin a slight climb. It then flies out of sight. The duration is 30 seconds. (NICAP, “F-51 Trailed by Object / Lt. Roe Sighting”; NICAP, “Something Follows C-47 and Observed by RB-47 Crew”; Keyhoe, FS Conspiracy, pp. 167–168; Sparks, p. 216)
Late June — Some 300 people in West Berlin, Germany, see three silvery UFOs on several occasions. Moving in a zigzag motion and accelerating at high speed. Rudolf Hermes, a director at Tempelhof Airport [now closed], says the witnesses describe the objects as “shiny.” (“Triangle Saucers Reported Seen near Berlin,” Lancaster (Pa.) Sunday News, July 4, 1954, p. 19)
June 26 — 12:40 a.m. The Atomic Energy Commission’s National Reactor Testing Station near Idaho Falls, Idaho, is suddenly lit up by a blinding glow that explodes in the night sky. Kelly Brooks and A. L. Taylor say the source of the light remains motionless for a few seconds, then shoots upwards at a tremendous speed. (Keyhoe, FS Conspiracy, p. 168)
June 26 — Around 7:30 a.m. A metallic blob is seen high in the sky near Columbus, Ohio. According to a newspaper article, a crew of an airliner is asked to investigate; the crew circles under the object while the 60 passengers take a look. Zanesville Radio says at 5:55 a.m. a round, silvery object is detected on an azimuth of 80°. At 5:35 a.m., an Air Force charter flight, No. 46 AF 23-24 to Wilmington, Delaware, flying at 3,000 feet observes an object in the Zanesville, Ohio, area at approximately 18,000 to 20,000 feet. (NICAP, “Airliner Investigates Strange Object”)
June 27 — The Obninsk Nuclear Power Plant, at the Institute of Physics and Power Engineering in Obninsk, Kaluga Oblast, Russia, becomes the first grid-connected nuclear power plant in the world. The plan achieves criticality on May 6 and now is set up to provide electrical power to Moscow. (Wikipedia, “Obninsk Nuclear Power Plant”)
June 29 — 5:03 p.m. A BOAC Stratocruiser leaves New York City bound for London, England. 30 minutes later, Capt. James R. Howard receives directions from Boston Air Traffic Center to hold his position over the Rhode Island coast. Howard circles for 10–12 minutes, after which Boston tells him to detour over Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Around 11:30 p.m. while crossing at 19,000 feet near Sept-Îles, Quebec, Howard, his copilot Lee Boyd, and navigator H. McDonnell see a large cigar-shaped object and six smaller black ovals moving the same speed as his airliner, 265 mph, on a parallel course. The small objects are strung out in a line, changing relative positions but always at the same level. The large object slowly and continually changes shape, “in a way that a swarm of bees might alter its appearance.” They appear opaque, hard-edged, gray in color, with no lights or flames visible.
Goose Bay AFB [now CFB Goose Bay], Labrador, orders an F-94 to vector toward the location. Just as Howard is giving the pilot his position, the small objects disappear. McDonnell says they enter the large object. As the F- 94 approaches, the large object dwindles in size and disappears. Howard lands at Goose Bay and is questioned by RCAF and USAF officials (McConnell says they take the flight logs); when he lands in London, the Air Ministry does the same, telling the pilots they viewed a solar eclipse (which took place at 7:00 a.m. on June 30). Howard later hears that there are UFO sightings in Massachusetts while he is in a holding pattern, and he contests in the December 11 issue of Everybody’s Magazine that what he saw was solid, not a mirage. Gordon Thayer of the Colorado project identifies the objects as superior mirages, reflections of the “dark terrain below seen against the
bright, ‘silvery’ sky to the left of the setting sun,” a “phenomenon so rare that it apparently has never been reported before or since.” James McDonald disagrees. In 2010, ufologist Martin Shough reexamines the case and concludes that the object might well have been an unusual mirage. (NICAP, “BOAC Stratocruiser Case”; Sparks,
p. 216; Clark III 195; Condon, pp. 139–140; James Howard, “We Were Shadowed from Outer Space,” Everybody’s Weekly, December 11, 1954; John Carnell, “BOAC’s Flying Jellyfish,” Fate 7, no. 11 (November 1954): 16–23; Leonard Cramp, “Mystery over Labrador,” Flying Saucer Review 1, no. 1 (Spring 1955): 6–8; James E. McDonald, “Statement on Unidentified Flying Objects,” in Symposium on Unidentified Flying Objects, Hearings, US House Committee on Science and Astronautics, 90th Cong., 2nd Sess., July 29, 1968, p. 46; “Captain James Howard Reflects on His Sighting of 1954 (BOAC),” nutsandbolts ufo YouTube channel, March 7, 2009; Good Above, pp. 189–191; Phillip Robertson, “Some Considerations on the Seven Isles, Quebec, Canada, Case of June 29, 1954,” May 31, 1991; Martin Shough, “Study of an Unusual Phenomenon Observed by BOAC Aircrew over Labrador, Newfoundland, June 29, 1954,” September 2009; Martin Shough, “The BOAC Labrador Sighting of June 29, 1954,” Caelestia, October 31, 2018)
June 30 — 2:17 p.m. Johnny Björnulf and Raun Conradi are aboard one of three Scandinavian Airlines planes flying above the Lifjell plateau, Telemark, Norway, to observe a total solar eclipse. Conradi takes some footage through a window on the north (port) side of one airplane. When developed it shows two small light sources that are fairly obvious window reflections, but media coverage causes much confusion about the circumstances under which the film is shot. (E. Graham, “Scandinavian Eclipse Expedition Films U.F.O.s,” Flying Saucer Review 2, no. 1 (Jan./Feb. 1956): 6–7; UFOEv, p. 5; Clas Svahn, “The Björnulf Solar Eclipse Film,” Clas Svahns Blogg, October 6, 2006)
June 30 — 6:50 p.m. Four civilians and several military personnel at Brookley AFB [now Mobile Aeroplex at Brookley] in Mobile, Alabama, see a brilliant silver or white object with short stubby wings approach from the south, circle over Mobile, then depart to the northeast. A radar contact at 6:30 p.m. with a stationary object is evidently unrelated anomalous propagation. (NICAP, “Object with Short Stubby Wings Tracked on Radar”; Sparks, p. 216)
Summer (or Summer 1955) — Evening. Dianne Vezza and two other teen girls are sitting in a backyard in Marietta, Ohio, when they see a star-like light moving at great speed. Suddenly it comes to a dead stop and two other stars speed in and come to an abrupt stop. The three objects form a perfect triangle. An oval object then becomes visible as the starlike objects disappear. Two other oval objects take up the same triangular position with the first. They then begin a light display with wildly colored lights that continues for a few seconds. The lights go out, and each of the objects beams a bright white light to the center of the triangle. The beams meet in the center for a few seconds and then go out. The oval objects disappear and the starlike lights return, but they soon speed off in different directions faster than a jet. The display is completely soundless. (Michael D. Swords, “Another Type of UFO Display,” IUR 30, no. 2 (January 2006): 11)
July — A saucer-buff zine titled Nexus is first published by James W. Moseley in New Jersey. (Nexus 1, no. 1 (July 1954); Clark III 1032)
July 2 — 11:05 a.m. An F-94C Starfire takes off from Griffiss AFB [now Griffiss Business and Technology Park] in Rome, New York, on an operational training mission. It is only a few miles out when the Griffiss control tower orders the plane diverted to intercept an unidentified aircraft. When Pilot Lt. William E. Atkins cannot find the aircraft, the controller tells him about a second unidentified aircraft, which Atkins identifies as an Air Force C-47. The control tower vectors him back to the first target. Atkins cannot see any aircraft above the cloud cover, so he descends below the clouds. During the descent, a furnace-like heat fills the cockpit and the engine plenum chamber fire warning light goes on. Atkins shuts the engine off, but the light remains on. Atkins and his radar man, Henry F. Coudon [or Condon], eject, landing without injury. At 11:27 a.m., the plane crashes into the town of Walesville, west of Utica, striking a building and an auto, killing 4 people, and injuring 5 others. Atkins tells reporters about the heat but clams up under Air Force pressure. The official investigation confirms the fire was caused by a malfunction of the fire detector circuit. There is no evidence of an in-flight fire. Kevin Randle suspects a balloon is responsible for one of the radar targets, because an apparent balloon is sighted later, from 6:00 to 10:00 p.m., in a 25-square-mile area from Rome to Frankfort, New York. (“Abandoned Jet Kills 3 in Car, 1 in House,” New York Times, July 3, 1954, pp. 1, 6; “Jet Plane Crashes in Flames, Kills 3 in Auto, One in House,” Syracuse (N.Y.) Post-Standard, July 3, 1954, pp. 1, 3; NICAP, “The Walesville Incident / F-94 Crash”; Kevin D. Randle, “Walesville Revisited,” IUR 25, no. 3 (Fall 2000): 3–5; Frank J. Reid, “Keyhoe’s Context,” IUR 25, no. 3 (Fall 2000): 6–7, 28–29; Kevin D. Randle, “Walesville UFO Jet Chase,” A Different Perspective, March 28, 2009; Keyhoe, FS Conspiracy, pp. 174–177; Condon, p. 161; Keyhoe, Aliens from Space, Signet ed., 1974,
pp. 22–23; “‘Balloon’ Excites Utica,” New York Times, July 3, 1954, p. 13)
July 3 — Nine green spheres hover, speed away at 2,600 mph, and are tracked on radar at 24,000 feet 20 miles north of Albuquerque, New Mexico. (UFOEv, p. 85)
July 3 — 8:15 a.m. The captain, officers, and 463 passengers of a Dutch ocean liner watch a “greenish-colored, saucer- shaped object about half the size of a full moon” speed across the sky and disappear in clouds. [same as July 29 entry?] (Ruppelt, p. 237)
July 8 — 9:25 p.m. Amateur astronomer Harold Hill is at his observatory in Orrell, Greater Manchester, England, when he sees a bright star in the southern sky that he at first thinks is a supernova. Soon it resolves itself into a bright, metallic globe with a cluster of 15–20 smaller, dimmer objects moving around. Clouds intervene and when they clear, he sees two bright objects, gyrating and flashing and moving slowly around each other. The objects are at a great altitude, because even through binoculars they have “shown no sensible size.” (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: January 1, 1947–December 31, 1959, The Author, 2003, pp. 80– 81; “An Unusual Sky Phenomenon,” Strolling Astronomer 9 (1955): 48)
July 9 — Die Weltwoche in Zürich, Switzerland, publishes two letters by psychologist Carl Jung, who says he has been interested in UFOs since 1946, but he has difficulty comprehending what they might be, since they seem to have both subjective and objective properties. (Clark III 636–637)
July 11 — UK Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding states in an article in the London Sunday Telegraph that “I am convinced that these objects do exist and that they are not manufactured by any nation on earth. I can therefore see no alternative to accepting the theory that they come from some extraterrestrial source.” (UFOEv, p. 122; Good Above, pp. 47–48)
July 14 — A fake memo, supposedly written by or for Robert Cutler, special assistant to President Eisenhower, to Gen.
Nathan Twining, indicates that an MJ-12 briefing should take place at the White House July 16. Cutler is in Europe at the time of the memo, although the memo could have been prepared by NSC Executive Secretary James
S. Lay Jr. or his associate, J. Patrick Coyne. (Robert Cutler, “Memorandum for General Twining: NSC/MJ-12 Special Studies Project,” July 14, 1954; Northern Ontario UFO Research and Study, “Majestic-12”; Stanton T. Friedman, “MJ-12: The Evidence So Far,” IUR 12, no. 5 (Sept./Oct. 1987): 14–18; Stanton T. Friedman, Top Secret / MAJIC, Marlowe, 1996, pp. 86–102; “Majestic-12 or ‘MJ-12’ Reference Report,” US National Archives, September 29, 2020)
July 20 — Two men are chased in their car by a UFO near Oslo, Norway, and stop to observe it. Afterward, one of the witnesses’ watches stops working and the car’s paint changes color. (Vallée, Magonia, p. 207)
July 20–21 — Ruppelt visits the Project Blue Book office at Wright-Patterson AFB in Ohio to gather information for his upcoming book. He is told that all UFO publicity is handled by a lieutenant colonel in Air Force intelligence. He writes in an August 3 letter to Keyhoe: “They claim to have gotten the unknowns down to about 10% but from what I saw this was just due to a more skeptical attitude. The reports are just as good as the ones we got and their analysis procedures are a hell of a lot worse.” (Donald E. Keyhoe, “The Captain Ruppelt Letters,” UFO Investigator 2, no. 2 (October 1961): 6; Clark III 1023)
July 23 —The US Navy issues a new directive that orders the immediate reporting of UFO sightings (FLYOBRPTs) to the director of AFOSI, ATIC, commanding officer of Eastern ADC, director of Naval Intelligence, commanding officer of the Eastern Sea Frontier, and the commandant of the Potomac River Naval Command. The directive cites JANAP 146, AFR 200-2, OPNAV 3820, and Directive 3820.2 and is intended to plug leaks coming from navy and marine personnel. It is unpublicized but unclassified, so it threatens disclosure of AFR 200-2, which is still classified. USAF begins work on a new version of AFR 200-2 without the “restricted” label. (Keyhoe, FS Conspiracy, pp. 188–189, 309–311)
July 24–25 — A security officer at the Naval Bureau of Aeronautics develops a personal interest in the Frances Swan contact case and accepts Adm. Knowles’s invitation to Eliot, Maine, to visit with Swan. On his return, he gives the FBI a report on his visit. On July 29 an FBI agent interviews him, and on August 9 J. Edgar Hoover sends an account of the interview to Rear Adm. Carl F. Espe and to the Army’s Assistant Chief of Staff, G-2. Hoover writes, “No further action is being taken in this matter by this Bureau.” (Clark III 1118)
July 25 — Policeman J. H. Flanagan and friends see 6 UFOs over Enkeldoorn [now Chivhu], Zimbabwe. Nearly stationary, they are visible for about 20 minutes and disappear when night falls. (ClearIntent, p. 134)
July 28 — Wilbert Smith, at the invitation of retired Navy Adm. Herbert B. Knowles, visits contactee Frances Swan in Eliot, Maine, his neighbor. Her two space friends, Affa and Alomar, direct Swan’s hand to draw a series of circles demonstrating the use of magnetic fields in spacecraft propulsion. Smith asks the aliens to communicate by radio at an appointed time a few days later, but the message does not come through. Nevertheless, Smith attempts to decipher the alien charts in hopes of learning how to build a saucer for Canada. (Clark III 1079–1080, 1118)
July 29 — Capt. Jan P. Bos and five officers of the Dutch ocean liner Groote Beer see a moon-like object rising out of the Atlantic Ocean 90 miles east of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. They watch it through a sextant, allowing them to
estimate its rate of ascent at a half degree in 2 minutes. (Loren E. Gross, UFOs, a History: 1954, June–August, The Author, 1990, p. 60)
August — 10:30 p.m. An astronomer sees a bright white disc, 20 times the apparent size of the moon, moving from west to northeast at a high rate of speed over Park Hills, Kentucky. The seemingly solid object is about 100 feet in diameter and flying at an altitude of 500 feet. It disappears abruptly after 3–4 seconds. (“Astronomers and UFO’s: A Survey, Part 2, Sightings,” IUR 2, no. 4 (April 1977): 3)
August 1 — 11:15 p.m. Desmond O’Reilly and others at Templeogue Tennis Club in Dublin, Ireland, watch an object fly over the Dublin Mountains in the direction of Howth. Initially he thinks he is looking at a meteor because he can only see it when it passes by gaps in the clouds. He watches it split into two pieces. (Irish Times, August 5, 1954; Shane Cochrane, “Ireland vs. the Flying Saucers,” Fortean Times 317 (September 2014): 54)
August 1 — 11:30 p.m. P. D. McCormack sees a bluish-white object flying at 1,000 mph at an altitude of 5,000 feet above the Dublin Mountains, Ireland, to the south. The trails seem to “fall away from the object at each side.” Two men fishing in the River Dargle near Powerscourt, County Wicklow, see a rocket-shaped object dropping balls of fire. At 11:35 p.m., on the North Beach in Rush, County Dublin, Mrs. W. Gray and others watch an object “like a bright electric bulb” fly overhead from the mountains and out to sea. Possible meteor. (Irish Times, August 3, 5, 1954; Shane Cochrane, “Ireland vs. the Flying Saucers,” Fortean Times 317 (September 2014): 54)
August 2 — The US Joint Chiefs of Staff direct the establishment of a Continental Air Defense Command. Secretary of Defense Charles Erwin Wilson announces the command’s formation publicly later in the month to integrate “the air defense capabilities of the three military departments into an air defense system responsible to the control of one military commander.” (Wikipedia, “Continental Air Defense Command”)
August 4 — 11:00 p.m.–12:00 midnight. Ten firemen and their chief observe two flying saucers over The Hague, Netherlands. The objects are seen in the clear night air at a high altitude. They move at incredible speed, at times remaining motionless for as long as 30 seconds. They are described as flat ovals with whitish-gray light. All agree that the objects are neither aircraft or balloons. (ClearIntent, p. 134)
August 6 — A bright white ball shoots across the sky over Santa Fe, New Mexico, leaving a luminous trail that persists for 15 minutes. Meteorite expert Lincoln LaPaz says it is not a meteor. It apparently disrupts TV signals and aircraft transmissions, but not ham radio. (Wilkins, FS Uncensored, Citadel, 1955, p. 226)
August 7–8 — One of the first UFO meetings in California is held on the slopes of Palomar Mountain, with lectures by George Adamski, Daniel Fry, Truman Bethurum, and Desmond Leslie. (“Palomar Mountain, 1940–1960: From Obscurity to World Fame,” The Adamski Case, September 22, 2019)
August 8 — 3:01 p.m. Project Magnet’s only UFO incident of note occurs when the Shirley’s Bay, Ontario, gravimeter indicates a greater deflection in the gravitational field than a conventional object would cause. Heavy clouds obstruct Wilbert Smith’s view of the sky. (Clark III 1079; “Wilbert B. Smith,” Northern Ontario UFO Research and Study; Good Above, p. 186)
August 10 — The Canadian Department of Transport officially folds Project Magnet but permits Wilbert Smith to continue using its facility on his own time at no expense to the government. Smith continues his work privately until his death in December 1962. (Story, p. 276)
August 11 — Frank Edwards is fired by his sponsor at the Mutual Broadcasting Network, the American Federation of Labor. He had offered to resign on August 7, citing a conflict over the type of material he has been required to report on, including AFL interests and George Meany’s personal outlook. His UFO reportage may or may not be an issue. (Clark III 435; Frank Edwards, “The Plot to Silence Me,” Fate 10, no. 6 (June 1957): 17–23)
August 11 — 8:54 p.m. A1C Chase E. Lewis, tower operator at Lawson AFB [now Lawson Army Airfield] in Fort Benning, Columbus, Georgia, sees a strange stationary object in the west. It varies in brightness, changing color from white to red to orange to white again, with seemingly high-speed motions. An Army helicopter piloted by WO R. T. Wade is sent to investigate; he locates the object 20 miles west of Lawson at 2,000 feet. Wade abandons the chase due to low fuel after 2 minutes. At 9:05 p.m., two additional tower operators (including A1C William N. Watson) view the object. A second Army helicopter, piloted by U. S. Tarma, is diverted to the object at 9:27 p.m. He sees it, but it disappears at 9:29 p.m. (NICAP, “Two Helicopters Encounter Venus (CIRVIS)”; Good Above, pp. 284–285; Loren E. Gross, UFOs, a History: 1954, June–August, The Author, 1990, pp. 77–80; Sparks, p. 219)
August 11 — 8:55 p.m. P. L. Percharde, electrical engineer and assistant manager of the Moeller Shipwrecker Company, of Okinawa, sees a line of blue lights underneath a blue circle with a black center fly over the SS Docteur Angier off Yoron-Jima, Japan, and climb, illuminating and agitating the clouds. (Patrick Gross, “Disk Seen from SS Docteur Angier, August 11, 1954”; Sparks, p. 219)
August 12 — 2:29 a.m. Four military men on US Army helicopters at Maxwell AFB in Montgomery, Alabama, see a glowing red disc soar around the base tower. There are both ground and air witnesses, as well as radar-visual confirmation. (Good Above, pp. 284–285, 493–494)
August 12 — An updated version of AFR 200-2 is issued by the Department of the Air Force and declassified by Air Force Chief of Staff Nathan Twining. The public can now know that the 4602nd Air Intelligence Service Squadron was brought in to assist ATIC (Blue Book) with preliminary and field UFO investigations, and that USAF considers UFOs to be “any airborne object which by performance, aerodynamic characteristics, or unusual features, does not conform to any presently known aircraft or missile type, or which cannot be positively identified as a familiar object.” It lists the objectives of UFO reporting as: “First as a possible threat to the security of the United States and its forces, and secondly, to determine technical aspects involved.” (Department of the Air Force, “Unidentified Flying Objects Reporting,” Air Force Regulation 200-2, August 12, 1954; Good Above, pp. 489–492)
August 16 — 5:00 p.m. A green ball is seen in the sky over Tananarive [now Antananarivo], Madagascar, and disappears behind a hill. It reappears a minute later and flies over the higher part of Tananarive. When the object flies in front of them, some witnesses see a lentil-shaped device with a silvery metallic aspect enveloped in electric luminous gas. According to Jean-Luc Bruneau, inspector general at the Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique, Gen. Charles de Gaulle is concerned about this sighting and quietly approves having a French study group involved with investigating UFO cases. (“1954, Tananarive, Madagascar: Multiple Witnesses to UFOs,” UFO Casebook, July 30, 2008; Gildas Bourdais, “From GEPAN to SEPRA: Official UFO Studies in France,” IUR 25, no. 4 (Winter 2000–2001): 11; Patrick Gross, “Tananarive, Madagascar, August 1954”)
August 20 — Contactee Dorothy Martin of Oak Park, Illinois, and Charles and Lilian Laughead of Detroit, Michigan, send out a 7-page press release announcing that a geological disaster will cause great environmental changes in North America and Europe. It warns that December 20 will be the last available date for evacuation, as a great flood will strike on December 21. Martin and her followers hope to board a landed flying saucer before doom falls. (Clark III 718)
August 20 — Morning. Edith Jacobsen, 2, and Åsta Solvang, 32, are on a blueberry-picking trip to Øyfjellet, near Mosjøen, Norway, with their uncle, Halvdan Jacobsen. The two sisters wander off to a fen when suddenly they see a man in the distance. They approach him and he smiles and stretches out his hand, but he only brushes Edith’s palm with it. He has long hair with a natural wave, a dark complexion, and a tight-fitting suit with a wide belt. He begins to talk but they can’t understand him. It does not sound like Norwegian, English, German, Spanish, French, or Russian. He takes out a “little mirror” from a pocket and with something like a pencil draws circles, apparently representing planets. He finally indicates he wants the women to accompany him and he takes them to a landed disc in a clearing. It is gray-blue and looks like two giant pot lids put together. He makes a sign to not come too close, then he opens a hatch on the top, crawls in, and shuts the door. The sisters hear a faint humming and the UFO rises while rotating on its own axis. (Gordon Creighton, “Mosjøen: An Early Norwegian CE-III Case,” Flying Saucer Review 34, no. 2 (June 1989): 1–7; Clark III 267–268)
August 23 — 1:00 a.m. Businessman Bernard Miserey has just parked his car in a garage at Vernon, Eure, France, when he notices a sudden illumination. He sees an object like an enormous (300 feet long) cigar standing on end, hovering above the north bank of the Seine River about 1,000 feet away. Suddenly from the bottom of the object comes a horizontal disc that drops, slows, and suddenly dives horizontally across the river at him. It vanishes at a high rate of speed toward the southwest. Three other discs follow in sequence. A fifth disc drops much lower than the earlier ones and remains still for an instant, swaying slightly. During this time the cigar has faded and sinks into darkness. The spectacle has lasted 45 minutes. Two police officers and an Army engineer also see the display. (Clark III 293; Loren E. Gross, UFOs, a History: 1954, June–August, The Author, 1990, pp. 77–80; Sparks, pp. 85–86; Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” February 2, 2007; Herbert S. Taylor, “Satellite Objects and Cloud Cigars,” IUR 29, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 4–5)
August 26 — 9:35 p.m. Crowds of people in Bray, County Wicklow, Ireland. see an object traveling at great speed over Bray Head. It is a brilliant blue light, traveling at “2,000 miles an hour” toward the sea before changing direction and moving toward Wicklow. (Irish Times, August 27, 1954; Shane Cochrane, “Ireland vs. the Flying Saucers,” Fortean Times 317 (September 2014): 54)
August 28 — 8:30 p.m. Several USAF fighter pilots pursue a triangular formation of 15 objects near Tinker AFB, Oklahoma City, tracked by ground radar. As the jets approach, the formation breaks, changes to a semicircle, and the objects speed up and vanish to the west. (NICAP, “USAF Fighters Report Formation Tracked by Radar”; Keyhoe, FS Conspiracy, pp. 25–26; Sparks, p. 220)
August 29 — A witness in Mérida, Venezuela, sees a large, intensely yellow, glowing object moving at great speed from west to east. When it reaches the Sierra Nevada de Mérida, it suddenly stops and two disc-shaped blue objects
emerge from it. All three continue to the east and disappear behind buildings. (Lorenzen, UFOs: The Whole Story,
Signet, 1969, p. 58)
August 29 — 11:05 p.m. First Officer H. G. Gardner and Engineer J. V. D. Whitisy, flying on a Royal Dutch Airlines DC- 4, see 3–4 dark, lens-shaped objects over Prins Christianssund radio and weather station, Greenland. They veer north and change position in formation. (NICAP, “Lens-Shaped Objects Veer North”; Sparks, p. 220)
August 31— 7:10 p.m. RAN Lieutenant J. A. “Shamus” O’Farrell is returning to HMAS Albatross Naval Air Station near Nowra, New South Wales, after a night cross-country in a Hawker Sea Fury aircraft. After contacting Nowra, O’Farrell sees a very bright light closing fast at one o’clock. It crosses in front of his aircraft, taking up position on his port beam, where it appears to orbit. A second and similar light is observed at nine o’clock. It passes about a mile in front of the Sea Fury and then turns in the position where the first light was observed. According to O’Farrell, the apparent crossing speeds of the lights are the fastest he has ever encountered. He has been flying at 250 mph. O’Farrell contacts Albatross, which in turn confirms that it has two radar “paints” in company with him. Radar operator Petty Officer Keith Jessop confirms the presence of 2 objects near the Sea Fury on the GCI remote display. The two lights reform at nine o’clock and then disappear on a northeasterly heading. O’Farrell can only make out “a vague shape with the white light situated centrally on top.” The Directorate of Naval Intelligence at the time writes that O’Farrell is “an entirely credible witness” and that he “was visibly shaken by his experience but remains adamant that he saw these objects.” News of the incident leaks out in December, but the official RAN file remains classified until 1982. (NICAP, “‘Sea Fury’ Encounter”; Swords 379–380; James E. McDonald, “Statement on Unidentified Flying Objects,” in Symposium on Unidentified Flying Objects, Hearings, US House Committee on Science and Astronautics, 90th Cong., 2nd Sess., July 29, 1968, p. 70; Good Above, p. 162; An Adelaide UFO Researcher, “The ‘Sea Fury’ Radar Incident Revisited,” 2017; “The Sea Fury Incident,” Australian Disclosure Project, April 30, 2006; Bill Chalker, “The Australian Government and UFOs,” IUR 22, no. 3 (Fall 1997): 18–19)
August 31 — Deputy Department of Transport Minister John Baldwin closes the Shirley’s Bay, Ontario, UFO station to save money, although he says Smith can work on his own time. (“Saucer Station Closes,” The Saucerian, no. 6 (Spring 1955): 12; Clark III 1079)
September 1 —The Continental Air Defense Command is established, primarily to defend the continental United States against air attack. It is also tasked to support US commanders in the Pacific, Atlantic, Caribbean, Alaska, Northeast, and of Strategic Air Command in their missions to the maximum extent consistent with its primary mission. ADC’s commander, Gen. Benjamin W. Chidlaw, becomes the first CINCONAD, and USAF is designated as the executive agency. (Wikipedia, “Continental Air Defense Command”)
September 2 — Dusk. John Jacob Swaim, 12, is working on a tractor at his family’s farm in Coldwater, Kansas, when he sees a small man about 3 feet tall with long, pointed ears and a pointed nose standing in a crouched position about 20 feet away. It is dressed in a shiny garment and has two cylinders strapped on its back. The being floats to a nearby UFO hovering 5 feet from the ground. The next day his father and Sheriff Floyd Hadley find pear-shaped footprints, wide at the toes and tapering to a narrow heel. (“Little Man in Kansas Wheat Field,” The Saucerian, no. 6 (Spring 1955): 12–13; Clark III 270–271; Curt Collins, “A Flying Cucumber Comes to Kansas, Sept. 1954,” The Saucers That Time Forgot, February 23, 2018)
September 3 — 4:30 p.m. USAF Maj. Robert J. Waste and the 9-man crew of his B-47 bomber are flying at 25,000 feet in the vicinity of Dallas, Texas, on their way to Barksdale AFB in Bossier City, Louisiana. Carswell AFB [now Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base Fort Worth] in Texas directs them to be on the lookout for unusual objects. The crew discovers they are being paced by a missile-shaped object only 100 feet overhead that is slightly larger and longer than their own fuselage. It has two rows of oval-shaped portholes along the sides and an orange exhaust. The bottom of the object seems to be glowing. After pacing the B-47 a short time, it shoots ahead and zooms upward at incredible speed. Carswell tells them to pursue, but they can’t keep up. The UFO then descends to within 300 feet of the bomber and begins circling it. The UFO stays with the plane, pacing it above and below, and performing figure-eights and other maneuvers for over an hour. Two other B-47s in the squadron are behind the lead bomber and also view the object. The UFO finally shoots upward and disappears again. Waste takes 32 frames of 35mm color film of the UFO with his personal camera, but his film and that of his copilot is confiscated during a 3-day debriefing at Barksdale. (Paul Cerny, “Close Encounter at 25,000 Feet: Government Coverup,”: IUR 8, no. 5 (Sept./Oct. 1983): 6–7)
September 7 — 12:30 a.m. Robert Chovel and two others are driving home from the theater in Hirson, Aisne, France, when they see a luminous red-orange disc flying above the railroad tracks. It stops suddenly across the road, 900– 1,200 feet from the ground. When the car reaches the bridge at Buire, the object shoots away at great speed. (ClearIntent, p. 134; Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” May 12, 2003)
September 7 — 7:15 a.m. Two bricklayers, Emile Renard, 27, and Yves DeGillerboz, 23, see a bluish-gray object floating in midair over a field as they are bicycling between Harponville and Contay, Somme, France. It looks like an unfinished haystack “with a plate turned upside down on top of it.” When they try to approach, it takes off. It has a diameter of 33 feet, and they notice it has a kind of door. The observation lasts more than 3 minutes, at which point the object releases some smoke as it departs straight up. (Aimé Michel, Straight Line, p. 35; Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” March 20, 2003)
September 8 — 11:00 p.m. Thomas Farquhar sees a “large oval-shaped disc,” crackling and hissing, fly over Derryhubbert, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. He thinks it is about 3 feet wide and flying at a height of 2,000 feet. Daniel McWilliam and James Bingham, in Carrickfergus, County Antrim, see a rocket soar into the sky and explode silently. Mr. L. Hauser is on a boat leaving Belfast when he sees a rocket come up out of the sea and explode when it reaches about 15,000 feet. (Belfast Telegraph, September 9–11, 1954; Shane Cochrane, “Ireland vs. the Flying Saucers,” Fortean Times 317 (September 2014): 54)
September 9 — 2:20 a.m. Mr. K. M. Gibbons of Nelson, New Zealand, gets out of bed and sees through the window three discs hovering above a mudflat 3 miles away in a V-formation. They radiate a blue-white light from their edges. He grabs a camera with a telephoto lens and takes a photo. After 5 minutes, the discs begin to wobble, tip on edge, then shoot vertically out of sight. Other reports come from the area that morning. The photo shows a blurry oval with a small dark area on top. (UFOEv, pp. 89, 92; Wilkins, FS Uncensored, Citadel, 1955, opp. p. 96)
September 10 — 8:30 p.m. Antoine Mazaud is walking home from his fields at Mourieras, north of Bugeat, Corrèze, France, when he is confronted by a helmeted being of average height who makes friendly gestures. It shakes hands with him and embraces him while uttering unintelligible words. Then it goes back into the brush, enters a cigar-shaped object about 13 feet long, which takes off to the northwest. A few minutes later, witnesses in Limoges report a disc-shaped, red object leaving a bluish trail. (Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” June 21, 2005; Mark Cashman, “Behavioral Classification System for UFO Occupants,” IUR 24, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 18)
September 10 — Around 10:30 p.m. 34-year-old metal worker Marius Dewilde comes out of his house at Quarouble, Nord, France, to see why his dog is barking. He hears hurried footsteps on his right and with his flashlight sees two creatures just beyond his fence walking in single file toward a dark object sitting on the railroad tracks. The creatures are about 3.5 feet tall with wide shoulders, short legs, and helmets covering large heads. No faces or arms are visible. When he tries to cut them off and gets within 6 feet, he finds himself paralyzed as a powerful orange beam of light is projected at him from a square opening in the dark object. The creatures continue toward the railroad tracks, a door closes, the dark object rises to 100 feet, hovers, and speeds away. Five imprints on three wooden railroad ties are found, made by an object that an engineer estimates must have weighed 30 tons. French police and the French Air Force investigate the case. (Wikipedia, “Marius Dewilde”; Aimé Michel, Straight Line, 44–46; Marc Thirouin, “Marius Dewilde n’a pas menti,” Ouranos, no. 25 (1960): 20–25; Vallée, Magonia, pp.
17–18, 209; Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” July 22, 2004; Jean F. Gilles, “The Bankruptcy of the French UFO Research Body, GEPAN,” Flying Saucer Review 28, no. 5 (June 1983): 15–16; Mark Cashman, “Behavioral Classification System for UFO Occupants,” IUR 24, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 18)
September 12 or 13 — Late afternoon. A witness is driving a van in the vicinity of Quarouble, Nord, France, when he sees a domed disc descending vertically into a small thicket about 160 feet off the road and land. He can see a kind of gallery around the dome where human-like beings are standing. He stops the car, gets out, and walks toward the object, but when he gets closer the object shines a green ray at him. The disc immediately ascends vertically, then moves gently away. His paralysis ceases. A rush of air shakes him at the time it takes off. (Marc Thirouin, “Marius Dewilde n’a pas menti,” Ouranos, no. 25 (1960): 25; Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” March 23, 2006)
September 14 — 5:00 p.m. Farm worker Georges Fortin, 34, and more than 200 other witnesses in Saint-Prouant, Vendée, France, watch a cigar or carrot-shaped UFO as it emerges from a cloud, tilts toward the ground, hovers, and then elevates its front end quickly into a vertical position. It emits vapor from its lower end. Next, a metallic disc- shaped object flies out, spins around the cigar, and then reenters the vertical object. (Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” July 2, 2004; Herbert S. Taylor, “Satellite Objects and Cloud Cigars,” IUR 29, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 5; Herbert S. Taylor, “Cloud Cigars: A Further Look,” IUR 30, no. 3 (May 2006): 10–12; Clark III 293; Martin Shough and Wim van Utrecht, “‘Cloud Cigar’ over Saint-Prouant, France,” June 13, 2011)
September 14 — Night. Several people see a circular UFO over Helsinki, Finland. Flying at 2,600 feet, it gives off an intense light and leaves a trail of reddish smoke about 3 times its diameter. It is visible 7 seconds. (ClearIntent, p. 134)
September 15 — Ijapada Chatterjee, the manager of the Kadori mica mine, and hundreds of others watch a disc descend to an altitude of 500 feet over three adjoining villages (Kadori, Barshi, and Mangalda) in the Manbhum district, West Bengal, India. It hovers, then soars upwards at terrific speed, creating a tremendous gust of wind. The UFO
is over a mine that supplies beryllium for the US Atomic Energy Commission. (“800 Biharis See Flying Saucer,”
Times of India (Bombay), October 3, 1954; UFOEv, p. 124; Project 1947, “UFO Reports, 1954”)
September 16 — 6:00 a.m. The radio transmitter for WMEV in Marion, Virginia, fails as a round, shiny object, 10–15 feet in diameter, flies over the tower toward the east. (“Flying Saucers Are Sighted in Virginia,” Lancaster (Pa.) Intelligencer-Journal, September 17, 1954, p. 44; Schopick, p. 79)
September 17 — Around 4:45 p.m. Hundreds of people see a UFO over Rome, Italy, making staccato thunder sounds as it hovers. It makes a brief dive, returns to position, then zooms straight up, leaving a stream of white smoke behind. Around 5:45 p.m., Lt. Bruno Giustiniani and other personnel at a military unit at Ciampino Airport in Rome see it as a “half cigar” moving at 179 mph at 3,500 feet. Blue Book receives a teletype about the object, saying it is in the shape of a jellyfish when stationary but in the shape of a cigar when in motion. At 6:49 p.m., radar at Pratica di Mare Air Base south of Rome picks up a target for 20–45 minutes, plotting a slow course along the coast. (Loren E. Gross, UFOs, a History: 1954 September, The Author, 1994, pp. 24–27; 1Pinotti 54–58)
September 17 — 7:15 p.m. A widow named Mellé sees a luminous, orange-yellow, cigar-shaped object near her villa in Gelles, Puy-de-Dôme, France. Her neighbors also see it and watch for 5 minutes. Possible contrail. (Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” April 11, 2006)
September 18 — 8:30 p.m. A round glowing UFO is seen approaching then hovering above Danané, Ivory Coast, by many people: a Catholic priest named Fr. Myard, the local chief of police, a Dr. Mariani, a businessman named Sory Diallo, and a group of women. The object moves again at 9:05 p.m., changes from a circle to an ellipse, then flies away. (Aimé Michel, Straight Line, 61; Loren E. Gross, UFOs, a History: 1954 September, The Author, 1994, pp. 28–29)
September 18 — 8:40 p.m. A huge green fireball streaks across Colorado and New Mexico. It zooms above Santa Fe, New Mexico, giving off a blinding glare and takes 30 seconds to cross the sky, disturbing TV and radio signals. Lincoln LaPaz remarks that it does not seem to be an ordinary meteor. (Keyhoe, FS Conspiracy, pp. 198–199; Ruppelt, p. 47; Sparks, p. 220)
September 19 — 10:00 p.m. Yves David, 28, is riding his moped on the D-1 road south of Cenon-sur-Vienne, France, when his headlight begins malfunctioning and he feels a prickling sensation like electricity. He sees a 9-foot-long UFO in the road ahead and a small man in a diving suit coming toward him. It touches David on the shoulder, mutters something incomprehensible, and returns to the object. The object emits a green light that temporarily stuns David before it takes off. (Clark III 269; Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” March 20, 2003)
September 20 — 9:00 p.m. Elie Cisterne, a farm worker in the hamlet of La Chassagne, Ussac, Corrèze, France, is returning home on his tractor when he sees a luminous object coming toward him. He jumps off the tractor and lies down, fearful, as the object stops a short distance above the road and hovers silently for several minutes.
Cisterne runs away when the UFO starts moving again, flying over his tractor and into the distance. (Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” December 29, 2005)
September 21 — 9:45 p.m. A guard at the Santa Maria Airport in Vila so Porto, Azores, sees a 10 x 5-foot, light metallic blue, pecan-shaped object with a clear glass or plastic nose and door, poles or aerials on its nose. It hums or whines as it hovers, then lands vertically 50 feet away. A blond man, 5 feet 10 inches tall, appears, speaks in a strange language, pats the guard on the shoulder, gets in the object, hooks up his harness, pushes a button, takes off with the object’s nose pointed up, then levels off and climbs vertically. (NICAP, “Blond Humanoid Reported by Airport Guard”; Sparks, p. 220)
September 21 — Leonard Stringfield has a private talk for 26 minutes with Lt. Col. John O’Mara, USAF Deputy Commander for Intelligence, who tells him that flying saucers do exist—three types, actually: a craft from outer space, a secret US aircraft, and unexplained natural phenomena. (Leonard Stringfield, “Private Talk with Lt.
Colonel John O’Mara, Deputy Commander, Intelligence, Confirms the Existence of ‘Flying Saucers,’” CRIFO Newsletter 1, no. 7 (October 1, 1954): 1)
September 22 — Shortly after 8:00 p.m. Mme. Gamundi is driving on the N7 north of Fontainebleau, France, when she notices a light in the sky. She stops and gets out and sees a huge luminous ball hanging motionless. It is reddish and surrounded by a luminous, moving smoke. Suddenly, another bright ball emerges from the bottom, falls, slows, turns, and disappears at high speed. At least 4 other objects emerge. When an aircraft from Orly Airport approaches, the ball rises at high speed and disappears. (Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” April 9, 2006)
September 22 — 11:00 p.m. Jean Besse, a draftsman for a power company in Tulle, Corrèze, France, watches a UFO through binoculars. It changes color three times in a few seconds. Probably astronomical. (Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” March 23, 2006)
September 23 — Afternoon. Several residents of Bayonne, Pyrénées-Atlantiques, France, see three mysterious objects high in the sky. One witness, policeman M. Corrions, says they are arranged in the shape of a triangle. Possible helicopters. (Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” April 20, 2006)
September 23 — 9:00 p.m. Irene Vrignolles sees a “flying cigar” that lands slowly in a meadow behind a rectory in Lencouacq, Landes, France. (Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” December 16, 2005)
September 24 — Hoaxed story of an alleged sighting by Cesar Cardoso at Castelo Branco, Portugal, who sees two entities in shining metal suits emerge from a landed UFO and pick up flowers, shrubs, and twigs. (Patrick Gross, URECAT, December 8, 2006; Mark Cashman, “Behavioral Classification System for UFO Occupants,” IUR 24, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 18)
September 26 — 2:30 p.m. At Chabeuil, Drôme, France, Lucette Leboeuf is walking her dog when she sees a short being wearing a translucent helmet and diving suit. She can see large eyes looking at her through the helmet. The creature approaches her, hopping. The dog barks at it and she runs away and hides in a bush. About 15 feet away, she sees an object about 16 feet in diameter resembling a top with a flat top. It rises above the cornfield and takes off at tremendous speed. Other people notice a circular area about 10 feet in diameter where the ground and grass are tightly packed. Tree branches are broken from above. Shocked, she stays in bed for two days. (Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap”)
September 27 — 8:30 p.m. 12-year-old Raymond Romand and two other children on an isolated farm near Prémanon, Jura, France, see a brilliant rectangular object. He sees two occupants and throws stones at them, but he is thrown to the ground by an “ice-cold invisible force.” Raymond confesses 6 weeks later that he made up the whole story, including making some physical trace marks. (Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” March 7, 2003)
September 28 — Around 12:00 midnight. Two witnesses at Rixheim, Haut-Rhin, France, watch an elongated luminous object through binoculars. Ten or more smaller luminous points are circling it in all directions. (Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” April 1, 2014)
September 28 — 10:30 p.m. Vintner M. Mercier of Saint-Armand-Montrond, Cher, France, notices that someone has stolen grapes from his vineyard and decides to stay up late and catch the thief. He sees a luminous object descend and three figures emerge. He is then paralyzed and loses consciousness. There is no sign of anything when he wakes up. Probable hoax. (Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” April 5, 2007)
September 30 — Gen. Jimmy Doolittle submits a 69-page classified report on clandestine operations directly to President Eisenhower. It negates the Second Hoover Commission’s recommendation on intelligence oversight. It says: “We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage services and must learn to subvert, sabotage, and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated, and more effective methods than those used against us.” (Richard A. Best Jr. and Herbert Andrew Boerstling, “Proposals for Intelligence Reorganization, 1949–1996,” Report to the US House Select Committee on Intelligence, Congressional Research Service, February 28, 1996, p. 11)
September 30 — Aviation pioneer Eugène Farnier watches an unknown object for 20 minutes above his property at Jouy- sue-Morin, Seine-et-Marne, France. It is swinging back and forth over an area of about 984 feet. Farnier thinks it looks similar to the cigar-shaped object seen at Marignane in October 1952. (Patrick Gross, “UFOs in the Daily Press”)
September 30 — Around 4:30 p.m. Georges Gatay and his team of construction workers at Marcilly-sur-Vienne, Indre-et- Loire, France, see a disc-shaped object on the ground with a small, helmeted being standing nearby. In his hand he holds an elongated object: “It could have been a pistol, or it could have been a metal rod.” On his chest is a light projector. Gatay tries to run, but he finds himself helplessly nailed to the spot. He is thus “paralyzed” during the whole observation until the object leaves. So are his seven coworkers, in a unique case of collective physiological reaction. Almost certainly a hoax. (Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” November 8, 2006)
October — London publishing house Frederick Muller publishes a contactee book, Flying Saucer from Mars, allegedly written by one Cedric Allingham, who claims that while vacationing in Scotland in February 1954 he saw a saucer land and talked to its occupant, a human-looking Martian. In 1969, science writer Robert Chapman concludes that no such person as Allingham existed. Christopher Allan and Steuart Campbell allege in 1986 that the book was written by arch-skeptical astronomer Patrick Moore using a pseudonym. His motive was to spoof Adamski and embarrass ufologists, but Moore never admits to the hoax. The photo of “Cedric Allingham” is really Peter Davies, who posed for the photograph with Moore’s reflecting telescope. Davies also edited the book to conceal Moore’s distinctive style of writing. (Cedric Allingham, Flying Saucer from Mars, Frederick Muller, 1954; Clark III 98; Robert Chapman, Unidentified Flying Objects, Barker, 1969; Christopher Allen and Steuart Campbell, “Flying Saucer from Moore’s?” Magonia 23 (July 1986): 15–18; Curt Collins, “Contact! A Close Encounter of the Third Kind from 1954,” The Saucers That Time Forgot, October 13, 2017)
October — Day. RAF pilot Michael Forrest, stationed at RAF Sek Kong [now Shek Kong Airfield] near Hong Kong is scrambled in a de Haviland Vampire ground attack fighter to intercept a target detected by ground radar approaching from China. The target appears to be the size of an aircraft and traveling at high speed with a
continuous track. Ground control tells him that at times it is stationary, but it has the ability to change direction and height at fantastic speeds. Forrest and another pilot are vectored into the blip at 30,000 feet, but they can see nothing. Ground radar insists the blip is right there with them. After 15 minutes the aircraft break off and head home. On the base, he is told that the blip was caused by “anomalous propagation.” (“‘Scrambled for Bogies’: An Incident at RAF Sek Kong,” Fortean Times 403 (March 2021): 45)
Early October — Maxime Pignatelli, 65, is hunting with his dog on the banks of the Durance River near Corbières, Alpes- de-Hautes-Provence, France. He sees a gray object about 12 feet long and 3 feet high on the ground about 130 feet away. Two helmeted figures emerge from a dome. The man flees. His dog also retreats a bit later, walking awkwardly as if partly paralyzed. (Jacques Vallée, “Un siècle d’atterrissages,” Lumières dans la Nuit, no. 103 (December 1969): 7; Francis Schaefer and Pierre Delval, “Un recit d’atterrissage inedit à Corbières,” Phénomènes Inconnus 1, no. 14 (1971): 10–13; Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” May 20, 2003)
October 1 — The Swedish Defense Ministry allegedly requests a secret investigation into UFOs. (Keyhoe, FS Conspiracy, p. 27)
October 1 — 9:20 a.m. An RCAF test pilot is flying at 30,000 feet over Montreal, Quebec, in an F-86 Sabre Mk 5 jet fighter when he notices a contrail high over the north end of Lake Champlain. He climbs to 51,000 feet at 540 mph but is unable to close on the object, which appears to him as a black dot. He turns to a different heading and sees that the contrail makes a similar turn abiut 10,000 feet above him. As he returns to Montreal, the contrail climbs at a 45° angle and disppears to the east. (Chris Rutkowski, Canada’s UFOs: Declassified, August Night, 2002, pp. 91–92)
October 1 — 4:00 p.m. An anonymous man and his dog are paralyzed as a luminous white object dives toward them and climbs away again at Bry-sur-Marne, Val-de-Marne, France. (Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” March 25, 2003)
October 1 — 6:45 p.m. Bernard Devoisin and René Condette are bicycling west of Ligescourt in the direction of Vron, Somme, France. They see a glowing orange object shaped like a beehive in the middle of the road. A small entity, about 3 feet tall and dressed in a “diving suit,” is standing close to it. When they get to within 200 feet of it, the object takes off at great speed. (Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” May 8, 2004)
October 1 — 7:50 p.m. Mechanic Ernest Delattre, 19, is riding to his home in Croix d’Épine, Oise, France, on his motor scooter when a bright egg-shaped object lands on the left side of the road 45 feet away. He sees short, dark shapes “like potato bags” moving around the object. He speeds up and the UFO changes its color and takes off. (Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” March 27, 2003)
October 1 — Around 10:00 p.m. Jean Defiz, a factory worker in Bergerac, Dordogne, France, is returning home on his bicycle when he sees a large shooting star. Later, he sees an intense light in his yard and rushes out to see a disc rise with a whistling sound. It becomes luminous and flies off. A neighbor also sees it and estimates it is 10 feet wide. (Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap”)
October 2 — The French Air Ministry allegedly launches a UFO investigation after 267 citizens come forward to report UFOs. (Wilkins, FS Uncensored, Citadel, 1955, pp. 60–61)
October 2 — 3:45 p.m. A teacher, Mlle. Jaillet, along with 23 schoolchildren, see an elongated object in the sky to the southeast at Les Rousses, Jura, France. It approaches rapidly and they see it is a “cloud cigar.” It switches from horizontal to vertical and hovers. At one point, a gleaming yellow disc emerges from it and moves away. The long object switches to horizontal again and moves away to the northwest. The incident lasts 4–5 minutes. (Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” March 25, 2003)
October 3 — Dawn. Stockyard employee Angelo Girardo is going to his job in Bressuire, Deux-Sèvres, France, when he sees a small being wearing a diving suit standing near a circular craft about 10 feet in diameter. It swiftly takes off. Hoax. (Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” August 3, 2007)
October 3 — 7:20 p.m. Villagers of Chereng, Nord, France, are having their Ducasse festival meal when they see a fast, luminous object in the sky suddenly stop, give off sparks, and descend to ground level. As people run to the spot, it takes off again. (Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” January 9, 2009)
October 3 — 11:15 p.m. Young farmer Jean Allary sees a circular object near Ronsenac, Charente, France, that seems to be gliding on or near the ground, has luminous spots, and lights up as it takes off. He finds flattened and scorched grass over an area 25 feet across. (Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” January 31, 2007)
October 4 — 8:00 p.m. In Poncey-sur-l’Ignon, Côte-d’Or, France, Mme. Yvette (or Thérèse) Fourneret sees a luminous orange object about 10 feet wide land in a meadow on her farm. She runs to tell some men, who arrive at the spot with rifles but find nothing. Instead, they discover a strange quadrilateral hole from which soil appears to be sucked up. The roots of plants are not damaged. The French Air Force and local police investigate and learn there are other witnesses. (Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” March 10, 2003)
October 5 — A spindle-shaped UFO is seen for 20 minutes by hundreds of people over El Mahalla El Kubra, Egypt. At Bahnay, aerial cylinders emit dark smoke. One explodes, knocking a farmer to the ground, and kills two cows, whose hides show burn marks. Lt. Tewrik takes a photo of a rotating UFO that emits smoke above El-Qantara el- Sharqîya on the western side of the Suez Canal. He sends it to the Egyptian Army and to Khedivial Astronomical Observatory in Helwan. Adm. Youssef Hammad, director of the Egyptian Ports and Lights Administration, alerts pilots and astronomers to keep watch for UFOs over Cairo. (Wilkins, FS Uncensored, Citadel, 1955, pp. 231–232; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1954 October, The Author, 1991, p.
October 5 — 4:00 a.m. M. P. Lucas, a baker in Loctudy, Finistère, France, is getting water from his well when he sees a UFO hovering nearby. A small being comes out of the object; it has an oval head covered with hair and large eyes. The creature touches Lucas’s shoulder and speaks to him in an unknown language. He calls for his boss, and the creature runs into the object and takes off. (Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” October 3, 2003)
October 5 — 7:15 a.m. A road worker named Narcy sees an object near a road in Mertrud, Haute Marne, France. He also sees a hairy dwarf wearing an orange, tight-fitting jacket climb through a porthole on the UFO, which consists of a cigar-shaped section under a flat disc. Tracks are found. Probable hoax. (Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” March 25, 2003)
October 5 — 3:45 p.m. In Beaumont, Puy-de-Dôme, France, witnesses Brun, Marfaron, Douti, and Marplat see a luminous ball moving west to east 1,500 feet away from them. It approaches to within 450 feet, and they feel paralyzed with faintness as a nitrobenzene odor spreads around them. (Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” March 24, 2006)
October 6 — Around 6:00 a.m. Mechanic Joseph Roy is riding to work on his bicycle at Isles-sur-Suippe, Marne, France, and sees a dazzling light at low altitude. It blinks out. When he gets to the spot where it disappeared, he sees a large object like an artillery shell 9 feet long. A small, dark form is standing in front of it. Roy becomes frightened and races to the nearest gendarmerie. Probable confusion, helicopter, and military personnel. (Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” January 16, 2006)
October 6 — 9:30 p.m. Two soldiers at the military barracks in La Fère, Aisne, France, watch a luminous craft in the shape of an artillery shell landed on the ground less than a quarter-mile away. As one soldier approaches it, he becomes paralyzed. (Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” April 9, 2006)
October 7 — 6:20 a.m. A group of workers at the Renault manufacturing plant at Le Mans, Sarthe, France, are bicycling to work when they feel an unpleasant tickling at the same moment an intense greenish light is emitted from a luminous object hovering above the Route N23 road. They are almost paralyzed, then the UFO leaves, flying low over the fields. (Aimé Michel, Straight-Line, p. 143; Schopick, pp. 8–9; Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” October 22, 2004)
October 7 — The Italian Air Ministry allegedly sets up UFO detection posts for 24/7 vigilance. (Wilkins, FS Uncensored,
Citadel, 1955, p. 232)
October 7 — 2:30 p.m. Farmer René Margaillon goes to work and notices a mysterious object about 300 feet away in a field between Monteux and Althen-des-Paluds, Vauclude, France. He approaches the object, which is about 8 feet tall and phosphorescent. Suddenly it disappears and he feels suffocated. (Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” April 5, 2003)
October 7 — Night. Witnesses at Corbigny, Nièvre, France, see a luminous cylinder that appears orange when vertical and motionless, and white when moving forward horizontally. At one point, two small discs emerge from its lower part. (Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” September 12, 2005)
October 8 — 7:30 p.m. Four children—Gilbert Calda, 12, Daniel Hirsch, 9, J. P. Hirsch, 5, and Robert Maguin, 16—are roller skating at Pournoy-la-Chétive, Moselle, France, when they see a luminous object near the cemetery. It is round, about 8 feet in diameter, and standing on three legs. A dwarf, about 4 feet tall, dressed in black, with a face covered in hair and large eyes, emerges and shines a blinding light at them. It says something in an unknown language. The children run away but look back in time to see the object flying away high in the sky. (Clark III 269; Aimé Michel, Straight-Line, 154; Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” March 7, 2003)
October 9 — The US Air Force releases a press statement saying that after studying 3,500 reports, it has found “no authentic physical evidence” that UFOs are spaceships or weapons. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1954 October, The Author, 1991, p. 22)
October 9 — 4:00 p.m. Jean Bertrand is driving near Carcassonne, Aude, France, when he comes upon a metallic sphere in the road ahead. The top half seems to be transparent, and he sees two human-shaped figures inside. As he approaches, the object takes off at high speed. Probable helicopter. (Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” March 26, 2003)
October 9 — Around 7:00 p.m. Roger Barrault, a worker in Lavoux, Vienne, France, is riding a bicycle when he is stopped on the road by a double beam of light coming from a 4-foot-tall figure that looks like a diver. It wears boots without heels and has brilliant eyes and a large moustache. Hoax. (Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” March 26, 2003)
October 9 — 8:30 p.m. Jean-Pierre Mitto and his two cousins are driving on Road 631 from Toulouse to Briatexte, Tarn, France, at a crossroads known as “La Caiffe” when they see two small figures about the size of 11-year-old children cross the road. They enter a pasture where a convex disc rises vertically and shoots upwards rapidly. It is about 20 feet in diameter and orange. Brown, oily residue is found at the site. (Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” March 26, 2003)
October 9 — 9:20 p.m. Mechanics André Bartoli and Jean-Jacques Lalevée see the sky light up with a yellow-orange glow in Cuisy, Seine-et-Marne, France. Bartoli’s car motor and headlights fail, and they both see a yellow-orange cigar-shaped object moving to the southwest. (Aimé Michel, Straight-Line, pp. 150–152; Schopick, pp. 9–11; Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” August 26, 2004)
October 9 — 10:15 p.m. Max Favell, a representative of a German firm in Beirut, Lebanon, sees a white flying object land. It takes off vertically, spinning, and is lost to sight. (Vallée, Magonia, pp. 222–223)
October 9 — Evening. As he is driving home from his job as a movie projectionist in Rinkerode [now part of Drensteinfurt], North Rhine-Westphalia, West Germany, Willi Hoge sees a blue light to one side of the road. He looks closer and sees four small figures with big heads and chests and small, thin legs, apparently doing repair work on a spindle-shaped machine. All are dressed in one-piece elastic body suits. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1954 October, The Author, 1991, p. 24; Wilkins, FS Uncensored, Citadel, 1955, p. 233)
October 10 — The Royal Observatory of Belgium in Uccle announces it will act as a clearinghouse for UFO reports. (Wilkins, FS Uncensored, Citadel, 1955, p. 233)
October 10 — A cylindrical UFO with red and green lights is seen over Alexandria, Egypt. (Wilkins, FS Uncensored,
Citadel, 1955, pp. 232–233)
October 10 — 11:30 a.m. Marius Dewilde, along with his 14-year-old son, allegedly has a second encounter with a UFO occupant at Quarouble, Nord, France. (Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” April 3, 2003)
October 10 — In a newspaper interview, Alfred Loedding alludes to the 1948 Estimate of the Situation without calling it that. Loedding shows a study of some 100+ UFO reports to one of the “country’s leading scientists,” who glances at it briefly, then declares that “flying saucers are a figment of the imagination.” Shortly afterwards, the skeptics in Project Sign win out, and Loedding’s efforts are ignored. (Trenton (N.J.) Sunday Times-Advertiser, October 10, 1954; Michael Hall, “Was There a Second Estimate of the Situation?” IUR 27, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 13, 32)
October 11 — 4:15 a.m. Baptiste Jourdy is delivering milk near Fonfrède, Loire, France, when the truck engine dies and the headlights fail. He gets out to investigate and sees a glowing, multicolored object, moving at great speed, cross the road and disappear in the distance. The headlights return and he starts the truck again. (Aimé Michel, Straight-Line, p. 157; Schopick, pp. 11–12; Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” April 6, 2003)
October 11 — 4:30 a.m. Two merchants, Henri Gallois and Louis Vigneron, are traveling to a fair in a van near Clamercy, Nièvre, France, when they both feel electrical shocks. The van motor dies, and the headlights go out. They become paralyzed and see on the ground, 150 feet away, a round object with three small figures around it. The figures go inside the object, which then leaves rapidly. The headlights come back on, the paralysis ends, and the engine can be restarted. Hoax. (Aimé Michel, Straight-Line, p. 158; Schopick, pp. 12–13; Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” April 7, 2003)
October 11 — 6:00 a.m. Baptiste Potin of Méral, Mayenne, France, is riding a bicycle to his workplace when he spots a huge orange ball in the sky that seems to be above Saint-Poix. It apparently descends to the ground as he approaches, barring the road. After watching it 8–10 minutes, it rises slowly and disappears in the northwest. He finds when he arrives at a farm that he is covered in white fluff embedded in his clothes. Probably an observation of the moon, accompanied by plant seeds. (Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” April 14, 2003)
October 11 — The Romanian magazine Contemporanul claims that UFOs are US propaganda designed to “stir up against Moscow a flying-saucer psychosis.” (“Saucers Are Not!” Cincinnati Enquirer, Oct. 12, 1954, p. 4; Ruppelt, p.
238)
October 11 — 9:50 p.m. Julia Juste, Maria Barbereau, and Marion Tanneur are driving along D14 about 1 mile from Chateauneuf-sur-Charente, Charente, France. Two luminous globes, one smaller than the other, appear in the sky ahead of them at low altitude, and their car stalls and the headlights go out. The larger one becomes brilliant white with a reddish halo. After 5 minutes, they move out of sight in the Charente valley. (Aimé Michel, Straight-Line, p. 160; Schopick, p. 13; Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” April 6, 2003)
October 12 — Morning. A UFO supposedly lands in a populous district on the south side of Tehran, Iran. It is said to have tried to kidnap a terrified man, Ghasim Faili, who says that on waking up he sees the UFO within 60 feet of him. It emits a magnetic force to capture him, but he shouts and neighbors gather, forcing the apparatus to take off.
Later sources add some dubious details. (Patrick Gross, URECAT, July 20, 2007)
October 12 — Afternoon. A French engineer driving to Kenitra, Morocco, sees a small figure in a metallic suit climbing abroad a UFO that quickly lifts off and flies away. The location is said to be Mamora Forest, which could be modern Mehdya, on the coast. (Lorenzen, Occupants, Signet, 1967, p. 95)
October 12 — Around 2:00 p.m. A math professor at Lisieux named Bon is in Saint-Germain-de-Livet, Calvados, France, when he sees a silvery disc with a diameter of 21–24 feet hovering over a wooden area off the road. It dives toward the ground, then rises suddenly and silently into the sky at tremendous speed. (Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” October 24, 2004)
October 13 — 7:35 p.m. Three witnesses (Olivier, Perano, and a third man) see a reddish disc about 12 feet in diameter near Bourrasol, a suburb of Toulouse, France. A small being about 4 feet tall is standing nearby wearing a diver’s suit. Its head is large, and it has enormous eyes. One witness approaches to within 60–70 feet and is paralyzed.
The UFO soon takes off. Definite hoax. (Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” April 24, 2003)
October 14 — 6:30 a.m. A resident of Shamsabad [which one?], Iran, sees a star-like object about 300 feet away from his house. Approaching to 60 feet, he sees a “short young man” who is standing on a circular piece of metal in the middle of the object and glancing around him. The man seems to be “laughing” at the witness. The UFO shoots up into the air and vanishes. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1954 October, The Author, 1991, p. 42)
October 14 — Keyhoe hears from an informant that the 4602nd AISS has a “crashed object” program. His contact Lou Corbin thinks the Air Force already has some recovered material. (Keyhoe, FS Conspiracy, pp. 214–215)
October 14 — A farmer and his wife see a light green object traveling at tremendous speed, possibly 3,000 mph, in Kenya. (Wilkins, FS Uncensored, Citadel, 1955, p. 234)
October 14 — 12:00 noon. Farmer Antonio Crepaldi is leading his cows to a pond near Ca’ Pisani, Rovigo, Italy, when an egg-shaped object emitting intense heat swoop over his house at an altitude of 50 feet. The cows panic and run away, apparently suffering burns. Some haystacks catch fire. The sighting lats 2 minutes. (1Pinotti 59)
October 14 — 3:30 p.m. Casimir Starovski, a miner, meets a strange figure in Erchin Forest, near Lewarde, Nord, France.
It has large, slanted, protruding eyes and a squat, furry body. Its nose is flat, it has thick lips, and it wears a skullcap on its oversized head. (Clark III 269; Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” December 21, 2005)
October 14 — 4:15 p.m. Flight Lt. James R. Salandin of the 604th Fighter Squadron is flying a Gloster Meteor Mk.8 out of North Weald Airfield, Essex, England, at 16,000 feet. He sees three objects heading towards him. Two of them (one gold, one silver) veer off to his port side, while the third closes to within a few hundred yards before veering to his port side. It is saucer-shaped with “buns” on top and underneath, silvery and metallic, with no portholes or flames. The report is sent to the Air Ministry where it disappears. (NICAP, “Gloster ‘Meteor’ Encounters Disc / Salandin Case”; “Week-end Pilot in Near Collision with Flying Saucer,” Flying Saucer Review 1, no. 1 (Spring 1955): 2; “The Famous Salandin Sighting,” Flying Saucer Review 30, no. 2 (December 1984): 13–15; Good Above, pp. 36–38; Good Need, pp. 154–155; Patrick Gross, “October 14, 1954, North Weald, Essex, UFO Encounters RAF Meteor Jet”)
October 14 — 6:20 p.m. André Cognard is driving on the D60 road to the east of Gueugnon, Saône-et-Loire, France, when a brilliant reddish fireball passes near his car to the west at low altitude. It is so bright that he stops his car. Probable meteor. (Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” April 20, 2003)
October 14 — Twilight. A witness is riding a moped on the road between Saint-Romain-sous-Gourdon and Les Brosses Tillots, Saône-et-Loire, France. Suddenly his motor fails and, as he gets off the cycle, a bright circular object bursts ahead of him. He walks back with his moped and is able to start it again. (Aimé Michel, Straight- Line, p. 175; Schopick, p. 14; Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” September 25, 2004)
October 15 — Early in the morning. A large, luminous, red object streaks across the sky above Hungary. A teacher from Györ-Moson-Sopron county takes two photos of what is an apparent meteor. (Hobana and Weverbergh 199–201)
October 15 — In Boaria Pisani, Padua, Italy, a farmer is leading his cows to a pond when he sees an object fly over his house. The cows panic and run away, knocking a girl to the ground, while the object emits a burst of light. The farmer runs to the house and then faints. Three other persons see the craft depart. It is dark in color but surrounded by short blue and yellow flames. The object is egg-shaped, flies at 50 feet above the ground, and emits intense heat. The little pond is found desiccated, and haystacks catch fire as it flies over while the cattle suffers burns. (Vallée, Magonia, pp. 229–230)
October 15 — Afternoon. Farmers near the Po della Donzella river channel, Veneto, Italy, see a disc-shaped object land then take off vertically. At the site is a deep crater about 18 feet in diameter. Poplar trees are partially burned. (Aimé Michel, Straight Line, p. 181)
October 15 — Evening. Veterinarian Henri Robert of Londinières in Normandy, France, is driving on route RN 314, near Baillolet, Seine-Maritime, France. He sees four orange objects flying one above the other at 1,000 feet. One floats down like a leaf, landing about 350 feet in front of his car. Robert feels an electric shock and his engine dies for 20 seconds and the object disappears. Robert continues driving. As he is going through the village of Bailleul- Neuville, he sees in his headlights a four-foot-tall bluish-gray figure with arms and legs spread. His headlights go off then on again. He then sees on his left a 27-foot-long cigar-shaped object at the edge of a slope. It takes off vertically and quickly moves toward the north. Possible hoax. (Aimé Michel, Straight-Line, pp. 184–185; Schopick, pp. 15–16; Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” April 7, 2004)
October 15–25 — Thousands of witnesses in the former Yugoslavia report low-flying UFOs and high-flying cigar-shaped objects, especially around Ljubljana, Slovenia; Sarajevo, Bosnia; and Belgrade, Serbia. Yugoslavia announces on October 27 that it intends to launch an official investigation. (Lorenzen, UFOs: The Whole Story, Signet, 1969, p. 61; Hobana and Weverbergh 90–91)
October 17 — Around 9:30 a.m. Guy Puyfourcat is returning from the fields near Cier-de-Rivière, Haute-Garonne, France, with his mare on a halter. The horse suddenly becomes restless and jumpy. A gray object about 4 feet in diameter rises from one side of the road and passes over them. The mare rises about 9 feet into the air and Puyfourcat releases her, and the animal falls to the ground and is unable to move for 10 minutes. The UFO moves away at high speed. (Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” October 16, 2007)
October 18 — 5:30 p.m. A M. Bachelard is driving a light truck southeast of Gelles, Puy-de-Dôme, France. As he goes around a bend, he feels paralyzed and his truck slows down to less than 20 mph. In a nearby field he sees an elongated object about 5 feet high. A few minutes later he reaches the village of Coheix, which is off his normal route, and starts telling people about the event. Later ufologists suspect there may be some missing time involved. (Aimé Michel, Straight-Line, p. 198; Schopick, pp. 16–17; Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” March 20, 2003; “The Landing at Gelles,” Flying Saucer Review Case Histories, no. 5 (June 1971): iii)
October 18 — 6:00 p.m. Two farmers near Saint-Cirgues, Haute-Loire, France, watch two bright balls connected by a rod for 15 minutes. They disappear at a fast pace. (Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” December 21, 2006)
October 18 — 9:00 p.m. M. and Mme. Labussière are driving on the N150 southwest of Saintes, Charente-Maritime, France, when they see a balance-shaped object in the sky. One side is red and the other orange, while the rod connecting them is a luminous green. The object pauses above a field near their car, which they pull over to watch more closely. The green rod soon dissipates, and the two balls settle in the field. In the dim light emitted by the objects, the Labussières see a small creature emerge from each, walk toward each other, pass without stopping, and enter the other object. (Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” December 29, 2003)
October 19 — 8:00 p.m. A M. Fillonneau is driving in Criteuil-la-Madeleine, Charente, France, when he sees a bright fireball. His headlights go out and the engine stops, and he finds that his battery is completely dead and the headlight bulbs burned out. (Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” February 5, 2007)
October 19 — Around 12:00 midnight. Renzo Pugina has just put his car in his garage at Parravicino, Como, Italy, when he sees a humanoid about 4 feet 3 inches tall in a scaly, luminous suit standing near a tree. The lower part of its body is like a cone. It aims a light beam at Pugina that paralyzes him briefly. He only manages to move some fingers, but with some concentration makes a clenching motion with his fist on the garage keys that he holds in his hand. Freed from the temporary paralysis, he runs to attack the intruder, who flees with a soft whirring sound. A police investigation finds a spot of oil at the location. (Vallée, Magonia, pp. 235–236; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1954 October, The Author, 1991, p. 74; 1Pinotti 60)
October 20 — 6:30 p.m. Jean Schonbrenner is driving a truck southbound near Turquestein-Blancrupt, Moselle, France, when he sees a bright glow ahead on route N393. He continues to drive but feels paralyzed, his hands glued to the wheel. At about 30 feet away, his engine stops and the yellow-orange glow rises slowly and heads northwest. He feels a sensation of warmth and sees that the glow contains a cone-shaped object. (Aimé Michel, Straight-Line, p. 203; Schopick, pp. 17–18; Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” April 21, 2003)
October 20 — 9:15 p.m. Jean Lalle (or Jean Lasse) is riding a motorcycle between Biozat, Alliers, and Effiat, Puy-de- Dome, France, when his engine dies suddenly. He sees an egg-shaped object with a bright trail climbing in the sky. The motorcycle restarts once the object has left. (Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” December 21, 2005)
October 21 — A young man hears a rustling sound and sees a landed UFO outside Melito di Napoli, Italy. It gives off a powerful bronze-green light. He then sees an occupant dressed in a diving suit emerge. A dog begins barking and
the entity retreats inside and takes off. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1954 October, The Author, 1991, p. 74; 1Pinotti 61)
October 21 — 4:45 p.m. Jessie Roestenburg and her two children observe a disc-shaped, aluminum object hovering above their house in Ranton, Stafford, England. Through two transparent panels they see two men with white skin, having shoulder-length hair and high foreheads. They wear transparent helmets and turquoise-blue clothing resembling ski suits. The object hovers at a tilted angle while the two occupants look at the scene “sternly, not in an unkind fashion, but almost sadly, compassionately.” (Clark III 268; Charles Bowen, “Few and Far Between,” in Charles Bowen, ed., The Humanoids, special issue of FSR, Oct./Dec. 1966, p. 4; Gordon Creighton, “The Roestenburg Story (1954),” Flying Saucer Review 38, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 6–9; Curt Collins, “Jessie Roestenburg’s 1954 UFO Encounter and Beyond,” Blue Blurry Lines, October 19, 2018)
October 21 — Evening. A motorist is driving on the D220 road with his 4-year-old son between Paillé and Pouzou, Charente-Maritime, France. He feels a tingling like electric shocks all over his body. The child cries, the engine stops, and the headlights go out as a luminous red body with a tail flashes briefly in front of them. (Aimé Michel, Straight-Line, p. 204; Schopick, pp. 18–19; Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” April 21, 2003)
October 21 — 9:25 p.m. Three observers at the Woomera Test Range in South Australia see an erratic, dancing light adjacent to rocket Launcher Apron 1, Range B, approximately 500 feet away. The light alternates from deep orange to yellow and is egg-shaped. Its apparent size is three times the magnitude of Venus. (NICAP, “Dancing Light Adjacent to Rocket Launcher”)
Mid-October — A merchant and his deliveryman are driving a van northeast of the village of Erquières, Pas-de-Calais, France, when they see a blinding light in front of them. As it passes over the van, the engine stalls and the headlights fail. Both men feel an electric shock. (Aimé Michel, Straight-Line, pp. 204–205; Schopick, p. 19; Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” March 12, 2005)
October 22 — Afternoon. Roger Reveillé is walking in the Fôret de Lusigny, Aube, France, when he hears a rustling noise. He looks up and sees an oval-shaped object about 20 feet long at treetop level. At the same time he feels an intense heat that also seems to be creating a thick fog. After a few minutes the object disappears upward, but the heat continues. Although it is raining, the ground underneath where the object had been is dry. (Aimé Michel, Straight-Line, p. 204; Schopick, p. 18; Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” September 28, 2003)
October 22 — 3:00 p.m. Principal Rodney Warrick and teacher Mrs. George Dittmar of Jerome, Ohio, Special School watch a large, silvery, cigar-shaped object hanging motionless in the sky. Soon it takes off, and in its wake it leaves a trail of whitish, web-like substance that floats down and begins to hang from wires along the road. It descends in both strands and balls for 45 minutes. Both adults get greenish stains on their hands from it. All of it dissipates, but the substance placed in closed jars dissipates more slowly. (“Strange ‘Flying Cigar’ Puzzles Union Countians,” Marion (Ohio) Star, November 2, 1954, pp. 1, 10; “Web-Spinning Saucer Visits Marysville, Ohio,” CRIFO Newsletter, December 3, 1954, p. 5; Michael D. Swords, “Angel Hair: Spindrift between Worlds,” IUR 32, no. 1 (August 2008): 3–4)
October 23 — 1:30 a.m. A woman in Cincinnati, Ohio, has fallen asleep listening to the radio. Suddenly it makes a harsh shrieking noise and the volume increases. Dogs begin barking in the neighborhood, so she looks outside and sees a large reddish-orange disc with a halo around it moving in a circle overhead. After a minute it moves off to the south. (“The Fort Wayne and Cincinnati Tie-In,” CRIFO Newsletter 1, no. 9 (December 3, 1954): 5)
October 23 — 3:00 a.m. A farmer named Carmelo Papotto near Tripoli, Verona, Italy, watches a UFO land 150 feet away with a sound like a compressor. It seems to be an oval machine with six wheels and complex machinery. The top half is transparent and flooded with bright light. Aboard are six men in yellowish overalls with human faces.
When he touches part of the object, he gets an electric shock. One occupant warns him to stay away. For the next 20 minutes he watches them fiddle with instruments. The object then rises to 150 feet and takes off at a dizzying speed. (Vallée, Magonia, p. 237; 1Pinotti 61–62; Mark Cashman, “Behavioral Classification System for UFO Occupants,” IUR 24, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 17–18)
October 24 — Rocket expert Hermann Oberth writes in the American Weekly: “It is my thesis that flying saucers are real and that they are space ships from another solar system. I think that they possibly are manned by intelligent observers who are members of a race that may have been investigating our Earth for centuries.” He thinks UFOs might fly by “distorting the gravitational field.” (Hermann Oberth, “Flying Saucers Come from a Distant World,” American Weekly, October 24, 1954, in Cincinnati Enquirer; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1954 October, The Author, 1991, p. 83; Hermann Oberth, “Lecture Notes for Lecture about Flying Saucers, 1954,” Australian UFO Bulletin, September 1991, pp. 4–9)
October 24 — A small man with strange glowing eyes is seen near Aïn El Turk, Algeria, along the coast. (Vallée,
Magonia, p. 237)
October 24 — 1:00–6:00 p.m. Officers and men at the Canoas Air Force Base near Porto Alegre, Brazil, watch a number of “circular silver-colored” objects moving at high speed. They are also seen by personnel of Varig airlines and some civilians. There are more than 100 witnesses. The chief military witness, jet pilot Lt. H. Ferraz de Almeida, sees a dull silver object moving apparently slowly above the base in a zigzag fashion. He estimates its altitude as 40,000–45,000 feet and suggests that its real speed must be tremendous. Maj. J. Magalhaes Mota is watching the same object as another one rapidly approaches the first and stops next to it. The second object then moves rapidly, abruptly changes course, and flies off in an arc. When the object is in motion, it is surrounded by a misty halo, and when it stops the halo disappears. Their movements appear mechanical and intermittent. The report is forwarded to the Air Ministry in Rio de Janeiro with a request to investigate. Brazilian Air Force Chief of Intelligence Col. João Adil de Oliviera heads the investigation, which concludes on December 2 that the “saucers appear to be some kind of revolutionary aircraft” that are not “conventional phenomena or illusions.” (UFOEv, p. 119; Swords 461–462)
October 25 — 6:15 a.m. Several UFOs, some described as spear-shaped and others as egg-shaped, speed over Belgrade, Yugoslavia [now Serbia], trailing bluish tails for about an hour. Witnesses include aeronautical engineer Vladimir Ajvas, AF Capt. Stjepan Djitkol, and staff at the nearby Zemun Polje Airport. The event is a culmination of UFO sightings over Yugoslavia since October 15, few of which make the newspapers. (UFOEv, p. 123; Hobana and Weverbergh 90–91)
October 25 — Lucien Jeune, mayor of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, Vaucluse, France, following numerous UFO sightings, issues a police order prohibiting “The overflight, landing, and take-off of aircraft, so-called flying saucers or flying cigars, on the communal territory.” The announcement, which also threatens the confiscation of any craft and the arrest of occupants, is done as a publicity stunt. Claude Avril, the city mayor in 2016, refuses to rescind it. (Louis de Gouyon Matignon, “The French Anti-UFO Municipal Law of 1954,” Space Legal Issues, May 29, 2019)
October 25 — 7:30 p.m. Farmer Gilbert Hée is gathering pears on his farm at Les-Jonquerets-de-Livet [now Mesnil-en- Ouche], Eure, France, when he sees an elongated object about 7 feet long with a green and a red light at both ends resting in the pasture. Some cows have gathered around it. The object is moving slowly and stops at a barbed wire fence. Hée goes inside. At 11:00 p.m., his son-in-law René Marais and a friend, Jean Chéradame, arrive on a motorcycle. Chéradame agrees to ride into the field and take a look, but he only goes 300 feet along the road before the engine fails. He falls from the bike and sees two short creatures walking stiffly and wearing bright clothes. (Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” April 11, 2004)
October 26 — 10:45 p.m. Aimé Bousard is returning on his bicycle from the town hall at Alleyrat, Creuse, France, to his residence at La Vaureille when he sees a figure crouching on the roadway. When he stops, the figure stands up and points two powerful light-blue lights at him. The entity is 5 feet 3 inches tall and dressed in a diver’s suit. It has two green lights on either side of its head. Bousard is paralyzed for 10 minutes while the lights are aimed at him. Then the entity crosses the road and disappears and Bousard can move again. Gendarmes investigate and note that his right hand is swollen and he has difficulty writing. They find a 27-inch circle of disturbed earth at the site. (Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” September 6, 2007)
October 27 — 1:30 p.m. More than 10,000 soccer fans witness two luminous discs during a game at Florence, Italy. A large amount of “white filaments” falls that clings to everything. Engineering student Alfredo Jacopozzi collects samples in a jar and takes it to Prof. Cozzi at the Institute of Chemistry at the University of Florence. The lab finds the samples have a “fibrous structure, with mechanical resistance to contraction and torsion, burns rapidly, leaving a transparent residue.” It contains calcium, silicon, aluminum, magnesium, iron, and boron. (“Italy, Too!” Flying Saucer News, no. 7 (Winter 1954–1955): 6; Brian Boldman, “Angel Hair Physical Analyses: A Review,” JUFOS 9 (2006): 101; Michael D. Swords, “Angel Hair: Spindrift between Worlds,” IUR 32, no. 1 (August 2008): 5–6; 1Pinotti 63–64)
October 28 — Hoaxed report of a landed UFO and occupants at Tradate, Italy, near Milan. (Frank Edwards, FS Serious Business, Bantam ed., 1966, pp. 108–109; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1954 October, The Author, 1991, p. 89; 1Pinotti 64)
October 28 — Three luminous UFOs soar over Rome, Italy, seen by Associated Press reporter Maurizio Andreolo and US Ambassador Clare Booth Luce. Some witnesses report “fine cotton or wool particles” falling from them. (Keyhoe, FS Conspiracy, pp. 212–213; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1954 October, The Author, 1991, p. 91; 1Pinotti 64)
October 30 — 1:00 p.m. UFO researcher Alberto Perego is driving past the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, Italy, when he notices a crowd of about 100 people gazing up at the sky. He sees two “white dots” moving toward the south then vanish in opposite directions. Later, two other objects appear and move to the north at an altitude of
about 6,500 feet. (Alberto Perego, “The Great ‘Cross’ above the Vatican,” Flying Saucer Review Case Histories, no. 15 (June 1973): 3)
Late October–early November — The UK War Office receives six reports of 40–50 unidentified radar targets that appear from nowhere, usually at midday, flying at a height of 12,000 feet. The targets first appear in a U-formation, then converge into two parallel lines and take up a Z-formation before disappearing. The location of the radar trackings is not revealed. (Good Above, pp. 38–39)
November — Gen. John A. Samford summons Col. John O’Mara from Dayton and directs him to clear up any confusion about Keyhoe’s use of USAF data. O’Mara writes Eickhoff and says he had misunderstood and that Keyhoe’s book does contain officially released Air Force UFO reports. (Keyhoe, FS Conspiracy, p. 231)
November — The Hungarian government gets an “expert” to state that UFOs do not exist because all reports “originate in bourgeois countries, where they are invented by the capitalist warmongers.” (Ruppelt, p. 238)
November 1 — 6:00 a.m. Jack Holloway sees a large, round object that leaves a vapor trail that sprays sparks and moves at high speed for a few seconds to the south of Salem, Oregon. (NICAP case file)
November 1 — 6:30 a.m. Rosa Lotti Dainelli sets out for the church at the castle of Cennina, Arezzo, Italy. As she passes through a wooded area, she sees a spindle-shaped object standing upright next to a cypress tree. It has two portholes and a little door, through which she can see two chairs. Two little men come out from behind the object; they are dressed in gray suits, cloaks that come down to their waists, and red helmets. They speak in an unintelligible language and snatch flowers from her hands and throw them inside the UFO. Dainelli flees, glancing back only once. (Clark III 228–229; 1Pinotti 65–74; Northern Ontario UFO Research and Study, “The 1954 Cennina Landing and Encounter with Humanoids”; Società Cooperativa Dramatica Filarmonica di Ambra, “Incontro con umanoidi di Rosa Dainelli nei Lotti”)
November 1 — 10:40 p.m. Gonzalo Rubinos Ramos is driving at a spot called Curva del Obispo 42 kilometers from A Coruña, Galicia, Spain, when his engine stalls and the lights go out. He sees a large glowing red object near the road. After a while it moves upwards with a “soft explosion.” At the same time, the radio-telegraph station in A Coruña is affected by severe interference and static. Probable meteor. (Antonio Ribera, “A UFO Survey of Spain: More Evidence,” Flying Saucer Review 9, no. 1 (Jan./Feb. 1963): 16; Herbert S. Taylor, “An Update on Vehicle Interference Reports, Part Two,” IUR 34, no. 1 (Sept. 2011): 18; Juan Carlos Victorio, “El ‘platillo volante’ de Órdenes (A Coruña),” Misterios del Aire, April 17, 2018)
November 2 — 10:30 a.m. Taxi driver Maurilio Braga Godoi leaves the streetcar trailer at Santo Amaro, a suburb of São Paulo, Brazil, and starts to walk home. When he arrives at the corner of Rua Andaguara, he is startled to find a glowing, circular object landed in an empty lot. It is about 90–120 feet in diameter and surrounded in a violet glow. He approaches it hesitantly from 60 feet away, feeling like running but he is rooted to the spot and is unable to call for help. The anxiety dissipates, and he walks toward it again, noticing a sliding door on the object. He goes inside, entering a circular room illuminated by a soft light. On a table he sees some maps, including one of South America with mushroom-shaped marks on it. He looks up and sees three humanoids less than 5 feet tall with dark brown skin and dressed in a light gray coverall and a belt that holds what might be a weapon. They appear to be conversing in an unknown language. He tries talking to them, but they don’t understand. He backs out of the object, dragging his feet. He jumps out of the door and runs away. Looking back at the object from 30 feet away, he sees it is hovering 30 feet above the ground then takes off swiftly and silently. Godoi is examined by psychiatrists, who find him neither neurotic nor psychotic. (Lorenzen, Occupants, Signet, 1967, pp. 198–199)
November 4 — A laborer named Jose Alves of Pontal, São Paulo, Brazil, is night fishing in the Rio Pardo in a deserted spot. He sees a silvery, glowing UFO like two washbowls placed on top of each other, closing in from a westerly direction and wobbling. It lands near him and three little men emerge from a window, 3 feet tall with dark brown skin. They are dressed in white clothes with tightly fitting skullcaps, and collect samples of grass, herbs, and leaves, as well as water, which they put into a metal tube. They jump back into the object, which takes off vertically. (Patrick Gross, URECAT, November 22, 2006)
November 4 (or 7) — 3:15 p.m. A motorcyclist, Gianni Cambosu, sees a silvery, disc-shaped object about 50 feet in diameter land near the road at Monte Ortobene, Sardinia, Italy. He swerves sharply to avoid it and falls off his cycle. A taxi driver, Francesco Tanca, stops to observe the object, which is making a soft whirring sound before it takes off. (Wilkins, FS Uncensored, Citadel, 1955, pp. 237–238; 1Pinotti 76)
November 5 — 10:09 a.m. A witness in La Roche-en-Brénil, Côte d’Or, France, sees an orange object making a noise like a generator land in a nearby pasture. He notices three men standing near it. One is holding a box that emits a beam of light and the other two hold objects that look like weapons. Physical traces are found at the landing site: a white substance and a circle 10 feet in diameter. (Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” April 16, 2003)
November 6 — 11:00 a.m. Alberto Perego is in the Tuscolana district in Rome, Italy, when he sees dozens of small, white objects in the sky at a height of 4–5 miles. They are moving at variable speeds, as high as 750–850 mph. At first he calculates that there are about 50 of them, but later realizes there are 100. Sometimes they are single, other times in pairs, threes, fours, sevens, or twelves. Frequently they are in diamond formations of four or V- formations of seven. At 12:00 noon, a formation of 20 objects appears from the east, followed by another 20 moving from the west. The two V-formations converge until their vertices form a St. Andrews cross, with 10 objects to each bar. The convergence takes place over the Trastevere–Monte Mario district above Vatican City.
The cross then performs a three-quarter turn on its axis, turning into an X-formation, then breaks off into two separate curves that take off in opposite directions. Another concentration of about 100 objects appears 10 minutes later and Perego notices shining filaments falling from the sky. He grabs a handful of the glassy substance, which evaporates in a few hours. (Alberto Perego, “The Great ‘Cross’ above the Vatican,” Flying Saucer Review Case Histories, no. 15 (June 1973): 4–5; 1Pinotti 76–80)
November 7 — 11:30 a.m. Alberto Perego is returning from the Tuscolana district of Rome, Italy, when he sees more formations of about 50 white objects that remain for about two-and-a-half hours. They arrive from different directions and always in formation. More filamentous material falls from the sky. (Alberto Perego, “The Great ‘Cross’ above the Vatican,” Flying Saucer Review Case Histories, no. 15 (June 1973): 5; 1Pinotti 80)
November 8 — 6:00 p.m. Witnesses near Voussac, Allier, France, in the Vacheresse Forest watch a luminous sphere land and then dim, fading to black. Investigators find an area 12–15 feet in diameter where there are no leaves and the ground seems excavated. (Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” April 18, 2003)
November 8 — 7:30 p.m. Blacksmith André Chaillou is riding a moped one mile north of Loublande, Deux-Sèvres, France, when he notices a small blue light in front of him. His engine fails and he nearly falls off the bike. The blue dot is projecting a strong light and hovering about 6 feet in the air. He finds himself temporarily paralyzed with a tingling in his hands. The blue light goes out and he is able to move again and restart his moped, but the light reappears about 450 feet away, seemingly 18 feet long and cone-shaped. It takes off vertically with a whistling sound. (Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” October 22, 2006)
November 10 — An agronomist and his family encounter a landed UFO along a road in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. Two men with long hair and one-piece suits emerge and approach them with raised arms. The witnesses speed away. (Clark III 268; Lorenzen, FS Hoax, pp. 48–49)
November 12 — 11:30 a.m. Alberto Perego watches even more formations of white objects over Rome. He has contacted the Italian air defense office, which tells him that the objects would be out of radar range. This time the objects are also observed by Fr. Zilwes, a Brazilian priest at the Vatican Observatory in Castel Gandolfo, Italy. (Alberto Perego, “The Great ‘Cross’ above the Vatican,” Flying Saucer Review Case Histories, no. 15 (June 1973): 5–6; 1Pinotti 81–82)
November 12 — 3:00–6:00 p.m. A white, motionless object appears over Louisville, Kentucky. A radar unit 30 miles southwest of Louisville tracks the object but loses sight about 12 miles northwest of Godman Army Airfield at Fort Knox. It is later sighted at Bedford, Indiana. Kentucky National Guard pilot Lt. Col. Lee J. Merkel notifies Wright-Patterson AFB near Dayton, Ohio, which sends an F-86 to investigate. The pilot sees nothing and returns to the base. Merkel and another National Guard pilot give chase in F-51 Mustangs, but they are also unsuccessful. Merkel says the object is moving into the wind, which is not likely for a balloon. Henry P. Julliard, deputy director of Standiford Field [now Louisville International Airport] follows the object for 45 minutes on the weather bureau’s theodolite; he says the object has no more motion than a star and that after sundown the object turns amber. (“That ‘Thing’ in the Sky Still ‘Unidentified Object,’” Louisville (Ky.) Courier-Journal, November 13, 1954, pp. 1, 12; “Louisville Stops Work to Watch Saucer,” CRIFO Newsletter 1, no. 9 (December 3, 1954): 3–4; NICAP, “Sphere Startles Thousands”; UFOEv, p. 134; Hynek UFO Report, pp. 51–52)
November 13 — 2:00 a.m. A witness is driving in Buchy, Seine-Maritime, France, and sees a luminous object take off as he feels a mild electric shock and is paralyzed. His car engine slows but does not stall. The object leaves, the paralysis goes away, and the car returns to normal. (Patrick Gross, “The 1954 French Flap,” October 22, 2006)
November 14 — 3:30 a.m. Railroad worker Jose Rodrigues comes across three figures in tight-fitting suits inspecting the ground with the help of luminous objects near railroad tracks near Urai, Paraná, Brazil. They see him and run back into the UFO. (NICAP, “Railroad Men See ‘Men’ Inspecting Tracks”)
November 14 — Two or three tractor drivers in Forli, Italy, watch a bright-red, luminous UFO approach them in a farm field. As it approaches, the engine that works by internal combustion fail, but the diesel engine still runs. The men run away; when they return, the UFO has departed. The engine that failed still causes some trouble after the sighting. (Lorenzen, UFOs: The Whole Story, Signet, 1969, pp. 62–63, 145)
November 14 (or 11) — 7:45 p.m. Near Isola, Spezia, Italy, Amerigo (or Americo) Lorenzini sees a cigar-shaped UFO land and a trio of small creatures wearing diving suits emerge. They walk over to Lorenzini’s rabbit cages and
stare at the animals, talking in a strange language. He runs inside to grab his gun and tries to pull the trigger as they are taking some rabbits to the UFO, but he becomes paralyzed. The UFO takes off, leaving a bright trail. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1954 November–December, The Author, 1991, pp. 20–21; 1Pinotti 88)
November 17 — 4:10 p.m. Iden K. Zimmerman is standing just under the roof of a shed by the railing of gate number six of the Willamette Falls Locks in Oregon City, Oregon. His gloved hands are resting on the railing. He feels something like “icy rain” on his hands. The rain seems to penetrate his clothing and gloves as if his arms are bare. He feels the same thing on his legs, from the knees down. Looking up, he sees a bright orange object as large as the full moon flying in a straight line from west to east. It disappears over the Crown Zellerbach Paper Mill roof across the river. He can find no trace of rain on the wooden deck or cement walks, and the moisture disappears from his clothing. A few minutes later he begins to feel dizzy and has trouble maintaining his balance. The effect wears off in about one hour. (Donald E. Keyhoe and Gordon I. R. Lore Jr., Strange Effects from UFOs, NICAP, 1969, pp. 16–17)
November 17–18 — Blue Book head Capt. Charles Hardin and Allen Hynek meet with Col. John M. White Jr., commander of the 4602nd AISS at Ent AFB [now the US Olympic Training Center] in order to help out with a guide for investigating and processing UFO reports. (Col. John M. White Jr., “Report of Visit of ATIC Representatives,” November 23, 1954, in History of 4602d Air Intelligence Service Squadron, vol. 1, January 1– June 30, 1955, pp. 55–57)
November 21 — 11:30 a.m. Copilot Cmdr. Armando Braulino, pilot Cmdr. Pedro Luiz Teixeira, steward, radio operator, and passengers of National Airlines Douglas PP-ANM airliner at 9,000 feet over Paraíbo do Sul, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, see a UFO formation, described as disc-shaped with cupola or dome on top, like aluminum with a polished surface. The formation is coming from the northeast at 7,200 feet and passes below the airliner at high speed. The duration is 40–50 seconds. (NICAP, “Shiny Objects Encountered by Airliner”)
November 22 — Charles Laughead is forced to resign his position at Michigan State College [now Michigan State University] in East Lansing, Michigan, because of his flying saucer activities. (Clark III 718)
November 22 — Anor Ferreira da Silva, a bored telegraph operator in Caratinga, Minas Gerais, Brazil, transmits a Morse code message to his friend Geraldo Bastos in Belo Horizonte, claiming that a flying saucer has crashed in a nearby quarry. His messages continue for an hour, repeatedly asking the authorities to defend the city from Martian invaders. Bastos takes the messages seriously, and a friend looking over his shoulder runs out to the nearest newspaper office to relay the news. The telephone system of Caratinga shuts down from all the press inquiries, and soon the Brazilian military investigates, finding nothing amiss in the city. (John Gosling, Waging the War of the Worlds, McFarland, 2009, pp. 114–119)
November 22 — 9:45 p.m. At Santa Maria Air Force Base, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, radio operator Arquimedes Fernandez sees a strange cloud above the trees, like an upside-down washbowl. It is a solid body 160 feet across, oscillating with a small light on top. Fernandez radios a report to weather headquarters at Porto Alegre. The object remains in view until his duty shift ends at 1:15 a.m. (Lorenzen, FS Hoax, pp. 51–52; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1954 November–December, The Author, 1991, pp. 28–29)
November 23 — Afternoon. A UFO follows three 10-year-old girls (Anne Storedal, Tora Storedal, and Tora Moy Haugo) returning home from school in Torpo, Viken County, Norway. It descends and hovers only 3 or 4 feet away from them. It is round, about 10 feet in diameter, and the bottom is black, trimmed with yellow spots which could have been lights, with a number of small “red jags.” The upper part is a transparent dome; a man who is operating controls is visible inside. He wears black trousers, a black jacket, and immense red goggles over his eyes. He stares at one of the girls. When the craft ascends it collides with a high-tension power line making a shower of sparks, and the girls run away. They notice a smell “like fried sausages.” A “streak” is found in the snow, apparently left by the craft having brushed the surface of the ground. (Clark III 268; Center for UFO Studies, HUMCAT Index 1954, p. 160)
November 28 — 2:00 a.m. Meat merchants José Ponce and Gustavo Gonzáles are driving a panel truck along Calle Bella Vista in Petare, Caracas, Venezuela. They find their way blocked by a 10-foot-wide, glowing ball hovering 6 feet above the street. When they get out to investigate, they are confronted by a dwarfish creature covered with stiff, bristly hair. Gonzáles grabs it, but it tosses him to one side. Two more dwarfs, gathering dirt and rocks nearby, approach. Ponce sees them and runs to find a police station. Gonzáles recovers in time to see two of the entities climb through an opening in the UFO. The third comes toward him, claws extended, and Gonzáles tries to stab it in the shoulder with his knife, but the blade glances off. One of the dwarfs inside the UFO points a tube at Gonzáles that emits a brilliant beam of energy. He is paralyzed and temporarily blinded but manages to stagger to the police station. A doctor at the emergency room at Esquina de Sálas hospital treats an abrasion on Gonzáles’s left side. Other witnesses to a UFO in the area come forward. (Lorenzen, FS Hoax, pp. 57–58; Lorenzen,
Encounters with UFO Occupants, Berkley Medallion, 1976, pp. 144–145; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1954 November–December, The Author, 1991, pp. 32–33; Michael D. Swords, “Classic Cases from the APRO Files,” IUR 24, no. 2 (Summer 1999): 31; Patrick Gross, URECAT, November 4, 2006)
November 28 — A group of peasants at Palmarito, Mérida, Venezuela, see a strange craft land. Three small-statured beings emerge from it. (Patrick Gross, URECAT, November 5, 2006)
December — Aviation inventor Bill Lear sees a flying disc giving off greenish light near Palm Springs, California. It hovers for 2 seconds then swiftly moves out of sight. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1955 January–June, The Author, 1992, p, 22)
December — The US Air Force acknowledges that it is contemplating a “New type of jet aircraft, powered by a turbine larger than any now in use, [that] is expected to take off, land vertically, and be able to hover. It may cruise at 1,500 knots and have a range of 15,000 nautical miles.” It speculates: “If the Soviets now have such an aircraft in operational use, would the United States air defense system be able to detect, identify, intercept and destroy a bomber or reconnaissance aircraft moving at a 1,500 knot clip at an altitude of 65,000 feet?” (“The Flying Disc,” Air Intelligence Digest 7, no 12 (December 1954): 6+)
December — Contactee Orfeo Angelucci, now working in Twentynine Palms, California, is at Tiny’s Café when he meets someone named Adam, who claims to have read his book and gives him some kind of mind-altering pill. After taking the pill, Angelucci finds himself in an “exalted state” and talks freely with Adam about outer space and politics. Prior to this time, Angelucci has caught the attention of the FBI because he has been approached several times by a group of seeming left-wing agents. (Orfeo Angelucci, The Son of the Sun, DeVorss, 1959; Kremlin 100–107)
December — Charles Laughead and his wife Lillian meet George Hunt Williamson at a lecture he is giving in Detroit, Michigan. (Zirger and Martinelli, The Incredible Life of George Hunt Williamson, Verdechiari, 2016, p. 103)
December 1 — President Eisenhower approves the development of the Lockheed U-2 reconnaissance plane as a CIA project under the direction of Allen Dulles. (Wikipedia, “Lockheed U-2”)
December 3 — Morning. Victoriano Maeso, Luis Brugeda, and Francisco Huertos are at Las Gastanas farm about 3 miles from Granja de Torrehermosa, Badajoz, Spain, when they hear an unusual noise and notice an object in the branches of an oak tree about 165 feet away. It is pyramid-shaped and about 8 feet high and 2 feet in diameter, with four fins and a box suspended from it by apparent ropes. They approach it, but the object rises and disappears toward the west. This observation is the first of about a dozen others reported over the next two weeks in Badajoz, Zaragoza, Teruel, Guipúzcoa, and Huelva provinces that seem to involve wayward balloons released in Germany by Radio Free Europe that carry leaflets intended to be dropped in the Soviet bloc. (Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos and Juan Carlos Victorio Uranga, “Los ovnis de diciembre de 1954,” Academia.edu)
December 5 — 8:15 a.m. Miguel Sevil is hunting in the Montes de Zuera north of Zaragoza, Spain, when he hears a prolonged whistle and sees a luminous, transparent object landed about 165 feet away. It has several rods protruding from it, each apparently with a propeller. Two men about 6 feet tall with blond hair and speaking an unintelligible language enter the UFO through a door on the side. It rises vertically at tremendous speed and disappears. Probable hoax. (Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos and Juan Carlos Victorio Uranga, “Los ovnis de diciembre de 1954,” Academia.edu)
December 7 — A Project Blue Book memo acknowledges the many “Foreign Sightings” in Europe, but attributes the cause to an increase in “meteorite activity” and overseas translations of Keyhoe’s book Flying Saucers from Outer Space. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1954 November– December, The Author, 1991, pp. 49)
December 7 — 1:15 p.m. R. H. Kleyweg, officer-in-charge of the meteorological station at Upington, Northern Cape, South Africa, is looking for a red balloon he has just released. He sees an object just east of the sun, moving slowly west, but when he begins tracking it with a theodolite, he realizes it is white, not red. It looks like a half circle with sunlight gleaming from its sloped top. He follows it for 3 minutes, but then it accelerates and he cannot keep it in sight. (James E. McDonald, “Statement on Unidentified Flying Objects,” in Symposium on Unidentified Flying Objects, Hearings, US House Committee on Science and Astronautics, 90th Cong., 2nd Sess., July 29, 1968, p. 63)
December 9 — Giovanni Aquilante, a farmer of Gricignano d’Aversa, Caserta, Italy, disappears after leaving home to work in the fields. His family and police fail to find him. On December 10, near 12:00 midnight, two of Aquilante’s sons and a friend see two mysterious entities with luminous eyes in a field. They quickly vanish. Aquilante returns home on the morning of December 11, silent and shocked, and explains that he met two “dwarfs” in the field wearing multicolored suits. They float him in the air and take him to “unknown places.”
They release him, but promise to come back for him later. Aquilante is terrified of being abducted again. (1Pinotti 89)
December 9 — Evening. Farmer Olmiro de Costa e Rosa is feeding his animals at Linha Bela Vista, said to be 2.5 miles from Venâncio Aires, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, when he hears a sound like a sewing machine that causes some of his cows to run. An object shaped like an “enormous polished brass kettle” with a rectangular structure on top is hovering in the air with an oscillating motion. Two small humanoids “enveloped in a kind of yellow sack from head to toe” are standing in a nearby field. As he approaches, one runs toward him and the other raises its arm.
The first one kneels down and plucks a tobacco plant from the field, then both jump into the craft, which vanishes within a few seconds. (Patrick Gross, URECAT, December 27, 2007)
December 9 — Night. Lorenzo Flores and Jésus Gómez are hunting rabbits near an unfindable town called Carera along the Transandean Highway in Venezuela. They run across a huge red UFO like two washbowls put together hovering above the road with flames spurting out. Four small hairy figures, 3 feet tall, scramble out and grab Gómez and try to drag him toward the craft. Flores strikes one with his gun butt, but it has no effect and feels like striking rock. The wooden rifle butt cracks from the impact. Gómez faints from fright, and both men are scratched and bruised. A passing motorist takes them to a police station, their clothes torn and skin abraded. When they tell their story to the police, it is obvious that their shirts have been shredded into ribbons. (“Hunters Clawed and Beaten,” APRO Bulletin 3, no. 4 (January 15, 1955): 2; Lorenzen, FS Hoax, pp. 56–57; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1954 November–December, The Author, 1991, pp. 51–52; Mark Cashman, “Behavioral Classification System for UFO Occupants,” IUR 24, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 18)
December 10 — An American petroleum engineer takes a photo of a formation of UFOs over El Tigre, Venezuela. (Loren
E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1954 November–December, The Author, 1991, p. 52)
December 10 — 6:30 p.m. A doctor is driving near Generalissimo Francisco de Miranda Air Base in Caracas, Venezuela, when he and his father see two little men running near the road and ducking into shrubbery. Moments later a UFO rises up from the same spot and zooms away. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1954 November–December, The Author, 1991, p. 52; “Doctor Sees Little Men, Disc,” APRO Bulletin 3, no. 4 (January 15, 1955): 4)
December 14 — 11:00 a.m. Three bright lights appear in the sky above Curitiba, Paraná, Brazil. Around 12:00 noon, they descend to a lower altitude, and witnesses see they are metallic discs. The Brazilian Air Force scrambles some jets, but they fail to intercept any of the objects. By 1:00 p.m., several groups of witnesses around the city are watching when two of the objects take off to the south, while the third comes closer and approaches some buildings in the city center. Chief of Police Col. Carlos Assunção sees a “reddish and slightly bluish object” moving at incredible speed. Maxim Cicaida, a professional photographer for Foto Heisler, snaps a photo of the disc above a building. He sends the negatives to the Brazilian Naval School in Rio de Janeiro, but they are never returned, and no analysis is released. (Brazil 29–31)
December 15 — A man is fishing in a river near Campo Grande, Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil, when he sees an unusual object landing a few hundred feet away. His dog gets nervous and begins to howl. He uses his telescopic gunsight to get a closer look. He sees two spheres of different sizes, the smaller one revolving around the larger one, which is about 6 feet above the ground and has three balls attached to its underside. Soon he sees small beings come down from the large object, moving rapidly. One is holding a phosphorescent bucket, and another has a metallic tube that is cone-shaped at one end. They use these tools to collect calcareous soil from the riverbank. They take two buckets’ worth inside the craft, which then takes off. The witness later finds square-shaped holes in the riverbank. Col. Adil de Oliveira of the Brazilian Air Force has the soil analyzed and it yields a composition of 61% silica, 19% aluminum oxide, 11% magnesium and iron, with other trace elements. (Lorenzen, Flying Saucer Occupants, Signet, 1967, pp. 195–196)
December 15 — Asked about UFOs at a press conference, Eisenhower says that it is “completely inaccurate to believe that they came from any outside planet or other place.” Immediately after the press conference, Eisenhower asks for a full briefing on UFOs. (“President Discounts ‘Saucer’ from Space,” New York Times, December 16, 1954,
pp. 1, 26; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1954 November–December,
The Author, 1991, p. 62; Keyhoe, FS Conspiracy, p. 238)
December 16 — Jésus Paz, Luis Mejia, and another young man are driving home after dinner at a restaurant in San Carlos, Venezuela, when Paz stops to relieve himself in a park. He claims he is jumped by a hairy dwarf from a flying disc (both of which his friends see when he screams). His friends rush the unconscious Paz to a hospital. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1954 November–December, The Author, 1991, p. 60; Mark Cashman, “Behavioral Classification System for UFO Occupants,” IUR 24, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 18)
December 19 — 11:00 p.m. José Parra, an 18-year-old jockey, watches a disc-shaped UFO land in Valencia, Venezuela. Six 3-foot-tall humanoids disembark and set about collecting vegetation samples and loading stones into the disc. When he tries to approach them, he is paralyzed by a violet beam aimed at him by one of the creatures. All the short beings enter the craft and it takes off. The UFO leaves behind ground traces. (Clark III 270; “‘Little Men’ Fail in Kidnap Attempt!!” APRO Bulletin 3, no. 4 (January 15, 1955): 3; Patrick Gross, URECAT, November 24,
December 20–21 — A group of Dorothy Martin’s followers has gathered at her Oak Park, Illinois, home to await the midnight arrival of a flying saucer that is to rescue them from planetary disaster. They have left jobs, college, and spouses, and given away money and possessions to prepare for their departure. When no spaceman arrives, the group sits in stunned silence. Martin begins to cry, and at 4:45 a.m. she receives a message by automatic writing saying that the God of Earth has decided to spare the planet from destruction. The cataclysm has been called off: “The little group, sitting all night long, had spread so much light that God had saved the world from destruction.” The group begins an urgent campaign to spread its message to a broader audience. (Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter, When Prophecy Fails, Harper Torchbooks, 1956; Wikipedia, “When Prophecy Fails”; Clark III 718–719)
December 26 — Australian physicist O. H. “Harry” Turner has been tasked with reviewing UFO reports in the RAAF files and writing an assessment for the Australian Directorate of Air Force Intelligence. Now in England, he sends the report to the Secretary, Department of Air, in Melbourne, Victoria. He writes: “If one assumes these Intelligence reports are authentic, then the evidence presented is such that it is difficult to assume any interpretation other than that unidentified flying objects are being observed…. Indeed, the superiority is such that it is highly improbable that such objects have a terrestrial origin… the evidence presented by the reports held by the RAAF tend to support the above conclusion—namely that certain strange aircraft have been observed to behave in a manner suggestive of an extra-terrestrial origin.” Turner goes on to recommend appointing at least one full-time investigator; publicity to encourage more people to report sightings; a liaison with the USAF to exchange information and verify Keyhoe’s claims; liaison with the RAF and the possibility of forming a panel to assist in analyzing reports. The Director of RAAF Intelligence checks with USAF on the reliability of Keyhoe’s work, and they ultimately reject it as impractical and unjustified. (Project 1947, “The Former Air Board / Department of Air / Current RAAF”; Bill Chalker, “UFOs Sub Rosa, Down Under: The Australian Military and Government Role in the UFO Controversy,” 1996; “The Project Interviews Harry Turner,” Disclosure Australia Newsletter, no. 16, September 2004)
December 26 — 8:30 p.m. Willis St.-Jean, a hoistman at the Agaunico Mine on the shore of Lake Timiskaming northeast of Cobalt, Ontario, sees a bright white light maneuvering in the sky. He calls John Hunt, a reporter at the North Bay Nugget office in Cobalt, to drive 3 miles to the mine to view it. The light is emanating from a large, rotating, slightly wedge-shaped disc. They watch the object for an hour after he arrives there. It circles, moves away, dances in the sky, disappears (apparently when it banks), and returns repeatedly, and at one point it flies over the lake, illuminating the surface. It disappears for good shortly after 10:15 p.m. (John Hunt, “Reporter Sees ‘Saucer’ over Cobalt Mine,” North Bay (Ont.) Nugget, December 27, 1954, p. 1)
December 27 — Elizabeth Klarer, having been alerted by her sister May that the local Zulu people are reporting appearances of a mythical lightning bird in the sky, travels from Johannesburg, South Africa, with her children to a hill southwest of Rosetta, KwaZulu Natal, that she later calls Flying Saucer Hill. There she claims to see a star ship descend and hover 8 feet above the ground, emitting a soft hum. Its hull is spinning, though its central dome remains stationary. The friendly extraterrestrial Akon, with whom she has been in telepathic contact, is clearly visible through one of three portholes, but a blast of heat emanating from the ship prevents her from approaching. The UFO leaves by shooting high into the sky. (Clark III 657; Elizabeth Klarer, Beyond the Light Barrier, Howard Timmins, 1980)
December 28 — The NSC 5412/2 Special Group, often referred simply as the Special Group, is an initially secret, but later public, subcommittee of the US National Security Council responsible for coordinating government covert operations. Presidential Directive NSC 5412/2 assigns responsibility for coordination of covert actions to representatives of the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, and the President respectively. All proposals pass through the Special Group on the way to Richard Helms at the CIA, who is responsible for covert operations. It changes names several times to avoid public exposure. In 1964, it is known as the 303 Committee, and in 1970 it is renamed the 40 Committee. Within this organization—which includes such familiar names as Nelson Rockefeller, Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, Gordon Gray, and Allen Dulles—is a subcommittee dealing with science and technology. It is here that the connection between the corporate and financial world and government-held technological secrets can be found. (Wikipedia, “Oversight of United States covert operations”)
December 30 — Fifty residents of Lima, Peru, watch a flight of 5 iridescent silver UFOs for at least 5 minutes. (La Nación, December 31, 1954)
1955
Early 1955 — A secure test site is needed for the CIA Project Aquatone (the Lockheed U-2 spy plane). Lockheed test pilot Kelly Johnson sends project pilot Tony LeVier and Skunk Works chief foreman Dorsey Kammerer on a two- week survey mission to scout locations for a new base in an unmarked Beechcraft V-35 Bonanza. CIA official Richard M. Bissell Jr reviews 50 potential sites with USAF liaison Col. Osmond J. Ritland. None seem to meet the stringent requirements of the program. They reject Johnson’s proposed Site I (Mud Lake?) because it is too close to populated areas. Ritland recalls a “little X-shaped field” just off the eastern side of Groom Lake, Nevada, just outside the AEC nuclear proving ground at Yucca Flat. (Peter W. Merlin, “Groom Lake Timeline: The First Fifty Years,” Secret Heroes, November 10, 2021)
1955 — Project Rover, a US project to develop a nuclear-thermal rocket, is initiated at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, New Mexico, and runs until January 1973. It begins as an Air Force project to develop a nuclear- powered upper stage for an intercontinental ballistic missile. The project is transferred to NASA in 1958 after the Sputnik crisis. It is managed by the Space Nuclear Propulsion Office, a joint agency of the Atomic Energy
Commission and NASA. Project Rover becomes part of NASA’s Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application (NERVA) project and henceforth deals with the research into nuclear rocket reactor design, while NERVA involves the overall development and deployment of nuclear rocket engines and the planning for space missions. (Wikipedia, “Project Rover”; Wikipedia, “NERVA”; Jacobsen, Area 51, pp. 303–312)
1955 — The US nuclear stockpile totals 2,422 bombs. (Ryan Crierie, “U.S. Nuclear Stockpile, 1945–2009”)
1955 — Otis T. Carr founds OTC Enterprises in Baltimore, Maryland, to advance and supply technology originating from ideas of Nikola Tesla. Carr claims he met Tesla while working as a night clerk in New York City’s Hotel Pennsylvania, where Tesla was living in the late 1920s. Tesla befriended Carr and revealed to him secrets he was not ready to make public yet. Carr attracts the funding of local businessman Wilfred C. Gosnell. Soon he hires a promotions man named Norman Evans Colton and sends out regular information bulletins to investors. (Clark III 860)
1955 — After selling his share of Fate magazine to Curtis and Mary Margaret Stiehm Fuller, Ray Palmer founds a would- be competitor, Mystic (later Search) and several short-lived SF titles. Other Worlds evolves in 1957 into Flying Saucers, a more or less nonfiction magazine that features articles of widely varying credibility and a column of saucer fan-club news. (Clark III 873)
1955 — George Adamski’s Inside the Space Ships, ghostwritten by Adamski follower Charlotte Blodget, is published by Abelard Schuman in the United States and Foster and Scott in Canada. Adamski claims that Orthon arranged for him to be taken on a trip to see the Solar System, including the planet Venus, the location where Orthon said the late Mary Adamski had been reincarnated. He claims that in another voyage he met the 1,000-year-old “elder philosopher of the space people,” who is called “the Master.” Adamski says he and the Master discussed philosophy, religion, and the “Earth’s place in the universe.” Adamski learns that he has been selected by Nordic aliens to bring their message of peace to Earth people and that other humans throughout history have also served as their messengers, including Jesus Christ. Adamski further claims that aliens are peacefully living on Earth, and that he has met with them in bars and restaurants in Southern California. (George Adamski, Inside the Space Ships, Abelard-Schuman, 1955; Clark III 40; Lou Zinsstag and Timothy Good, George Adamski: The Untold Story, Ceti, 1983; David Stupple, “The Man Who Talked with Venusians,” Fate 32, no. 1 (January 1979): 30–39)
January — George King gives the first public demonstration of his contacts with the Cosmic Masters in Caxton Hall, London, England. After mounting the platform, he enters a trance, and Aetherius (the Cosmic Master from Venus) reveals a plan for human peace and enlightenment. (Douglas Curran, In Advance of the Landing: Folk Concepts of Outer Space, Abbeville, 1985, p. 63)
Early January — Dorothy Martin leaves the Chicago area for Prescott, Arizona, home of the like-minded George Hunt Williamson, after being threatened with arrest and involuntary commitment. She later founds the Association of Sananda and Sanat Kumara. Under the name Sister Thedra, she continues to practice channeling and participate in contactee groups until her death in 1992. (Clark III 719)
January 3 — 4:00 p.m. Félix Galarraga and Gerardo Izuesta see a red balloon-like object about 7–10 feet in diameter land near Oiartzun, Spain. Galarraga rushes towards it, but the UFO rises and speeds away. From a separate location, brothers Miguel and Martín Arraspio also see the object descend. Possibly another Radio Free Europe balloon
with leaflets. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1955 January–June, The Author, 1992, p. 4; Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos and Juan Carlos Vistorio Uranga, “Los ovnis de diciembre de 1954,” Academia.edu)
January 7 — The Air Force Information Services Letter warns that service members are talking too much about UFOs. (Ruppelt, p. 228)
January 14 — 5:30 p.m. A luminous UFO drops from the sky near Idyllwild, California. Immediately afterwards, a B-47 pilot reports to March AFB [now March Air Reserve Base] near Riverside, California, that an “unknown object just hit our wing.” The pilot guides the plane to a landing. No trace of a crashed object can be found. (Keyhoe, FS Conspiracy, pp. 247–248)
January 31 — 2:00 a.m. Peruvian Air Force Commander Guillermo Serpa and Col. Juan Rodriguez Cavero are returning to El Pata Air Force Base near Talara, Peru, by car through the Sechura Desert on the Pan-American Highway 1N when they see a bright light in the sky ahead. The object, a deep red domed disc, draws nearer and Serpa stops the car to observe it. It tilts slightly toward them, making occasional clicking sounds. Several minutes later it accelerates quickly in their direction, changing to a bright orange color then to a bright white as it shoots past them at terrific speed. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs a History: 1955, January– June, Supplemental Notes, The Author, 2002, pp. 14–18)
February 1 — 7:55 p.m. Instructor Capt. Delwyn F. Ritzdorf and aviation cadet Frederick W. Miller are flying a TB-25 bomber-trainer about 20 miles east of Cochise, Arizona, at 13,000 feet and 238 mph when they see a bright round object with red and white hues. It approaches them then hovers off the left wing for 5 minutes about 5° above the horizontal. Radio interference prevents Ritzdorf from reporting the sighting. The object climbs rapidly on a parallel flight track for 3 minutes before pulling away at 500–600 mph and disappearing. (NICAP, “Huge Metallic Disc Paces B-25”)
February 2 — Aviation inventor Bill Lear, during a press conference in Bogotá, Colombia, states his belief that “flying saucers came from outer space and are piloted by beings of superior intelligence.” He suspects that they might use gravitational fields as propulsion. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1955 January–June, The Author, 1992, p. 18)
February 2 — 11:15 a.m. A Venezuelan Aeropostal airliner piloted by Captain Dario Celis is flying between Barquisimeto and Valera, Venezuela, at 7,500 feet. Celis and his copilot B. J. Cortes spot a strange, round “apparatus” flying swiftly toward the plane. Rotating counterclockwise, the object shines with a greenish light. Around its center is a red ring or band that emits flashes of brilliant light. Above and below this band are lighted portholes. Hurriedly the pilot cuts in his mike to call the Barquisimeto radio station. After reporting the UFO, he waits for an answer, but the receiver is dead. Later the radio operators state that just as the pilot began his report, communication is cut off. The copilot banks toward the rotating UFO. Instantly the object whirls downward, then levels off, and races away at tremendous speed. (NICAP, “Plane Encounters Saucer and Radio Goes Dead”; Keyhoe, FS Conspiracy, pp. 249–250)
February 6 — Several witnesses in Greymouth, New Zealand, see a dazzling, silvery, cigar-shaped object moving inland at a high speed. Two observers see it consisting of two parts, with the leading part larger than the other. A loud explosion like a thunderclap is heard, causing the earth to tremble slightly. (“World Roundup,” Flying Saucer Review 1, no. 2 (May/June 1955): 8)
February 10 — 9:30 p.m. Many residents of Caracas, Venezuela, see a strange object crossing the sky silently from northeast to southwest. José Agustín Díaz in Altamira clocks its time as 6–8 minutes. It looks like a disc with two bright, pulsating, bluish lights on the underside. (Lorenzen, UFOs: The Whole Story, Signet, 1969, p. 64)
February 13 — Midnight. A green fireball shoots across east Texas like a “huge electric arc,” passing from Tyler towards Lufkin. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1955 January–June, The Author, 1992, p. 24)
February 15 — ATIC sends a memo to Maj. Joseph A. Cybulski, commander of the 4602nd AISS at Ent AFB [now the US Olympic Training Center] in Colorado Springs, Colorado, complaining about the high number of unknowns. It suggests that AISS and ATIC “strive to reach as many case solutions as possible, thereby reducing the percentage of the unknowns to a bare minimum.” As long as there is sufficient information, most cases “will fit to some extent one of the hypotheses.” The probable and possible cases are merged into the “identified” category. (Maj. T. G. Connair Jr., “Evaluation of Unidentified Flying Objects,” February 15, 1955, in CUFON, “4602d AISS Unit History Sampler, Part 7 of 7 Parts”)
February 18 — The nuclear Teapot Wasp test takes place at the Nevada Test Site. Ground forces take part in Exercise Desert Rock VI, which includes an armored task force Razor moving to within 3,000 feet of ground zero, under the still-forming mushroom cloud. (Wikipedia, “Operation Teapot”)
February 21 — Early morning. “Cobwebby gray fibers” fall in Horseheads, New York, covering one-half square mile. Some “ragged sheets” are many feet in length. Chemist Charles B. Rutenber of Elmira College in Elmira, New York, describes it as “badly damaged, slightly radioactive cotton fiber” that might have come from a Nevada atomic test. He concludes it is a “short-staple cotton, possibly lint from waste cotton used in industrial plants.” John B. Diffenderfer, a chemist at a local Westinghouse laboratory, finds it is 30% carbon, with calcium, silica, aluminum, iron, and 10 other trace elements. He thinks it comes from powdered milk residue, perhaps from the Dairylea milk processing plant in Elmira. But milk plant chemists Louis R. Hermani and Robert L. Mix say the material is composed of “cotton and wool fibers with pieces of fine copper wire mixed in” and looks like it comes from a carpet sweeper bag. (“Further Tests Made of Fibers Collected in Horseheads Area,” Elmira (N.Y.) Star- Gazette, February 23, 1955, p. 13; Brian Boldman, “Angel Hair Physical Analyses: A Review,” JUFOS 9 (2006): 101–102)
February 23 — 8:30 a.m. Frederick S. Briggs, a bricklayer and former army sergeant employed at Broadlands, Romsey, Hampshire, England, the manor then owned by Lord Mountbatten, Prince Philip’s uncle, sees a large disc-shaped UFO over a nearby meadow as he is bicycling to work. The object is shaped like a spinning top, metallic, and about 20–30 feet in diameter with portholes around the center. Watching from less than 100 yards away, Briggs estimates that the object is 80 feet above the ground. He sees a humanoid figure dressed in what look like overalls and a helmet descend from the craft on some sort of column with a platform at the bottom. He is then dazzled by a bright blue light from the craft and falls over, unable to move, as if held by a strange force. The UFO then flies off at high speed. Mountbatten takes a personal interest in this incident, interviews Briggs, and searches the area of the meadow over which the UFO is seen. He subsequently has a statement prepared, detailing Briggs’s claims.
This story is written up by Desmond Leslie in Flying Saucer Review in 1981. Mountbatten’s signed statement on the incident is held with many of his other private papers at the Broadlands Archive. (Desmond Leslie, “Did Flying Saucers Land at Broadlands?” Flying Saucer Review 26, no. 5 (January 1981): 2–4; Good Above, pp. 40– 42, 451–454)
March — Technician and businessman Morris K. Jessup publishes The Case for the UFO, the first book to use the relatively new US Air Force term “UFO” instead of flying saucer. He engages in speculation about Fortean phenomena, ancient astronauts, levitating forces to explain megalithic structures, and experiments in ancient times with flight and even space flight. He identifies 1877–1887 as an “Incredible Decade,” in which astronomers observe strange space objects, and meteorologists note strange falls from the sky. He speculates that mysterious disappearances of ship crews might constitute a curiosity among “our space friends” on “what has happened to us since they put us down here.” (Morris K. Jessup, The Case for the UFO, Citadel, 1955; Clark III 634; Story, p.
51)
March — James S. Rigberg, owner of the Flying Saucer Bookstore in New York City, begins publishing Flying Saucer News as the official publication of the Flying Saucer News Club of America, founded in 1953. It is published twice a year until at least May 1982. (Flying Saucer News 1, no. 1 (March 1955))
March — The CIA obtains quantities of Hemophilus pertussis, whooping cough bacteria, from Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland. The agency field tests it covertly along Florida’s Gulf Coast. The incidence of whooping cough triples this year, but the CIA’s role remains unknown until 1979. (Bill Richards, “Report Suggests CIA Involvement in Fla. Illnesses,” Washington Post, December 17, 1979)
March 1 — The Douglas Aircraft Company is conducting a study of “Unconventional Propulsion Schemes/Systems” for the USAF Air Technical Information Center from 1954 to 1955, headed by Wolfgang Klemperer, who writes a memo to E. P. Wheaton that says: “Our studies of the possible merit or significance of occasionally appearing publications concerning Unconventional Propulsion Systems have been carefully continuing since the first memo (MTM-622) about the progress to mid-December 1954.” Apparently the project examined some UFO reports (including Willis Sperry’s) and UFO books. (Douglas Aircraft Company, “Unconventional Propulsion Schemes,” MTM-622, March 1, 1955; Keith Basterfield, “Documents Located from that 1955 ‘Secret’ UAP Study by Douglas Aircraft Company,” Unidentified Aerial Phenomena—Scientific Research, January 11, 2019)
March 11 — 7:50 p.m. Lawrence Grab and his son see a brilliant flash of light from their home at 714 West Lakeside Street in Madison, Wisconsin, then watch a phosphorescent object speed over the city from southwest to northeast. (“Season’s First Saucer Flies in at High Speed,” Madison Wisconsin State Journal, March 12, 1955, p. 7)
March 12–13 — George Van Tassel’s second Giant Rock Interplanetary Spacecraft Convention in the Mojave Desert near Landers, California, attracts a smaller crowd than the first. This time George Adamski is in attendance, along with Charles Laughead, Dorothy Martin, George Hunt Williamson, Dana Howard, Daniel Fry, Truman Bethurum, and Dick Miller. Retired USAF Project Blue Book head Edward J. Ruppelt is in the audience and writes up a report.
(Edward J. Ruppelt, “Among the Contactees,” IUR 19, no. 4 (July/Aug. 1994): 3–6, 23–24; Clark III 531; “Six Claim Rides on Interplanetary Ships,” Los Angeles Times, March 13, 1955, pp. 3, 4)
March 15 — The 4602nd AISS guide to investigating UFOs is complete and gets distributed to appropriate personnel. (4602d AISS, “UFOB Guide,” in History of 4602d Air Intelligence Service Squadron, vol. 1, January 1–June 30, 1955, reprinted in CUFON, “4602d AISS Unit History Sampler, Part 6 of 7 Parts”)
March 24 — 2:30 p.m. The pilot of a private Beechcraft plane is flying at 1,500 feet with a student in the Ryukyu Islands, Japan. They see a domed disc with three windows about 900 feet on their left that appears to change color from white to orange and back again. Over the next few minutes, the object flies over, in front of, and under the airplane. When the pilot puts the plane into a dive, the craft stays with it. The plane’s instruments stop working. The pilot makes a steep right turn but the object still paces the plane. When the Beechcraft’s engine begins to stall, the pilot calls Naha Airport on Okinawa, which alerts the US Kadena Air Base. Two jets are scrambled, but by the time they arrive the object is long gone. (Lorenzen, UFOs: The Whole Story, Signet, 1969, pp. 65–66)
March 29? — Early morning. A bus driving past Wright-Patterson AFB near Dayton, Ohio, sees a silver, triangular object hovering above the base for 15 minutes. (“Sightings,” APRO Bulletin, August 1955, p. 9)
Spring — Flying Saucer Review is launched in London, England, as a small-circulation quarterly, with aviation journalist and former RAF pilot Derek Dempster as its first editor. (Denis Montgomery, “How It All Began: Founding the Flying Saucer Review,” May 5, 2004; Flying Saucer Review 1, no. 1 (Spring 1955); Clark III 498)
Early April — Pentagon press officer Capt. Robert White writes to Claude H. Marck Jr., an interested citizen in Colorado, that Dewey Fournet’s motion studies project was a personal endeavor, that the probability of UFOs being spacecraft is “extremely remote,” and that the Air Force does not try to influence public opinion on the matter. (Swords 209–210)
April — U-2 project director Richard M. Bissell Jr. secures a presidential action adding the Groom Lake area in Nevada to the AEC proving grounds for CIA use. Kelly Johnson meets with CIA officials in Washington, D.C., and discusses progress on Project Aquatone, proposing to use the name “Paradise Ranch” for the new base. (Peter W. Merlin, “Groom Lake Timeline: The First Fifty Years,” Secret Heroes, November 10, 2021)
April 5 — 9:55–10:15 a.m. Three or four fireballs fall in various places in southern New Mexico. Air Force Sgt. Camilla Saenz is stationed on Sacramento Peak near Cloudcroft when she sees a yellow fireball with a red tail traveling fast from east to west on the south side of the peak. An airplane from Biggs Air Force Base [now Biggs Army Airfield] in El Paso, Texas, sees an apparent meteor strike near Weed, New Mexico, but USAF planes comb the area for 2 hours afterward without finding anything. Bill Watson sees a dark object smash into the earth near Oil Center, New Mexico, but he can find no fragments. Lincoln LaPaz reports that heavy shortwave and TV interference accompany the appearance of the fireballs. (“Fireballs Shower on State,” Alamogordo (N.Mex.) Daily News, April 6, 1955, p. 1)
April 5 — Producer Ivan Tors debuts Science Fiction Theatre, a science fiction anthology TV series that presents scientifically plausible stories in an unsensational manner. Many episodes deal with UFO or alien themes, including the season opener, “Beyond,” in which a test pilot bails out and loses his plane because he thinks he’s going to crash into a UFO. The program runs 78 episodes through 1957 and is hosted by veteran announcer Truman Bradley. Each episode opens with Bradley on a laboratory set, sometimes quoting from a recent Scientific American article, and he discusses and demonstrates a scientific principle that plays a role in the story he is introducing. (Internet Movie Database, “Science Fiction Theatre”; Curt Collins, “The UFO Message of Science Fiction Theatre,” The Saucers That Time Forgot, January 18, 2019)
April 6 — Night. Three unusual green fireballs pass over New Mexico. Radio and TV interference are reported over a wide area. (Keyhoe, FS Conspiracy, pp. 264–265)
April 8 — 9:25 p.m. Three residents of Albuquerque, New Mexico, watch a blue-green fireball streak west over the city. It appears to have a rose-orange tail. (“Fire Balls Again Seen over City,” Albuquerque Journal, April 9, 1955, p. 1)
April 25 — 1:00–1:30 a.m. Residents and motorists see a brilliant fireball streak across the sky above Council Bluffs, Iowa. State Highway Patrolman John Ebert says the light was as bright as an arc welder. One resident sees the light burst into flame and drop to earth. Witnesses in Nebraska think the fireball descends abut 3 miles southeast of Waverly, Nebraska. (Council Bluffs (Iowa) Nonpareil, April 25, 1955; Nukes 93)
April 30 — A member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences tells a radio audience that UFOs do not exist. (Ruppelt, pp.
May — The UK Air Ministry announces that the report in March on a five-year investigation into UFOs by the RAF has been submitted to high-ranking officers, but the results cannot be released publicly for security reasons. MP Maj.
Patrick Wall asks the Under-Secretary of State for Air George Ward to confirm whether or not he would publish a report. Ward replies that only 10% of UFO reports are unidentified and that is because of lack of data. (Derek Dempster, [Editorial], Flying Saucer Review 1, no. 2 (May/June 1955): 1; Good Above, p. 43; UFOFiles2, p. 60–
61)
May — 15-year-old Jacques Vallée and his mother see a “gray, metallic disc with a clear bubble on top” hovering above a church in Pontoise, France. (Jacques Vallée, Forbidden Science, North Atlantic, 1992, pp. 15–16)
May 4 — A survey team arrives at Groom Lake, Nevada, and lays out a 5,000-foot north to south runway on the southwest corner of the lakebed and designates a site for a base support facility. The “Ranch” initially consists of little more than a few shelters, workshops, and trailer homes in which to house its small team. In a little over three months, the base consists of a single paved runway, three hangars, a control tower, and rudimentary accommodations for test personnel. The few amenities include a movie theater and volleyball court. There is also a mess hall, several wells, and fuel storage tanks. (Wikipedia, “Area 51”; Peter W. Merlin, “Groom Lake Timeline: The First Fifty Years,” Secret Heroes, November 10, 2021)
May 4 — Afternoon. Lt. Col. Edward J. Stealy, commander of the 57th Fighter Interceptor Squadron at Keflavík Airfield, Iceland, and 1stLt. Joseph Burt see 10–15 flying objects, 60–70 feet in diameter, at about 25,000 feet. They fly in loose formation for about 4–5 seconds and are traveling at a tremendous rate of speed (perhaps 1,150 mph). (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1955 January–June, The Author, 1992, pp. 5–58; Sparks, p. 226; Clark III 376)
May 5— ATIC declassifies Battelle Memorial Institute’s 1951–1954 study of UFOs, completed in March 1954, as Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14 but does not release it until October 25. (Special Report No. 14: Analysis of Reports of Unidentified Aerial Objects, US Air Force, 1955; Clark III 929–932)
May 22 — Journalist Dorothy Kilgallen writes in the Los Angeles Examiner that “British scientists and airmen” have examined the wreckage of a crashed flying saucer. Her informant is a “British official of Cabinet rank,” who tells her that the “saucers were staffed by small men—probably under four feet tall.” Flying Saucer Review editor Gordon Creighton later researches this story in detail and thinks Kilgallen’s source is First Sea Lord Louis Mountbatten. Some suggest that Kilgallen picked the story up at a cocktail party hosted by Mountbatten. Her story is widely dismissed as a hoax, but other events put her claims in a new light. (“U.F.O. Crash in Britain?” Flying Saucer Review 1, no. 3 (July/Aug. 1955): 6; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1955 January–June, The Author, 1992, p. 69; Good Above, pp. 43–44)
May 23–26 — At the Fifth AISS Commander’s Conference at Ent AFB [now the US Olympic Training Center], Colorado Springs, Colorado, an analysis of UFOs and science fiction is presented that notes: “General public not qualified to evaluate material propounded in science fiction. Absurd and fantastic theories given credence solely on the basis of ignorance.” Also, “Abnormal predisposition to attach belief to the more fanciful aspects of UFOBs, e.g. ‘Flying Saucers’ would tend to negate the source’s reliability as a factual observer.” (“Report of Fifth Commander’s Conference, 23 May to 26 May 1955,” in History of 4602d Air Intelligence Service Squadron, vol. 2, January 1–June 30, 1955, reprinted in CUFON, “4602d AISS Unit History Sampler, Part 7 of 7 Parts”)
May 24 — 7:48 p.m. GOC spotter Charlotte Whitecotton and another woman at Loveland, Ohio, watch four UFOs in formation pass low over their enclosure, then zoom to the north. They report the incident to the Columbus Filter Center. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1955 January–June, The Author, 1992, p. 71; Isabel Davis and Ted Bloecher, Close Encounter at Kelly and Others of 1955, CUFOS, 1978,
pp. 145–146)
May 25 — Around 3:30 a.m. Robert Hunnicut is driving along the Loveland-Madeira Road in the Branch Hill area of Loveland, Ohio. At the Hopewell Road intersection, his headlights illuminate three short figures kneeling next to the road. They are grayish humanoids with a wide slit for a mouth, an indistinct nose, and normal eyes without eyebrows. The heads are hairless with prominent wrinkles on the forehead. They are wearing one-piece grayish garments. One arm seems longer than the other and the upper torso is lopsided. One of the figures is holding a rod emitting blue-white sparks. Hunnicut gets out of the car and walks towards them. They look towards him and there is a 3-minute standoff. Hunnicut goes to the police station and returns with Police Chief John K. Fritz. No trace of anything is found. (Stringfield, 3-0 Blue, CRIFO, 1957, pp. 66–68; Stringfield, Situation Red, Fawcett Crest, 1977, pp. 115–116; Isabel Davis and Ted Bloecher, Close Encounter at Kelly and Others of 1955, CUFOS, 1978, pp. 138–148; Clark III 270; Rob Ryder, “On the Trail of the Loveland Frogman,” Fortean Times 361 (Christmas 2017): 38–41)
Summer — 12:30 a.m. Dumitru Coca watches a strange object emitting a ring of white sparks at an altitude of 3,000 feet above Hârşeni, Romania. It is blue with white stripes and flying noiselessly at high speed. He watches it for 3 minutes. (Hobana and Weverberh 229–230; Romania 11)
June — James W. Moseley renames Nexus as Saucer News and it becomes a popular bimonthly UFO magazine. (Clark III 1032)
June — Cincinnati, Ohio, businessman Thomas Eickhoff buys a copy of George Adamski’s Inside the Space Ships. Upset with Adamski’s statement that his space contacts can be corroborated, he takes steps to take him to federal court to make him prove his story or face fraud for using the US mail system to sell his book. Eickhoff’s lawyer brings in a government adviser who advises them to drop the lawsuit. Eickhoff’s efforts eventually bring a reply from a lawyer for CIA Director Allen Dulles, who says the problem is that Adamski could “prevent anyone from testifying in court concerning this book because maximum security exists concerning the subject of UFOs.” The lawyer says he would be subject to a countersuit. (Stringfield, Situation Red, Fawcett Crest, 1977, pp. 169–170; Good Above, pp. 341–342)
June 4 — A Boeing RB-47 reconnaissance aircraft of the Air Force Special Security Service (air arm of NSA?) tracks an unknown object visually and by radar for 9 minutes near Melville Sound, Nunavut, Canada. The crew chief describes it as “glistening silver metallic.” The crew obtains gun camera film, but of poor quality. The object speeds off to the north. (Good Above, p. 285; Sparks, p. 226)
June 5 — 7:30 p.m. François-Gilbert Muyldermans is cycling on a deserted road near Saint-Marc, near Namur, Belgium, when he sees a bright disc moving at a high speed at an altitude of around 4,900 feet. He takes out his camera and snaps a photo. The object descends, then rises again emitting a cloud of white smoke. He takes two more photos. Anomalies in the blurred grain, inconsistencies in orientation, and the circumstances by which the story entered UFO lore suggest a deliberate hoax, perhaps with the help of a journalist. (“A ‘Classic’ from Belgium,” BUFORA Journal 4, no. 12 (March/April 1976): 12–13; Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos and Wim van Utrecht, Belgium in UFO Photographs, Volume 1 (1950–1988), FOTOCAT Report no. 7, 2017, pp. 38–69)
June 7 —An RB-47 en route to Eielson AFB, Fairbanks, Alaska, registers an electronic contact southeast of Banks Island, Northwest Territories, Canada, at 10,500 feet range. The radar return is small and rectangular. (Good Above, p.
June 13 — Frank Edwards travels with a TV film producer to the Navy Department at the Pentagon and asks for some unclassified photos of rockets. When the Navy learns that Edwards wants to show them on TV during a panel discussion on UFOs, the office refuses to cooperate. (Keyhoe, FS Conspiracy, p. 269)
June 23 — 12:15 p.m. A Mohawk Airlines DC-3 is cruising at 3,000 feet in good daylight visibility about 15 miles east of Utica, New York, on a heading to Albany. Both pilot and copilot see an object come over the top of the aircraft from behind, an estimated 500 feet above their altitude. They estimate the length of the object at about 150 feet. It is described as “light gray, almost round, with a center line Beneath the line there were several (at least four)
windows which emitted a bright blue-green light. It was not rotating but went straight. [The lights] seemed to change color slightly from greenish to bluish or vice versa [as the object receded]. A few minutes after it went out of sight, two other aircraft (one, a Colonial DC-3, the other I did not catch the number) reported that they saw it and wondered if anyone else had seen it. The Albany control tower also reported that they had seen an object go by on Victor-2 [airway]. As we approached Albany, we overheard that Boston radar had also tracked an object along Victor-2, passing Boston.” (NICAP, “150ʹ Object Passes over DC-3 Crew from Behind”; Condon, p. 143)
June 25 — 10:45 p.m. Two civilian and two military witnesses see a yellow, shining sphere with a trail 4–5 times its length over Hillcrest Heights, Maryland. It appears to oscillate in the air, stops, oscillates again, then finally moves away at high speed. It travels nearly overhead and then is lost in the sky at a 45° elevation. It is visible for 7 minutes. (Michael D. Swords, “Air Force UFO Investigations in the Mid-1950s,” IUR 29, no. 3 (Fall 2004): 8– 10)
June 26 — Several civilian and military witnesses in Holt, Florida, see a disc with blinking lights. (Sparks, p. 227; Michael D. Swords, “Air Force UFO Investigations in the Mid-1950s,” IUR 29, no. 3 (Fall 2004): 10; Hynek UFO Report, p. 45)
June 26 — 10:45 p.m. A brilliant round object with a trail 4–5 times its own length approaches National Airport in Washington, D.C., stops, oscillates, and moves off at high speed. Ceiling lights at the airport go out when the object approaches and return to operation when the UFO leaves. Searchlights are trained on the object, but when they catch it in their beams, the searchlights go out. A check with the Silver Hill Observatory in Hillcrest Heights, Maryland, determined that a small weather balloon carrying a magnesium flare was released aboiut the same time as the visual sighting. (Aimé Michel, Straight-Line, p. 236; Schopick, p. 21; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1955, January–June, The Author, 1992, pp. 84–85)
June 29 — The Second Hoover Commission presents its final report to Congress on streamlining procedures in the executive branch. Gen. Mark W. Clark, heading the commission’s task force on intelligence, notes the CIA’s lack of accountability and recommends establishing an intelligence oversight committee. (Wikipedia, “Hoover Commission”; Richard A. Best Jr. and Herbert Andrew Boerstling, “Proposals for Intelligence Reorganization,
1949–1996,” Report to the US House Select Committee on Intelligence, Congressional Research Service, February 28, 1996, pp. 9–10)
June 30 — The 4602nd AISS reports that of its 194 preliminary UFO reports for 1955, it has made 23 field investigations and has 25 unsolved reports, or an unknown rate of 13%. Going back to August 12, 1954, and removing cases of insufficient evidence, the percentage of unknowns is lower: 23 unknowns from 306 reports, or about 7.5%. In reality, however, none of these numbers mean much; they reflect the creativity and audacity of the explainers at ADC and ATIC. ()
Late June or early July — Early evening. A 19-year-old Civil Defense worker named Carlos Flannigan is driving a truck across a bridge over the Little Miami River near Loveland, Ohio, when he notices 4 small figures about 3 feet high on the riverbank. A terrible smell hangs over the area. He only watches them for about 10 seconds then immediately drives to police headquarters to report the incident. (Isabel Davis and Ted Bloecher, Close Encounter at Kelly and Others of 1955, CUFOS, 1978, pp. 129–132; Patrick Gross, URECAT, February 14, 2008)
July — Construction of the Groom Lake base in Nevada is completed and the CIA begins utilizing it, along with the US Air Force, for Project Aquatone, the development of the Lockheed U-2 strategic reconnaissance aircraft, the nation’s first aerial espionage program. It consists of one paved runway, three hangars, a control tower, a makeshift mess hall, and rudimentary accommodations. A movie theater and volleyball court are added. CIA officer Richard Newton is assigned as base commander. Other key organizations are briefed on Area 51’s existence—the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the US Navy, the National Security Agency, and the Defense Intelligence Agency. A small group of four Lockheed test pilots, two dozen Lockheed mechanics and engineers, a handful of CIA officers who double as security guards, and some of Col. Ritland’s staff take up residence. (Jacobsen, Area 51, pp. 5, 51–53; Peter W. Merlin, “Groom Lake Timeline: The First Fifty Years,” Secret Heroes, November 10, 2021; “Pilots of the U-2,” Secret Heroes, November 10, 2021)
July — 2:00 p.m. Col. William T. Coleman is flying a B-25 out of Miami, Florida, with a copilot, flight engineer, a Lockheed test engineer, and a General Motors jet engine technician. As he is moving northward into southern Alabama, he spots at 2 o’clock high what he calls a “craze” in the windshield. He calls the others’ attention to it. He gives chase to it at low altitude over farmland and sees its shadow on the ground, as well as two vortices coming out of the shiny metallic disc that kicks up dust on the ground. When he tries to cut it off at a maximum
speed of 345 mph, the object is gone, leaving behind the vortices on the ground. Duration of the sighting is 10–11 minutes. (NICAP, “Col. Coleman Case / Chases UFO at Low Altitude”)
July 1 — CRIFO Newsletter becomes CRIFO Orbit. This issue reviews several airplane crashes and disappearances that Stringfield thinks might be related to UFO activity. (“World’s Air Forces, in Joint Operations, Challenge Incursion of UFO’s,” CRIFO Orbit 2, no. 4 (July 1, 1955): 1– 2; Clark III 460, 1114)
July 3 —3:30 a.m. Margaret Symmonds is driving on US 129 seven miles south of Stockton, Georgia, when four small humanoid figures with caps and huge eyes are caught in the headlights. They seem to be digging a hole in the road with some sticks. She yells and swerves the car, driving past them. The figures seem oblivious. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1955 July–September 15th, The Author, 1992,
pp. 2–3; Stringfield, 3-0 Blue, CRIFO, 1957, pp. 63–64; Clark III 270; Isabel Davis and Ted Bloecher, Close Encounter at Kelly and Others of 1955, CUFOS, 1978, pp. 149–160; Patrick Gross, URECAT, February 16, 2008)
July 5 — 3:00 a.m. USAF pilot Lt. Homer H. Speer Jr and copilot Lt. Paul Daily, call sign Archie 29, and pilot Lt. Robert
W. Schneck and copilot Lt. David Cueldner, call sign Archie 91, are flying Boeing KC-97 Stratofreighters at 20,000 feet on a refueling mission off the coast of Newfoundland. They see two bright objects at 20,000 feet, apparently stationary. Ground radar picks up several objects, some in a distant cluster flying erratically. Speer is able to maintain visual contact, calling direction change of the object to the radar site by radio. The objects are tracked on radar for 49 minutes. (NICAP, “Archie 29 KC-97 Radar Case”; Sparks, p. 228; Chris Rutkowski and Geoff Dittman, The Canadian UFO Report, Dundurn Press, 2006, pp. 296–297; Chris Rutkowski, Canada’s UFOs: Declassified, August Night, 2022, pp. 263–264)
Late July — A man, a female companion, and two children are picnicking on a Lake Ontario beach in St. Catharines, Ontario, when a silvery disc approaches them rapidly across the water, then hovers above them before heading to another family nearby. It swings back to the original group, “moving like a clock pendulum.” The man flees to his car but finds it will not start. Through the windows of the UFO, just a few feet above the ground, the witnesses see the faces of four pale-faced men with black hoods covering their ears and heads, sitting straight and rigid. The object shoots over the lake, ascends rapidly, and disappears. (Clark III 268)
July 24 — The Groom Lake “Ranch” in Nebada receives it first delivery of U-2s from Burbank, California, in a C-124 Globemaster II cargo plane, accompanied by Lockheed technicians on a Douglas DC-3. Regular Military Air
Transport Service flights are set up between Area 51 and Lockheed’s offices in Burbank. To preserve secrecy, personnel fly to Nevada on Monday mornings and return to California on Friday evenings. (Wikipedia, “Area 51”)
July 26 — A brilliant round object with a trail 4–5 times its own length approaches National Airport [now Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport] in Washington, D.C., stops, oscillates, and moves off at high speed. Ceiling lights at the airport go out when the object approaches and returns to operation when the UFO departs. (UFOEv, p. 135)
July 29 — President Eisenhower announces a program to launch a scientific satellite during the International Geophysical Year. The program will be run by the National Science Foundation and the National Academy of Sciences, with advice coming from the Department of Defense. (Amy Shira Teitel, “How the Stage Was Set for the Satellite Race,” Popular Science, January 3, 2016; Amy Shira Teitel, Breaking the Chains of Gravity: The Story of Spaceflight before NASA, Bloomsbury Sigma, 2017)
July 29 — 8:30–9:30 p.m. An aircraft engineer and four others notice a “2nd magnitude star” in the vicinity of Saturn at Lake Ronkonkoma on Long Island, New York. The star moves in a perfect circle around Saturn, heads east until it gets to the Moon, where it executes a half-circle pass and disappears. The object then appears 120° away and moves horizontally until it takes an abrupt turn vertically. It disappears again at about 70° above the horizon.
Then it reappears in a straight dive-like descent until it reacquires its original 30° elevation. It proceeds horizontally again, makes an abrupt angular shift again downwards, and is lost in the trees. Through binoculars the object looks spherical and yellowish. (Michael D. Swords, “We Know Where You Live,” IUR 30, no. 2 (January 2006): 8–9; Swords 227)
August — Hundreds of people gather each night at the Black Arch, on the Antrim Coast Road near Larne, County Antrim, Northern Ireland, to watch a mysterious display of lights at sea. The light flashes three or four times in quick succession, then flashes again about 6 minutes later. The Larne police suspect that the lights are flares dropped from aircraft. (Larne Times, August 18, 1955; Shane Cochrane, “Ireland vs. the Flying Saucers,” Fortean Times 317 (September 2014): 54–55)
August — Police from Luzern, Switzerland, investigate a sighting of a shiny metallic disc seen at Waldibrücke and Eschenbach. (“Forscher findet verschollene UFO-Akten der Schweiz,” Grenzwissenschaft-Aktuell, July 8, 2013; “The Swiss X-Files,” Fortean Times 312 (April 2014): 24)
August 1 — The first test flight of the Lockheed U-2 takes place at Groom Lake, Nevada. During a high-speed-taxi test in the first U-2, Lockheed’s chief test pilot, Tony LeVier, inadvertently becomes airborne after accelerating the U-2 to 70 knots. He is unable to land the U-2 on his first attempt, and it bounces back into the air, but he manages to successfully bring it down on a second try. Damage to the prototype U-2 is very minor. (Wikipedia, “Lockheed
U-2”; “Area 51 and the Accidental Test Flight,” Central Intelligence Agency, August 6, 2015)
August 1 — 8:45 p.m. William M. Sheneman, the owner of a radio/TV store in Willoughby, Ohio, pulls into his driveway and walks across the street to check his mailbox. He sees a red light about 1,000 feet away coming at him at a right angle. He thinks it is a plane about to crash. Then the ground is illuminated with two brilliant lights aimed directly from the object. He runs back into the house as the UFO moves over his garage about 50–100 feet in the air. He sees a big red light at the front and a green light at the rear. Then all the lights turn off and the object moves away over the woods. He and his wife can now see the outline of a dome lit up with tiny lights inside. It hovers there for 5 minutes then moves away. (UFOEv, p. 114; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1955 July–September 15th, The Author, 1992, pp. 31–32; Isabel Davis and Ted Bloecher, Close Encounter at Kelly and Others of 1955, CUFOS, 1978, p. 180; Clark III 244–245)
August 2 — Frederick C. Durant informs the Sixth Congress of the International Astronautical Federation in Copenhagen, Denmark, that President Eisenhower has decided to back the launch of a US scientific satellite during the upcoming International Geophysical Year. Not to be outdone, Soviet delegate Leonid I. Sedov calls a press conference and announces that Russia can launch an artificial satellite within the next 2 years that will be more sophisticated than the Americans’ efforts. (Amy Shira Teitel, “How the Stage Was Set for the Satellite Race,” Popular Science, January 3, 2016; Amy Shira Teitel, Breaking the Chains of Gravity: The Story of Spaceflight before NASA, Bloomsbury Sigma, 2017)
August 8 — The CIA’s Todos Odarenko writes an office memorandum recommending that the CIA should maintain a file of UFO sightings but deny that all investigations are inactive, and separate explainable UFOs from unidentifiable reports. (Jacobsen, Area 51, pp. 75–76)
August 11 — 9:30 p.m. A witness in Cairo, Illinois, sees a triangular-shaped UFO low on the horizon above the trees, heading silently north and slightly west. Its front end is dark, its middle section bluish green, and its end very bright. (“Sightings,” APRO Bulletin, August 1955, p. 9)
August 16 — Early morning. Truck driver Ernest Suddard and his 13-year-old son are returning home to Bradford, West Yorks, England, when their headlights light up a small figure in the street. It is 4 feet tall, dressed in skin-tight black clothes, and is hopping forward in a series of jerky movements. A circular, silvery object, perforated with holes, appears on the figure’s chest just below its throat. It approaches the truck then turns away abruptly into a passage. Suddard alerts the police, but they find nothing. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1955 July–September 15th, The Author, 1992, p. 50; Patrick Gross, URECAT, February 19, 2008)
August 16 — 3:55 p.m. Mechanic Hugh Saunders sees a silver object above a white cloudbank above Cave Hill in Belfast, Northern Ireland. It is flat and moves swiftly. (Belfast Telegraph, August 17, 1955; Shane Cochrane, “Ireland vs. the Flying Saucers,” Fortean Times 317 (September 2014): 55)
August 19 — 2:00 p.m. A “shining, glittering ball” zigzags across the sky over Lisburn, Northern Ireland. It is seen by many people for about 10 minutes. Jeffrey Moore, 17, says it looks like a steel ball at first, then as it gets closer it appears “cross-shaped.” It moves in a variety of directions before disappearing into the clouds. (Belfast Telegraph, August 20, 1955; Shane Cochrane, “Ireland vs. the Flying Saucers,” Fortean Times 317 (September 2014): 55)
August 20 — Pilot Horace A. Hanes attains an airspeed record of 822 mph in a North American F-100C Super Sabre at Palmdale, California. (Wikipedia, “North American F-100 Super Sabre”)
August 20 — 10:45 p.m. The president of a small Canadian air service and his nightwatchman are checking their seaplanes in their dock at Kenora, Ontario, when they see an object “shaped like two saucers with their open tops touching, one above the other” streaking toward them from the west. It is silvery-white in color and sending out rays from its surface or sparkling “as if some electric force or very hot air was flowing from all the surfaces.” It tilts on its side about 600 feet from them, then straightens out with the flat side parallel with the ground and hovers about 225 feet from them and 40 feet above the surface of the lake. It is completely silent and looks to be only 4–5 feet across. (J. Allen Hynek, The UFO Experience, Ballantine ed., 1974, pp. 111–112)
August 21–22 — About 7:00 p.m. Billy Ray Taylor goes into the backyard of the Elmer “Lucky” Sutton farmhouse 7 miles north of Hopkinsville, Kentucky, and sees a bright object come from the south-southwest, pass over, and descend into a gully about 500 feet north and about 35-40 feet lower elevation. Glennie Lankford and 6 other adults (Elmer Sutton, Vera Sutton, John Charley Sutton, Alene Sutton, June Taylor, O. P. Baker) plus 3 children (Charlton, Lonnie, and Mary Lankford), see several gremlin-like creatures float down from trees and approach the house from the dark. They are about 3 feet high with roundish heads, elephantine ears, slit-like mouths extending ear to ear, huge and wide-set eyes, no visible necks, and long arms ending in clawed hands. They wear glowing silver clothing. When they run, they drop on all fours. When one of them approaches the house, Sutton and Taylor fire shotguns through the window screen, scoring a direct hit. The creature is knocked over, but gets up and scuttles off. Taylor walks out the door and one of the creatures grabs at his head. This activity continues the greater part of the night and includes heavy gunfire at times. Sutton fires point blank at it, knocking it from the roof, but it just “floats down.” At about 11:00 p.m. they run out of ammunition, and the entire group flees in terror in two cars and drives at high speed into Hopkinsville to report the incident to the police. A state patrolman leaves the Shady Oaks restaurant 3 miles north of Hopkinsville in a car to respond to the call and sees several meteor- like objects streaking over him sounding like artillery fire. He sees two in a series looking like meteors coming from the southwest, headed towards Kelly from the direction of Fort Campbell, a US Army installation. City, county, state, and military police and reporters drive out to the Sutton farm to investigate from 11:30 p.m. to 2:00
a.m. The UFO entities return at about 2:30 a.m. Glennie Lankford is trying to get to sleep when she sees one outside her window stretching its claw-like hands up to the screen. Elmer Sutton again shoots at them without effect. The last one is seen at about 5:15 a.m. Clark writes that investigations by “police, Air Force officers from nearby Fort Campbell, and civilian ufologists found no evidence of a hoax”; however, Brian Dunning reports that “the claim that Air Force investigators showed up the next day at Mrs. Lankford’s house has been published a number of times by later authors, but I could find no corroborating evidence of this.” Dunning also observes that “the four military police who accompanied the police officers on the night of the event were from an Army base, not an Air Force base.” Skeptic Joe Nickell notes that the family could have misidentified great horned owls, which are nocturnal, fly silently, have yellow eyes, and aggressively defend their nests. He thinks Taylor and Sutton were drinking heavily. Meteor sightings also occurred at the time that could explain Billy Ray Taylor’s claim that he saw “a bright light streak across the sky and disappear beyond a tree line some distance from the house.” (Wikipedia, “Kelly–Hopkinsville encounter”; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1955 July–September 15th, The Author, 1992, pp. 54–75; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1955 July–September 15th, Supplemental Notes, The Author, 2002, pp. 18– 36; J. Allen Hynek, The UFO Experience, Ballantine ed., 1974, pp. 172–178; Story, pp. 190–192; Clark III 642–
643; Isabel Davis and Ted Bloecher, Close Encounter at Kelly and Others of 1955, CUFOS, 1978; Sparks, p. 230; “The Close Encounter of the Third Kind at Kelly Re-examined,” IUR 3, no. 5 (May 1978): 4–6; Kim Hansen, “UFO Casebook,” UFOs 1947–1987, Fortean Tomes, 1987, pp. 53–56; Joe Nickell, “Siege of ‘Little Green Men’: The 1955 Kelly, Kentucky, Incident,” Skeptical Inquirer 30, no. 6 (Nov./Dec. 2006); Brian Dunning, “The Kelly- Hopkinsville Encounter,” Skeptoid podcast no. 331, October 9, 2012; Patrick Gross, “The Kelly-Hopkinsville Case, 1955”)
August 23–24 — 11:50 p.m. Personnel at the Ground Observer Corps tower in Hamilton County, Ohio, notice three white spheres between Columbus and Cincinnati. Tracking the UFOs on radar, they notify SAC at Lockbourne AFB [now Rickenbacker Air National Guard Base], which scrambles jets to investigate. The UFO approaches the tower and hovers in pendulum-like motions directly above it. The interceptors give chase, but the UFO disappears at an incredible speed. The Greater Cincinnati Airport also tracks unidentified blips on radar. To his surprise, Stringfield obtains clearance to write about these sightings in CRIFO Orbit. But when he tries to interest the Cincinnati newspapers, they are not interested. A Wright-Patterson AFB spokesperson denies the incident to the press and claims to know nothing about Stringfield’s relationship with ADC. (Stringfield, Situation Red, Fawcett Crest, 1977, pp. 12–14; Sparks, p. 230; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1955 July–September 15th, The Author, 1992, p. 75)
August 25 — 8:30 p.m. Mrs. Lloyd Wright and Mrs. Lester Parsons of Bedford, Indiana, see a huge white object with a black streak down the center. The object seems to expand and contract regularly as it hovers over Mrs. Parsons’s home. The houselights appear to dim and pulsate in rhythm with the object. (Schopick, p. 114)
August 29 — RAF pilot Walter Gibb reaches an official record altitude of 65,876 feet in an English Electric Canberra B.2 turbojet. (Wikipedia, “Walter Gibb”)
August 30 — 9:30 a.m. Pedro Navarro, 25, takes a photograph of some swirling storm clouds over Dudignac, Buenos Aires province, Argentina. When he develops them, he notes that the disturbance looks more like a giant disc. The newspapers reproduce enhanced versions of the photo, but it is never critically analyzed until several decades later. The best guess is that the photo shows a round cloud. (Vicente-Juan Ballester-Olmos, “Exigesis of the Dudignac Saucer of 1955,” UFO FOTOCAT Blog, December 26, 2021; Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos, “Exegesis of the Dudignac Saucer of 1955,” January 2022)
September — Austrian Countess Zoe Wassilko von Serecki writes an article for American Astrology in which she conceives of UFOs as living animals that inhabit the ionosphere and are attracted to electrical sources. (Zoë Wassilko-Serecki, “Startling Theory on Flying Saucers,” American Astrology 23 (September 1955): 2–5; Clark III 1099–1100)
September — Day. Several witnesses see four silver discs flying in formation over Lima, Ohio. (Michael D. Swords, “The Timmerman Files,” IUR 26, no. 4 (Winter 2001–2002): 13)
September 2–4 — 9:05 p.m. Eddy Geddes notices a fireball as he is driving to Kalispell, Montana, from Whitefish. He stops at a Ground Observer post and notifies the women stationed there. Jets are scrambled from Malmstrom AFB in Great Falls and arrive shortly after midnight, long after the object is gone, but another fireball is apparently seen later. The same scenario occurs on September 4 when five F-94C Starfire jets (as well as other aircraft from Great Falls and Spokane, Washington, are sent to the Kalispell area. (“Air Force Jets Called in Search for ‘Fireball’ over Kalispell,” The Missoulian, September 5, 1955, p. 7; “Recent Sightings,” APRO Bulletin, September 15, 1956, p. 19)
September 8 — Test pilot Ray J. Goudey reaches an altitude of 65,000 feet in a Lockheed U-2 at Groom Lake, Nevada, a feat not revealed until declassification in 1998. “From where I was up above Nevada I could see the Pacific Ocean, which was 300 miles away.” (Wikipedia, “Lockheed U-2”)
September 9 — Capt. Hugh McKenzie of the Air Defense Command in Columbus, Ohio, contacts UFO researcher Leonard Stringfield in Cincinnati and asks for CRIFO’s cooperation in providing them with new UFO reports. He also says that Ground Observer Corps in southwestern Ohio is to report UFO activity to CRIFO for screening.
Screened reports are then to be forwarded to the ADC filter center using the code “Fox Trot Kilo 3-0 Blue.” All expenses will be reimbursed by the Air Force. (Stringfield, Situation Red, Fawcett Crest, 1977, p. 11; Clark III 1114)
September 20 — In response to a September 13 letter from Rep. Gordon H. Scherer (R-Ohio) about the contactee claims of George Adamski, CIA Director Allen Dulles replies that the “CIA shall have no police, subpoena, law- enforcement powers, or internal-security functions” over mail fraud related to UFOs. (Allen W. Dulles, Letter to Gordon H. Scherer, September 20, 1955)
October — President Eisenhower gives the CIA control over the U-2 spy plane program and Area 51. (Jacobsen, Area 51,
October — 8:00 p.m. A student at St. Joseph’s Minor Seminary in Peterborough, New Hampshire, sees four glowing, bluish-white objects to the southwest. One appears to be on the ground with 3–4 figures beside it. He goes into the recreation room to find more witnesses. When they go outside, the objects are slowly moving above the school building toward the northeast. (“New Hampshire,” CUFOS Associate Newsletter 6, no. 2 (April/May 1985): 4–5)
October 3 — A B-47 from Davis-Monthan AFB in Tucson, Arizona, crashes northwest of Lovington, New Mexico. The lone survivor, 2nd Lt. William Daniel Borggen, says the plane is flying at 15,000 feet when three instruments go out after it breaks away from a refueling plane in a pre-dawn flight. The crew drops 5,000 feet, then the bomber hits something and crashes. (“B-47 Crash Is Probed,” Clovis (N.Mex.) News-Journal, October 3, 1955, pp. 1-2)
October 4 — 7:10 p.m. Senator Richard B. Russell Jr. (D-Ga.), chairman of the Armed Services Committee, on a trip to the USSR, is on a Soviet train near Baku, Azerbaijan, when he spots a disc-shaped craft taking off near the tracks. Russell sees the “first flying disc ascend and pass over the train” and goes “rushing in to get Mr. Efron [Reuben Efron, his interpreter] and Col. Hathaway [Col. E. U. Hathaway, his aide] to see it,” the report says. “Col.
Hathaway stated that he got to the window with the Senator in time to see the first [UFO], while Mr. Efron said that he got only a short glimpse of the first. However, all three saw the second disc and all agreed that they saw the same round, disc-shaped craft…as the first.” A fourth witness is unidentified. “One disc ascended almost vertically, at a relatively slow speed, with its outer surface revolving slowly to the right, to an altitude of about 6,000 feet, where its speed then increased sharply as it headed north,” the report states. “The second flying disc was seen performing the same actions about one minute later. The take-off area was about 1–2 miles south of the rail line.” The Air Force report is written by Lieut. Col. Thomas Ryan, who interviews Russell’s companions in Prague, Czechoslovakia [now Czech Republic], on October 13, after they arrive there from Russia shortly after the sighting. The report remains Top Secret until April 30, 1959, and Secret until March 1985 when Stanton Friedman manages to get it declassified following a FOIA request. (NICAP, “Senator Russell Observes UFO from Train”; Clark III 1049–1050; Sparks, p. 231; Joel Carpenter, “The Senator, the Saucer, and Special Report 14,” IUR 25, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 3–7; Swords 227–228; Good Above, pp. 224–226)
October 7 — Retired Gen. Douglas MacArthur tells Achille Lauro, the mayor of Naples, that he does not think there will be a war with the Soviet bloc, but that “because of the developments of science all countries on earth will have to survive and to make a common front against attack by people from other planets.” The meeting takes place in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City. (“M’Arthur Greets Mayor of Naples,” New York Times, October 8, 1955, p. 7; “Space War Possible Is MacArthur Hint,” CRIFO Orbit 2, no. 8 (November 4, 1955): 1; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1955 September 15th–December 31st, The Author, 1993, pp. 15–17)
October 10 — The Air Force releases a statement from Fort Worth, Texas, saying that anyone reporting flashing lights for the next two months across the US is seeing wind-driven experimental plastic balloons that might travel as fast as 110 mph. (Keyhoe, FS Conspiracy, p. 206; Keyhoe, FSTS, p. 43)
October 18 — CIA Director Allen Dulles informs the joint Intelligence Advisory Committee about Senator Russell’s sighting. (Joel Carpenter, “The Senator, the Saucer, and Special Report 14,” IUR 25, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 7)
October 19 — Wilton E. Lexow, head of the CIA Applied Science Division, notes the similarity of the objects seen by Sen. Russell to the Avro Canada Project Y-2 (Silver Bug), a proposed vertical take-off gyroplane now under development by the US Air Force. (Wikipedia, “Avro Canada”; Wikipedia, “Avro Canada VZ-9 Avrocar”; Joel Carpenter, “The Senator, the Saucer, and Special Report 14,” IUR 25, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 8)
October 25 — Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14 is released, months after it is completed by analysts at Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio, using cases supplied by the Air Force and tabulated on IBM punch cards. The original report by Battelle is about 300 pages, but the Air Force distills this down to 100. It is accompanied by a press release in which Secretary of the Air Force Donald A. Quarles states: “On the basis of this study we believe that no objects such as those popularly described as flying saucers have overflown the United States.” (At the same time, Quarles states that the Air Force is working on radical new aircraft that “are sure to be mistaken for flying saucers.”) Only 100 copies are printed initially, but scientist Leon Davidson prints and sells copies of it beginning in 1956, along with his analysis and commentary. The report includes 3,201 reported UFO sightings.
Battelle employs four scientific analysts, who divide cases into knowns, unknowns, and a third category of insufficient information. They also break down knowns and unknowns into four categories of quality, from excellent to poor. For a case to be called identified, two analysts must independently agree on a solution; for a case to be called unidentified, all four analysts must agree. A report classified as unidentified is defined as: “Those reports of sightings wherein the description of the object and its maneuvers could not be fitted to the pattern of any known object or phenomenon.” Out of 3,201 cases, 69% are judged to be identified, 22%
are unidentified, and 9% have insufficient information to make a determination. The report further breaks these results down based on whether the identification is considered certain or merely doubtful. For example, in both the astronomical and aircraft IFO categories, 12% are considered certain and 9% are doubtful. Overall, of the 69% listed as IFOs, 42% are thought to be solved with certainty, while 27% are still considered doubtful. In addition, if a case is lacking in adequate data, it is placed in the insufficient information category, separate from both IFOs and UFOs. A key feature is to statistically compare IFOs and UFOs by six characteristics: color, number of objects, shape, duration, speed, and brightness. If there are no significant differences, the two classes are probably the same, the UFOs then representing merely a failure to properly identify prosaic phenomena that can already account for IFOs. On the other hand, if the differences are statistically significant, this suggests IFOs and UFOs are indeed distinctly different phenomena. In the initial results, all characteristics except brightness test significant at less or much less than 1% (brightness is greater than 5%). By removing astronomical sightings from the knowns and redoing the test, just two categories, number and speed, are significant at less than 1%, the remainder having results between 3% and 5%. This indicates that there is a statistically significant difference between the characteristics ascribed to UFOs and IFOs, but perhaps not as significant as the initial results suggested. For two characteristics, brightness and speed, the significance actually increases with the revised test. Hynek later calls the Battelle report a “shamefully biased interpretation of statistics to support a preconceived notion.” Keyhoe asks Ruppelt what he thinks. Ruppelt says the report “was a shock to me. I was the one that had the IBM system tried out. It didn’t prove a thing, and I had written it off as worthless before I left the project… also this report was drawn up in 1953, yet the Air Force released it as the latest hot dope in October, 1955.” The Air Force releases a second edition, with a new preface and an addendum that brings the subject up to date, in July 1957. In the 1990s, after interviewing three men (Art Westerman, Perry Rieppel, and William T. Reid) who had participated in the Battelle project, Mark Rodeghier and Jennie Zeidman of the Center for UFO Studies conclude that the engineering mindset at Battelle had caused a disconnect between its data and its conclusions. Because the project cannot reverse engineer a UFO from the reports (because of faulty witness testimony, multicausal UFOs, etc.), the engineers conclude that a structured craft does not exist. (Wikipedia, “Identification studies of UFOs”; Wikipedia, “Project Blue Book”; US Air Force Air Technical Intelligence Center, Special Report No. 14; Analysis of Reports of Unidentified Flying Objects, May 5, 1955; Leon Davidson, Flying Saucers: An Analysis of Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14, [1956], 3d ed., Ramsey-Wallace, 1966; “Plan Radical New Aircraft,” Franklin (Pa.)
News-Herald, October 26, 1955, p. 1; Clark III 929–932; Jacobs, UFO Controversy in America, Signet ed., 1976,
pp. 123–126; Keyhoe, FSTS, p. 770; Jennie Zeidman, “I Remember Blue Book,” IUR 16, no. 2 (Mar./Apr. 1991): 7–8; Jennie Zeidman and Mark Rodeghier, “The Pentacle Letter and the Battelle UFO Project,” IUR 18, no. 3 (May/June 1993): 4–12, 19–21; Joel Carpenter, “The Senator, the Saucer, and Special Report 14,” IUR 25, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 3, 9; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1955 September 15th–December 31st, The Author, 1993, pp. 30–63; Swords 220–224, 239–241)
October 25 — A mysterious object passes over Serbia and is seen throughout the country. Milorad B. Protić and other astronomers at Belgrade Observatory track the object and determine that it is not a meteor. After the launch of Sputnik in November 1957, Protić decides that the object must have been an experimental Soviet satellite. (Lorenzen, UFOs: The Whole Story, Signet, 1969, p. 68)
October 27 — Afternoon. Hosea D. Lambeth, principal of Whitsett Elementary School, North Carolina, and about 100 students watch 10 objects like “steel balls” dart through the sky for 25 minutes. Light-colored wispy material in 2–3-inch strips falls from the sky at the same time. Nearby Burlington Industries tests a sample and declares it not a synthetic material. No spiders are found in the strands. (Clark III 124; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1955 September 15th–December 31st, The Author, 1993,pp. 72–75)
November — J. Heinrich Ragaz begins publishing Weltraumbote in Zürich, Switzerland. It continues through June 1961. (Weltraumbote, no. 1 (November 1955))
November 1 — 8:06 p.m. A flying light paces New Zealand National Airways DC-3 Flight 108 west of Waitara, New Zealand, at 8,000 feet for about 5 minutes. Capt. William T. Rainbow and Copilot Stanley G. Trounce spot the object behind them flying along the coast on a parallel course. Changing color from white to yellow to gold to red, it overtakes the aircraft and flies alongside it for 15 miles, then picks up speed and disappears into the distance ahead. Rainbow estimates it is traveling at 850 mph. (UFOEv, p. 125; “1955: ‘Flying Light’ Seen by NAC Captain and Crew,” Ufocus.nz, June 15, 2021)
November 20 — 5:20 p.m. Operations Officer Capt. Edward G. Denkler Jr. and 5 men of the USAF 663rd AC&W Squadron see two oblong, bright orange, semi-transparent objects fly erratically at terrific speed toward and away from each other, over Lake City [now Rocky Top], Tennessee. (NICAP, “Seven Witnesses Observe Maneuvering Objects near Oak Ridge Plant”; Sparks, p. 232)
November 22 — The first Soviet test of a true thermonuclear bomb takes place at the Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kazakhstan. (Wikipedia, “RDS-37”)
November 30–December 2 — The New York Herald Tribune and Miami Herald publish two articles by aviation journalist Ansel Talbert in which he lists the names of aerospace firms conducting gravity-control propulsion research, including Glenn L. Martin Company, Convair, Bell Aircraft, Lear Inc., Clarke Electronics, and Sperry Gyroscope Division. The Gravity Research Group indicates these companies have constructed “rigs” to improve the performance of Thomas Townsend Brown’s gravitators through attempts to develop materials with high dielectric constants. Articles about the gravity propulsion research by the aerospace firms cease after 1974. Follow-up studies on Brown’s work and other claims are conducted by R. L. Talley in 1990 and 2013 US Air Force studies, NASA scientist Jonathan W. Campbell in a 2003 experiment, and Martin Tajmar in a 2004 paper. They find that no thrust can be observed in a vacuum and that Brown’s and other ion-lifter devices produce thrust along their axis regardless of the direction of gravity—consistent with electrohydrodynamic effects. (Wikipedia, “United States gravity control propulsion research”; Wikipedia, “Anti-gravity”; Ansel E. Talbert, “Scientists Taking First Steps in Assault on Gravity Barrier,” Miami Herald, November 30, 1955, pp. 1–2; Ansel E. Talbert, “Future Planes May Defy Gravity and Air Lift in Space Travels,” Miami Herald, December 2, 1955, p. 8)
December 11 — 9:00 p.m. Near Jacksonville, Florida, two airline pilots and ground observers see a fast-maneuvering, orange-red, round object, with ground radar tracking. Two USN jets on a practice night-flying mission are vectored to the object by a Naval Air Station Jacksonville controller. On approach the object suddenly rises up to 30,000 feet then dives back down in a circle, buzzing the jets. (Sparks, p. 232)
1956
1956 — French ufologist Aimé Michel publishes The Truth about Flying Saucers, one of the best early books on UFOs, originally published in French in 1954. (Aimé Michel, The Truth about Flying Saucers, Criterion, 1956; “First Read: Aimé Michel’s ‘The Truth about Flying Saucers,’” Magonia, February 25, 2012)
1956 — Gray Barker publishes They Knew Too Much about Flying Saucers, a bestselling book about the supposed Albert
K. Bender mystery and his encounter with three men in black. (Gray Barker, They Knew Too Much about Flying Saucers, University Books, 1956; Clark III 178, 190; David Halperin, “‘They Knew Too Much’: The Book That (Almost) Scared Me under My Bed,” Ms.Horror.com, March 16, 2017)
1956 — Morris K. Jessup publishes The UFO Annual, an anthology of newspaper and magazine articles about UFOs, and UFO and the Bible, the first book-length attempt to connect biblical miracles with space visitors. Jessup is the first writer to use the term “ufology” in his introduction (dated December 31, 1955). (Morris K. Jessup, The UFO Annual, Citadel, 1956; Clark III 106, 634–635)
1956 — Soviet polar aviator Valentin Akkuratov is flying a Tupolev Tu-4 aircraft near Cape Morris Jesup, Greenland, performing strategic ice reconnaissance. Dropping down below the clouds, he sees an unknown object moving on the port side parallel to his course. It looks like a “large pearl-colored lens with wavy, pulsating edges.” Thinking it is a US aircraft, Akkuratov heads back into the clouds. After flying for 40 minutes to the southeast, the cloud cover ends and Akkuratov encounters it again. He decides to approach the object, which changes course and paces the airplane at the same speed. After 15–18 minutes, the UFO sharply alters course, speeds ahead, and rises quickly until it disappears. (Felix Ziegel, “Unidentified Flying Objects,” Soviet Life, no. 137 (February 1968): 27– 29; Good Above, pp. 226–227)
1956 — Fishermen at lake Ozero Blagodati, Primorsky Krai, Russia, allegedly see an enormous silvery object with an apparent diameter of 4,900 feet rapidly flying above them at 1,960 feet. It resembles a hat with red portholes around its rim and is accompanied by loud grinding sounds and black smoke. The object emits numerous thin metal threads resembling horse hairs that the fishermen pick up the next day. The object crashes into the Sea of Japan. (Stonehill and Mantle, Russia’s USO Secrets, Flying Disk, 2020, pp. 113–114)
1956 or 1957 — 7:45 p.m. W. J. Kyncy is aboard the destroyer USS Maddox in the North Pacific between Midway Island and Japan. He and some 30 other sailors on the stern see a steady orange light coming toward them at about 50 mph. It stops for 2 minutes about 1,300 feet away at about 400 feet altitude. It begins moving again at 35 mph then blinks out after 5–10 seconds. (“Correspondence,” CUFOS Associate Newsletter 3, no. 4 (Aug./Sept. 1982): 6)
January — The US Army Chemical Corps begins classified human experiments at its Edgewood Arsenal facility at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland. The Medical Research Volunteer Program (1956–1975) is driven by
intelligence requirements and the need for new and more effective interrogation techniques. Overall, about 7,000 soldiers take part in these experiments that involve exposure to more than 250 different chemicals. Some of the volunteers exhibit symptoms at the time of exposure to these agents but long-term follow-up is not planned as part of the Department of Defense studies. The experiments are abruptly terminated by the Army in late 1975 amid an atmosphere of scandal and recrimination as lawmakers accuse researchers of questionable ethics. Many official government reports and civilian lawsuits follow in the wake of the controversy. The chemical agents include VX, sarin, mustard gas, atropine, scopolamine, 2-PAM chloride, LSD, PCP, cannabinoids, riot control agents, alcohol, and caffeine. (Wikipedia, “Edgewood Arsenal human experiments”)
January — Edward J. Ruppelt’s Report on Unidentified Flying Objects is published. His candid opinions about UFOs contradict many of the positions taken on UFOs by the Air Force. He has personally seen the Estimate of the Situation, he confirms the existence of Fournet’s motion study, and he first describes the basic contours of the Robertson Panel. (Edward J. Ruppelt, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, Doubleday, 1956; Michael D. Swords, [Review], JUFOS 3 (1991): 179–183)
January 9 — The CIA’s Applied Science Division takes on the job of holding UFO reports. (ClearIntent, p. 135)
January 13 — UFO researcher Morris K. Jessup receives a letter from someone in New Kensington, Pennsylvania, who calls himself Carlos Miguel Allende [a pseudonym of Carl Allen], who alludes to a US Navy experiment to make a destroyer invisible in October 1943 [the bogus Philadelphia Experiment]. He writes another letter postmarked May 25 that suggests hypnosis or truth serum might bring out more details. (Wikipedia, “Philadelphia Experiment”; Clark III 95; Andrew H. Hochheimer, “The Carl Allen Letters,” The Philadelphia Experiment from A–Z, January 31, 2001)
January 15 — An object the apparent size of a washtub is seen falling into the sea 150 feet offshore Busan, South Korea, by large numbers of townspeople. The glow continues for an hour and a half before the object sinks. Korean and American military authorities are alerted. Military Police Cpl. Ben Elliot observes the glow, which resembles burning alcohol or benzene. (Samuel Norman, “Recent UFOs over Japan,” Fate 9, no. 6 (June 1956): 22–24)
January 22 — Jonathan N. Leonard reviews Harold T. Wilkins’s Flying Saucers Uncensored, Keyhoe’s Flying Saucer Conspiracy, and Ruppelt’s Report on UFOs in the New York Times. He calls Wilkins a mystic, Keyhoe “repetitious and unconvincing,” and Ruppelt (most unfairly) “the longest and dullest of the current crop of saucer books.” (Jonathan N. Leonard, “Visitors from Space,” New York Times Book Review, January 22, 1956, p. 25)
January 31 — 3:24 p.m. Kentucky National Guard pilot Lt. Col. Lee J. Merkel is flying an F-51 Mustang out of Standiford Field [now Louisville International Airport] in Louisville, Kentucky, on a maintenance test flight. His aircraft crashes 10 miles north of Bedford, Indiana, following some confusing information from various sources about an unknown radar target or visual observation in the vicinity. (ClearIntent, pp. 62–63; Good Need, pp. 215– 216)
February 9 — 1:30 a.m. Patrolmen Marvin Poer and John Freeland see a ball of fire plunge behind the breakwater at Redondo Beach, California. It bobs on the water’s surface before sinking into 15 feet of water some 300 feet off the shore. Five county lifeguards row out to look for it and retrieve a US Army Signal Corps battery light that was dropped from an airplane. (“Sea Cools Mystery of Hot Disk,” Los Angeles (Calif.) Mirror-News, February 9, 1956, p. 8; “Sea-Saucer or Searchlight?” CRIFO Orbit 2, no. 12 (March 2, 1956): 4)
February 9 — In a memo, “Responsibility for Unidentified Flying Objects,” the CIA’s Applied Science Division retains files for incoming raw reports that might provide information on foreign weapons R&D. Other (more significant?) reports are forwarded to the Fundamental Sciences Area for review of information on foreign science developments. Still others are to be destroyed. (ClearIntent, pp. 135–136)
February 12 — 10:55 p.m. Two F-89D fighters flying at 20,000 feet, one crewed by pilot Bowen and radar observer Crawford, suddenly see a green and red object 40 miles southeast of Goose Bay AFB [now CFB Goose Bay], Labrador. It rapidly circles thir jet, and the other fighter tracks it on radar but cannot see it visually. About 15 minutes later, operators at Goose Bay paint a stationary target about 40 miles southwest of the base. The two pilots vectot toward the object and obtain radar contact, but it vanishes when they get within 8 miles. (Sparks, p. 233; Chris Rutkowski, Canada’s UFOs: Declassified, August Night, 2022, p. 262)
February 17 — 10:50 p.m. Air traffic controllers at Orly Airport, Paris, France, see a target appear on their radar screens that is twice the size of a conventional aircraft. It cruises around, hovers, and accelerates at fantastic speeds, and is tracked for a total of 4 hours. When it first appears on radar it is directly above Gometz-le-Châtel, Seine et Oise, and 30 seconds later it is 19 miles away, having moved at nearly 2,500 mph. A second, smaller target appears, identified as an Air France DC-3 airliner flying over the Les Mureaux military base, Yvelines, at 4,500 feet (800 feet lower than the UFO). Orly radios the pilot to alert him to the unidentified target. Radio Officer Beaupertuis sees the object through a window on the starboard side of the plane—enormous in size, indistinct in outline, and
lit in some areas with a red glow. Capt. Michel Desavoye confirms the sighting, saying he and the crew watch the object for 30 seconds and are certain it is no civil airliner. The sighting duration is nearly 3 hours. (NICAP, “Large UFO Tracked on Ground Radar”; “A Saucer Shows Up over Paris and Creates a Stir in a Radar Room and a Cockpit,” Flying Saucer Review 2, no. 2 (March/April 1956): 3; Patrick Gross, “Orly Airport, France, February 1956”)
February 18 — Stringfield receives a letter from Lord Hugh Dowding that says he doesn’t think there is an official “British attitude to UFOs.” (Stringfield, Situation Red, Fawcett Crest, 1977, p. 165)
March — Mechanix Illustrated publishes a story on the Avro Canada MX-1794 (Y-2, or Silver Bug) vertical take-off gyroplane under development by the US Air Force. The cover proclaims, “U.S. Air Force Reveals Our Flying Saucer.” Through 1958, Avro spends $2.5 million and the USAF $5.4 million funding the project. Numerous models are built, and wind-tunnel testing is undertaken at MIT and Wright-Patterson AFB. The design includes eight Armstrong Siddeley Viper turbojet engines, a very large center rotor/impeller with Lundstrom compressor turbines, with the cockpit mounted in the top center. Control is achieved through eight small exhausts at the outer edge, directed either through the top or bottom, in addition to the main turbine exhaust through the bottom center of the craft. A multiengine test rig is built and tested in 1956, resulting in powerful thrust, a great deal of noise, and vibrations. In 1957, the USAF provides additional funding to extend the project, by then highly classified and designated as Weapon System 606A. The concept developed is for a circular-winged, supersonic aircraft. Over 1,000 hours of wind-tunnel testing are performed. Drawings developed by Avro show an aircraft that appears to be a merging of a flying saucer with more conventional fuselage shapes—a tailless aircraft with circular wings. (Wikipedia, “Avro Canada”; Willy Ley, “How the Flying Saucer Works,” Mechanix Illustrated 52 (March 1956): 78–81; Good Need, p. 215; Charles Mandel, “A Saucer from Mars? Nope, Canada,” Wired, July 5, 2001)
March 10 — British pilot Peter Twiss reaches an official airspeed of 1,132 mph in a Fairey Delta 2 over Chichester, England. (Wikipedia, “Peter Twiss”)
March 16 — Stringfield receives a letter from Gen. John A. Samford that ends his affiliation with ADC. (Stringfield,
Situation Red, Fawcett Crest, 1977, p. 14)
Spring — The Flying Saucer Discussion Group begins meeting on a more-or-less monthly basis at the YWCA in Washington, D.C. It is begun by Mrs. Walton C. “Clara” John, the publisher of a mimeographed zine called The Little Listening Post, which often covers UFOs. (“‘Toward a Broader Understanding…’: The Story of How NICAP Began,” UFO Investigator, October 1971, p. 2)
April — USAF Capt. George T. Gregory succeeds Capt. Charles Hardin as director of Project Blue Book. (Sparks, p. 14)
April — An annotated copy of the paperback edition of Morris K. Jessup’s The Case for the UFO (1955) is sent in a manila envelope from Seminole, Texas, to Adm. Frederick R. Furth, chief of the Office of Naval Research. The annotations are written in three different colors of ink, apparently by three persons, A, B, and Jemi, who claim to know a great deal about the UFO intelligences. They mention space people, underwater cities, force fields, and much more. The book falls into the possession of Maj. Darrell L. Ritter, USMC aeronautical project officer at ONR, who brings it to the attention of ONR Capt. Sidney Sherby and ONR Projects Officer Cmdr. George W. Hoover, who become interested and get permission (as long as it does not involve official naval personnel) to send the copy to the Varo Manufacturing Company, in Garland, Texas, which has contracts with the military.
Varo publishes 25 spiral-bound copies of the book in black and red ink, which shows the annotations. Meanwhile, Jessup has been receiving at least two strange letters (January 13 and May 25, 1956) from someone calling himself Carlos Miguel Allende, which claim that as a result of a strange experiment at sea utilizing principles of Einstein’s Field Theory, a destroyer (identified by some as the USS Eldridge and others by the USS Engstrom, which were not in the Philadelphia Navy Yard at the time) and all its crew became invisible in October 1943, but the sailors showed side effects. Allende says he has witnessed all of this. Sherby talks to Jessup about the Varo edition; Jessup isn’t much interested but tells him about the Allende letters, which talk about the same things as the annotations and are obviously written by the same person. Gray Barker’s Saucerian Press publishes the Varo edition in July 1972. Sometime in the 1970s, Carlos Allende appears at APRO headquarters and confesses that the whole annotations thing was a hoax, but he surfaces a few years later saying that the CIA coerced him into saying it was a hoax. In the late 1970s, Robert A. Goerman identifies Allende as Carl Allen, who lives near him in Pennsylvania. In the October 1980 issue of Fate, Goerman explains the entire mess, saying that Allen had written all three of the annotation types. Bill Moore and Charles Berlitz take the whole thing seriously enough to write The Philadelphia Experiment in 1979, which links the force fields back to T. Townsend Brown, later the founder of NICAP. (Morris K. Jessup, The Case for the UFO, annotated Varo ed., Saucerian, 1972; Wikipedia, “Philadelphia Experiment”; Ivan T. Sanderson, “Jessup and the Allende Case,” Pursuit 1, no. 4 (September 30,
1968): 8–10; William L. Moore, with Charles Berlitz, The Philadelphia Experiment: Project Invisibility, Grosset and Dunlap, 1979; Robert A. Goerman, “Alias Carlos Allende,” Fate 33, no. 10 (October 1980): 69–75; Clark III 95–97; Kevin D. Randle, “The Allende Letters,” A Different Perspective, July 5, 2009; Kevin D. Randle, “Chasing Sources: The Philadelphia Experiment,” A Different Perspective, August 9, 2016; Andrew H. Hochheimer, “Carlos Miguel Allende or Carl Meredith Allen or…,” The Philadelphia Experiment from A–Z, August 13, 2016; Andrew H. Hochheimer, “The Varo Edition,” The Philadelphia Experiment from A–Z, December 13, 2016)
April 3 — CIA agent Joseph Bryan III writes to Ruppelt, saying that while he served as special assistant to Air Force Secretary Thomas Finletter, he tried to “have him prepare a statement for release when communication was established with a saucer.” Finletter declines to do so. (Michael David Hall and Wendy Ann Connors, Captain Edward J. Ruppelt: Summer of the Saucers, Rose Press International, 2000, p. 10)
April 3 — Keyhoe writes a lengthy letter to Sen. Harry F. Byrd (D-Va.), criticizing Air Force secrecy, deconstructing Blue Book Special Report no. 14, and requesting a congressional hearing. Keyhoe asks Byrd to forward his letter to the Air Force for a response, but he forwards it himself anyway, as does Byrd. The Air Force’s Gen. Joe W. Kelly responds, dismissing both Keyhoe and UFOs. (Swords 222–223)
April 5–May 10 — Some 156 overflight missions into Soviet territory by RB-47 reconnaissance aircraft from Thule Air Base in Greenland begin in Operation Home Run. They fly over the North Pole and into Siberia, probing for electronic intelligence. (Wikipedia, “Project HOMERUN”; R. Cargill Hall and Clayton D. Laurie, eds., Early Cold War Overflights, 1950–1956: Symposium Proceedings Held at the Tighe Auditorium, Defense Intelligence Agency, 22–23 February 2001, Volume 1, US National Reconnaissance Office, 2003, pp. 259–313)
April 7 — Elizabeth Klarer returns to Flying Saucer Hill southwest of Rosetta, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, drawn by a strange compulsion. The spaceship is waiting for her, and Akon takes her in his hands and says, “Not afraid this time?” He leads her on board the craft, which she learns also carries a second alien, who looks much like Akon except he is darker and more muscular. As the ship first rises into space, Akon says he has been watching her for some time. He lets her look at the earth below through a viewing lens that also has x-ray capability. The saucer goes to a “mother ship” filled with friendly space people. At one point a huge video image projected on the wall allows her to view scenes from their home planet, Meton, in the Alpha Centauri system. They serve her a vegetarian meal. Klarer and Akon begin a lifelong romantic attachment that includes sexual activity. (“Landing in South Africa,” Flying Saucer Review 2, no. 6 (Nov./Dec. 1956): 2–5; Elizabeth Klarer, Beyond the Light Barrier, Howard Timmins, 1980; Clark III 657; Paul Seaburn, “Woman from Earth Claimed to Have Already Been to Proxima b,” Mysterious Universe, August 31, 2016)
April 8 — 10:15 p.m. Capt. Raymond E. Ryan, First Officer William Neff, flight attendant Phyllis Reynolds, and many passengers take off on American Airlines Flight 715 from Albany, New York, heading north then nearly due west at 260 mph and 6,000 feet north of Schenectady, when a brilliant white light about 2–3 miles away is spotted about 90° to the left appearing like an airliner heading in to land at Albany. The white light moves about 90° to dead ahead position about 8–10 miles away at high speed, estimated at about 800–1,000 mph, where it changes color to orange and seems to block the airliner’s path or risk collision. It disappears briefly and reappears as an orange light again but standing still ahead of the airliner to the west. The Convair airliner contacts Griffiss AFB [now Griffiss International Airport], Rome, New York, where controllers ask Ryan to turn his lights off and on to help identify aircraft. He is told the airliner is seen and the orange UFO are to the south. The airliner is ordered to maintain course to follow the UFO to the west, skipping its scheduled landing at Syracuse after nearly 30 minutes of following the object. The promised fighter jet interception is never seen. The object disappears at high speed to the northwest towards Oswego, New York. (NICAP, “Air Force Requests Plane Loaded with Passengers to Chase UFO”; Sparks,
p. 236; “Cover-Up Suspected in Reported Air–UFO Chase,” UFO Investigator 1, no. 3 (January 1958): 10–12;
UFOEv, p. 117)
April 16 — An interview with Ryan and Neff is taped on the TV show Meet the Millers. They claim that Griffiss AFB “asked us our next point of landing and to identify the aircraft. I told them Syracuse and identified the flight number. Then they told us: ‘Abandon that next landiat-postcardat-postcardng temporarily. Maintain your course and altitude. We’re sending two jets to intercept the object.’” About the UFO, Ryan says, “This was absolutely real. I’m convinced there was something fantastic up there.” Keyhoe obtains a copy of the tape. (NICAP, [transcript of Meet the Millers program, April 16, 1956])
April 28 — At the third Giant Rock Interplanetary Spacecraft Convention near Landers, California, contactee Dick Miller plays tape recordings allegedly made by Mon-Ka, a Martian, in which he asks Los Angeles radio stations to shut down for two minutes at 10:30 p.m. on November 7, 1956, so that Mon-Ka can speak from his spacecraft. As a publicity gimmick, two radio stations (KATY [now KYNS] of San Luis Obispo and KBIA of Los Angeles) go off
the air at that time, and KTTV in Los Angeles sends up an airplane to watch for the approaching spacecraft. Nothing happens. (Clark III 531, 766–767)
May 1 — USAF Gen. Joe W. Kelly writes to Sen. Harry F. Byrd (D-Va.) that there is a “total lack of evidence that [UFOs] are interplanetary vehicles.” (“How about Those Three Secret Reports, General Kelly?” CSI News Letter, no. 5 (September 21, 1956): 1)
May 1 — Air Force Manual section 190-4 goes into effect. It affects all USAF official press releases, statements to Congress and the public, and publications about UFOs. It requires the Secretary of the Air Force Office of Information to “delete all evidence of UFO reality and intelligent control, which would, of course, contradict the Air Force stand that UFOs do not exist.” NICAP is made aware of the regulation in 1962 when former USAF information spokesman Maj. William T. Coleman admits to a NICAP member that Maj. Lawrence J. Tacker’s book Flying Saucers and the US Air Force was reviewed under AFM 190-4. (“Air Force Reveals Censorship Controls,” UFO Investigator 2, no. 4 (July 1962): 1)
May 1 — 7:55 p.m. Koto Ward, a factory worker, along with many others, see a large bright object flying low over the rooftops in Tokyo, Japan. Turuko Kurihara, in a different location, sees a greenish object at 7:59 p.m. The object makes no noise but causes severe distortion on the TV sets in the area. (Schopick, p. 103)
May 3 — Hollywood producer Clarence Greene releases a semi-documentary about the UFO phenomenon in the US,
U.F.O. Edward J. Ruppelt, Dewey Fournet, and Albert M. Chop assist in the production. The principal character is Chop, played by Los Angeles Examiner journalist Tom Towers, and examines his career going from skeptical USAF public information officer to Pentagon UFO press spokesman. The film uses only one professional actor, Harry Morgan, in a voiceover part. UFO witnesses Delbert Newhouse, Nicholas Mariana, and Willis Sperry play themselves, and Los Angeles policemen stand in for Ruppelt, Fournet, and Gen William Garland. The Air Force carefully monitors its reception and readies itself to counter the film’s impact. The documentary analyzes two famous pieces of UFO footage: the Montana film of 1950 and the 1952 UFO Utah film (both shown for the first time in public). It concludes with the famous 1952 Washington, D.C., UFO incident, in which Chop played a central role, and recreates his experiences. At the end of the documentary, Chop states his belief that UFOs are a real, physical phenomenon of unknown origin. (Wikipedia, “UFO (1956 film)”; Internet Movie Database, “Unidentified Flying Objects: The True Story of Flying Saucers”; Robert Barrow, “Unidentified Flying Objects, Accidental Epic,” IUR 30, no. 2 (January 2006): 3–6; Robert Barrow, “Tom Towers: The Other Al Chop,” IUR 30, no. 4 (August 2006): 17–19; Clark III 1188–1189; Swords 222; Curt Collins, “Project Blue Book: UFO, the Motion Picture,” The Saucers That Time Forgot, August 24, 2018)
May 4 — 9:30 p.m. Rev. Charles Burmeister, an amateur astronomer, sees five “orange blobs” flying in a U-shape formation east to west at high speed over Marinette, Wisconsin. His son joins him to watch. One more object passes in the same flight path, then a group of six, then one more, followed by another. Blue Book classes the sighting as meteors without even consulting Hynek, who later says that meteors do not fly in formation. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1955 May–July, The Author, 1993, pp. 2–7; Swords 229–230)
May 22 — 11:05 p.m. USAF 1st Lt. Earl D. Holwadel and 1st Lt. Curtis Carley are piloting a T-33 jet at 18,000 feet 58 miles northwest of Monroe, Louisiana, when they see a bright light due east. They see it again in the east at 11:15
p.m. Holwadel banks right to the southeast somewhat behind the object, which is now a great distance away. The object suddenly comes straight at them at high speed, passing in front of the T-33 at about 225 feet away. It flashes an intensely bright white light from a “greenhouse-shaped dome” or cockpit window at its front end that lights up the canopy of the T-33. The object is about 30-40 feet long, elliptical in shape, shorter than a C-47 but wider, a small steady red running light in the center, with no wings, only stubby protrusions extending 3-4 feet and 25 feet long on each side. The bottom surface is like steel with ribs extending down 2–4 feet with a wave-like appearance. It moves away then returns at high speed on a westerly course with “fantastic” maneuverability. It never changes
flight attitude at any time. (NICAP, “Elliptical Object Comes Straight at T-33”; Walter N. Webb, “Inside Building 263: A Visit to Blue Book, 1956,” IUR 17, no. 5 (Sept./Oct. 1992): cover, 5; Sparks, p. 237)
Summer? — Morris K. Jessup is invited to the Office of Naval Research to examine the mysteriously annotated version of his The Case for the UFO. He becomes convinced that his correspondent Carl Allen has written all or most of it. Capt. Sidney Sherby and Cmdr. Hoover ask for the Allen letters and these are included in a special printing of the annotated book by the Varo Publishing Company of Garland, Texas. In 1969, Allen confesses to APRO that he had written the annotations, but he retracts the confession later. (Clark III 95–97; Andrew H. Hochheimer, “The Varo Edition,” The Philadelphia Experiment from A–Z, December 13, 2016).
Summer — 11:30 p.m. A cigar-shaped UFO with lighted portholes is seen by two witnesses in the southwest part of Springfield, Illinois. The car driven by one of the witnesses quits, and the UFO seems to affect the traffic lights as
well. The object looks slightly smaller than a blimp. After about 30 seconds it moves straight up and disappears. (Michael D. Swords, “The Timmerman Files,” IUR 26, no. 4 (Winter 2001–2002): 14, 30)
June (or June 1957) — RNZAF Airman Derek Mansell is a passenger in a Bristol 170 Freighter Mk 31M near Wellington, New Zealand, when the aircraft encounters severe turbulence and its compass and other instruments spin wildly. All communications fail and the engine spurts intermittently for 25 minutes before everything returns to normal. When the Freighter lands at RNZAF Base Ohakea near Bulls, the pilot of a Douglas C-47 Dakota lands and asks them whether they had seen a huge metallic disc about 250 feet in diameter with a blue light on top and a red light on the bottom, which he had observed just above the Freighter pacing it. The Dakota crew apparently took photos, but these have not turned up. After a two-hour debriefing, both crews are told never to discuss the matter. (Good Above, pp. 432–433)
June — 10:00 p.m. Two women are driving north toward New Hampshire, Ohio, when a bright light approaches them from a small wooded area. They stop their car to look at it. The light is attached to a large rectangular object resembling a railroad box car that settles near the ground at the edge of the highway opposite to them about 30 feet away. Suddenly the side of the object facing them lights up from inside with a pale green light and they can see three small entities. One is standing next to a console “operating some kind of controls,” and the two others are also active. For 5 minutes, they appear to be observing the women. The entities have dark hair on their heads and arms and are wearing short-sleeved smocks. The object moves up and away toward the southwest and disappears. (“Unreported 1956 CEIII Discovered in Ohio,” CUFOS Associate Newsletter 3, no. 3 (June/July 1982): 4–5)
June 13 — Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, an American black-and-white science fiction film from Columbia Pictures, produced by Charles H. Schneer, directed by Fred F. Sears, starring Hugh Marlowe and Joan Taylor, and with special effects by Ray Harryhausen, is released in Los Angeles. The film’s storyline is suggested by Donald E. Keyhoe’s nonfiction Flying Saucers from Outer Space (1953), but bears little resemblance to the content. Keyhoe has sold the rights to Clover Productions in Hollywood. (Wikipedia, “Earth vs. the Flying Saucers”; Internet Movie Database, “Earth vs. the Flying Saucers”; Clark III 434)
June 14 — Walter N. Webb visits and interviews Project Blue Book head Capt. George T. Gregory at Wright-Patterson AFB in Ohiob . (Walter N. Webb, “Inside Building 263: A Visit to Blue Book, 1956,” IUR 17, no. 5 (Sept./Oct. 1992): 3–5)
June 25 — ATIC’s Col. John Eriksen, writing for Secretary of the Air Force Donald A. Quarles, replies to a query from Rep. John E. Moss (D-Calif.), explaining why USAF is not handing out multiple copies of Blue Book Special Report no. 14 and that it does not intend to withhold UFO information from the public. (Swords 223)
July — Brinsley Le Poer Trench, 8th Earl of Clancarty, takes over as editor of Flying Saucer Review from Derek Dempster. (Flying Saucer Review 2, no. 4 (July/Aug. 1956); Clark III 498)
July — US parapsychologist Andrija Puharich and Dutch psychic Peter Hurkos accidentally meet Charles Laughead and his wife Lillian in Acámbaro, Guanajuato, Mexico, both groups in town to view the famous figurines of Waldemar Julsrud, during the time that Hurkos is being studied by Puharich at his medical facility in Glen Cove, Maine. The Laugheads are convinced that Puharich and Hurkos are space people come to assist them, based on the channelings of their associate George Hunt Williamson (although they do not name him). (Andrija Puharich, Uri: A Journal of the Mystery of Uri Geller, Bantam, 1975, pp. xviii–xxiv; Zirger and Martinelli, The Incredible Life of George Hunt Williamson, Verdechiari, 2016, p. 104)
July 4 — Pilot Hervey Stockman makes the first of eight U-2 flights over Soviet Russia, Mission 2013. He flies from Wiesbaden over East Germany and Poland before crossing the Soviet border near Grodno, Belarus, then over bomber bases at Minsk, Belarus; Leningrad [now St. Petersburg], Russia; and the Baltic states. The mission is tracked by Soviet radar; a number of MiG fighters unsuccessfully try to intercept the U-2. (Spyflight, “Lockheed U-2”; Jacobsen, Area 51, pp. 86–88)
July 9 — One early U-2 mission, Mission 2020, flown by Martin Knutson, flies over Engels-2 airfield, near Saratov, Russia, and photographs 20 M-4 Bison bombers on the ramp. Multiplying by the number of Soviet bomber bases, the intelligence suggests the Soviets are already well on their way to deploying hundreds of aircraft. Ironically, the U-2 has actually photographed the entire Bison fleet; there is no bomber at any of the other bases. Similar missions over the next year finally prove that. At least in official circles, the bomber gap is disproven. (Spyflight, “Lockheed U-2”)
July 10 — The Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, coastline and suburbs are draped with “angel hair” that hangs from utility lines and trees. It vanishes within hours, but a sample is recovered for analysis by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Organisation. It cannot be identified, although six scientists rule out wool, cotton, feathers,
cellulose, and synthetic fibers. (Brian Boldman, “Angel Hair Physical Analyses: A Review,” JUFOS 9 (2006): 102; Keith Basterfield, “Angel Hair: An Australian Perspective,” IUR 27, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 7)
July 16 — 7:00 p.m. Lawyer (or law professor) João de Freitas Guimarães is taking a walk on the beach at Caraguatatuba, São Paulo, Brazil, when he observes a hat-shaped, luminous object leave the sea between São Sebastião and Ilhabela and land only a few yards away from him. A door opens, a metallic stairway emerges, and two tall, human-looking men with long, fair hair emerge wearing green jumpsuits. Through gestures, they encourage him to enter the craft. Inside, the saucer takes off and the crew communicate with him telepathically, telling him about a radiation protection system that exists around the ship and that they have left the atmosphere. They are supposedly from Venus. His alleged trip lasts an hour. When he returns, his watch no longer works. (Luiz do Rosário Real, “Caso Dr. Freitas Guimarães,” April 1976; Clark III 548–549; Vallée, Magonia, pp. 257–258; Equipe UFO, “João de Freitas Guimarães, o advogado que passeou em um UFO,” Portal UFO, October 1, 2013; Brazil 32–35)
July 17 — Elizabeth Klarer takes several photos of a silvery disc as it is hovering around Flying Saucer Hill, southwest of Rosetta, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. (Clark III 657–658)
July 19 — President Eisenhower temporarily halts U-2 overflights above eastern Europe. (Wikipedia, “Lockheed U-2”)
July 19 — Naval Air Station Hutchinson [now Hutchinson Air Force Station], Kansas, reports tracking “a moving unidentified object” on radar, observed visually by state police as a “teardrop shaped” light source. Witnesses report “noticeable maneuvers of UFO vertically and horizontally over a wide area of the sky.” (NICAP, “NAS Tracks UFO”)
July 20 — In a lecture delivered at a meeting of Clara John’s Flying Saucer Discussion Group, author Morris K. Jessup declares that it is time for a new UFO organization. A consensus is reached that a Washington, D.C.–based agency should investigate UFOs, and T. Townsend Brown offers to draft a preliminary proposal. (Clark III 792; “‘Toward a Broader Understanding…’: The Story of How NICAP Began,” UFO Investigator, October 1971, p. 2)
July 20 — Three witnesses in the Panorama City neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, independently observe a huge, ball-shaped object from which emerge three beings. They are nearly 6 feet tall and have long, blond hair, and wear tight, green suits. (Donald B. Hanlon, “Questions on the Occupants,” in Charles Bowen, ed., The Humanoids, special issue of FSR, Oct./Dec. 1966, p. 64)
July 22 — 5:30 a.m. Mrs. Ray Brown sees an egg-shaped object giving off a green-colored light from its rear end over Highway City, California. (Lorenzen, UFOs: The Whole Story, Signet, 1969, p. 72)
July 22 — 11:00 a.m. USAF Maj. Merwin Stenvers is flying at 16,000 feet over Pixley, California, in a Convair C-131D and is suddenly staggered and knocked to the right by a terrific blow. He makes an emergency landing at Kern County Airport [now closed] in Lost Hills. An examination shows that more than half of the left elevator control surface is gone or smashed, leading to speculation that the airplane had been hit by something. However, an accident investigation team finds that a series of rivets had popped, jamming a rod that controls the elevator servotab and causing the elevator to get stuck. (“Plane’s Dive Is Laid to Control Device Failure,” Fresno (Calif.) Bee, July 25, 1956, p. 4-B; Lorenzen, UFOs: The Whole Story, Signet, 1969, pp. 71–73; Frank Edwards, FS Serious Business, Bantam ed., 1966, pp. 39–40)
Late July — A group of US Navy pilots based at Naval Air Station Los Alamitos [now Joint Forces Training Base–Los Alamitos], California, tell news reporters from Orange County News Service that they have orders to shoot down any UFOs that seem hostile. The pilots say this is a standard command issued to pilots on the US to Hawaii run. (“Unanswered Questions: No. 4, Have UFOs Been Fired Upon?” Flying Saucer Review 3, no. 1 (Jan./Feb. 1957): 18–19)
July 26 — Two disc-shaped objects are suspended in mid-air, one above the other, over the aircraft carrier USS Franklin
D. Roosevelt as it is berthed in the port of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. They are 75–100 feet in diameter and have two rows of counter-rotating lights. The upper one releases a ball of fire that drops into the top of the lower one. Within seconds they vanish with tremendous speed. One of the witnesses is Petty Officer 3rd Class (OI) Leon Treadwell, who signs papers agreeing he will tell no one for 20 years. Chief Warrant Officer John C. Hau reports that the ship’s radar tracked a cigar-shaped object the day before or after. (Good Need, p. 231)
July 26 — 8:20 p.m. Physician J. L. Bennet and his wife watch two spinning, powder-blue lights for 10 minutes outside his home in Kilburn Estate, in District 21 near King Albert Park, Singapore. They dart about the sky “like fish in a tank,” come together, hover, and separate at great speed, disappearing from sight. He manages to take several photos, one of which shows two objects, one a nearly perfect oval, the other blurred. (Lorenzen, UFOs: The Whole Story, Signet, 1969, p. 73)
July 28 — 9:55 p.m. Seven witnesses in Brentwood, California, see a sparkling green light flash through the sky and seemingly land in an orchard. Television reception is briefly interrupted. Sheriff’s deputies and reserve officers search a square-mile area for 3 hours but find nothing. (“Mystery Light Falls in Contra Costa Co.,” Oakland
(Calif.) Tribune, July 29, 1956, p. 1; “Saucer Sightings Mount As Mars Swings Close,” CRIFO Orbit 3, no. 6 (September 7, 1956): 2)
August — FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover launches COINTELPRO (counter-intelligence programs). These are employed against American dissidents and their organizations; the first one targets the American Communist Party. Typical methods are anonymous or fictitious letters, false defamatory or threatening information, forged signatures, and other disinformation. The FBI blackmails insiders to spread false rumors or promote factionalism. It creates bogus organizations to attack or disrupt a bona fide group, and instigates hostile actions through third parties, such as employers, elected officials, and the media. It enables the FBI to investigate any political organization on the pretext of checking for Communists, including the NAACP, women’s rights groups, and gay rights groups. These programs prompt nearly 330,000 FBI investigations and create a Security Index of over 200,000 dangerous Americans to be detained in the event of war. Documents relating to these programs are marked “Do not file,” offering no clues that they exist. (Wikipedia, “COINTELPRO”)
August — John P. Cahn publishes a second article in True on the Scully hoax. (J. P. Cahn, “Flying Saucer Swindlers,”
True, August 1956, pp. 36–37, 69–72)
August — George King forms the Aetherius Society in London, England, as the result of what King claims are contacts with extraterrestrial intelligences, whom he refers to as “Cosmic Masters.” The main goal of the believer is to cooperate with these Cosmic Masters to help humanity solve its current earthly problems and advance into the New Age. Life on other planets is described as free from war, hatred, disease, want, and ignorance. According to King, the civilizations of Atlantis and Lemuria both vanished during an atomic war. (Wikipedia, “Aetherius Society”; Clark III 52–53; Douglas Curran, In Advance of the Landing: Folk Concepts of Outer Space, Abbeville, 1985, pp. 62–69)
August — Late night. Two young men are camping near Newark, Ohio, when they see five bright lights in a rigid V- formation. They fly in erratic, sharp-turning patterns for about 5 minutes, including sharp 30° turns. One man takes a photo. They report the sighting to the newspapers and the Air Force, but a USAF officer confiscate both the print and the negatives; the newspaper’s copies are also taken. (Michael D. Swords, “Timmerman’s Triangles,” IUR 29, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 16)
August 3 — A press leak from the Air Force Association reveals that proposals for two types of UFO-detecting satellites are under development. A television subsystem is cancelled as impractical, but an infrared subsystem requires much lower data transmission rates. Lockheed has signed an Air Force contract. The CIA’s Richard M. Bissell later reveals that the CIA Office of Scientific Intelligence Deputy Director Gen. Philip G. Strong has been pushing the Air Force to develop an infrared tracking satellite. The infrared system actually begins as planned in 1968, with initial operational status in 1970. (Clark III 813, 1032)
August 13–14 — 9:30 p.m. A radar-visual UFO sighting begins at RAF Bentwaters [now Bentwaters Parks], Suffolk, England. A blip traveling approximately 4,000–8,000 mph on an east-west course is picked up on radar. It moves in a straight line to a position about 15 miles northwest of Bentwaters. Within a few minutes, about a dozen normal targets are spotted 8 miles southwest, moving northeast at about 100 mph. In front of the targets are three objects in a triangular formation, about 1,000 feet apart. All the targets then appear to converge into one extremely large target (several times the size of a B-36), which continues moving to the northeast, then stops for a few minutes, then resumes, and is lost to radar. The entire sighting up to this point takes 25 minutes. Five minutes later, another solid target appears, flying east to west at 4,000 mph or more, then vanishes when it moves out of range. A T-33 trainer from the 512th Fighter Interceptor Squadron crewed by 1st Lts. Charles Metz and Andrew Rowe is sent to investigate the radar contacts, but sees nothing. No visual sightings of the objects are made from Bentwaters in this period, with the exception of a single amber star-like object which was subsequently identified as probably being Mars. At 10:55 p.m., another target is picked up 30 miles to the east, traveling west at 2,000–4,000 mph. It passes directly overhead and is seen as a white light by both air (a C-47 at 4,000 feet reports it passed underneath him) and ground observers. Bentwaters notifies RAF Lakenheath, also in Suffolk, about what is going on, and Lakenheath personnel see a luminous object stop, then zoom off to the east. Also, two white lights are seen joining from different directions, which are tracked on two screens at Lakenheath. According to T/Sgt. Forrest Perkins, watch supervisor at the Lakenheath radar center, at midnight Lakenheath notifies RAF Neatishead, Norfolk, that a strange object is buzzing the base. A de Havilland Venom night fighter is scrambled, directed by Neatishead radar controller Flight Lt. Freddie H. C. Wimbledon. Perkins and Wimbledon claim the jets are sent up around midnight, but the crews think it is at 2:00 a.m. The Venom, crewed by Flight Officers David Chambers and John Brady from 23 Squadron at RAF Waterbeach [now closed] in Cambridgeshire, finds the object on radar north of Cambridge and sees it as a bright white light, which then disappears. The navigator says it is the “clearest target I have ever seen on radar.” The object, however, is behind the plane and stays there for some time, despite climbs,
dives, and circling. Ground radar operators say that the object is glued right behind the fighter. After 10 minutes, the fighter heads back. The UFO follows briefly, then stops and hovers. Another Venom, crewed by Flight Officers Ian Fraser-Ker and Ivan Logan, is scrambled at 2:40 a.m. but experiences engine problems and aborts. Ministry of Defence officer Ralph Noyes says that one of the Venom pilots has taken a gun-camera film, which was later shown at a briefing in Whitehall. The object is tracked on two radars, leaving the area at 600 mph. The encounter is classified until 1969, when it is analyzed by the Colorado project. Gordon Thayer suggests that the “apparently rational, intelligent behavior of the UFO suggests a mechanical device of unknown origin as the most probable explanation of this sighting.” A later investigation is conducted by David Clarke, Andy Roberts, and Jenny Randles. In contrast to the reports given in the original classified teleprinter message (from 3910th Air Base Group to ADC at Ent AFB, now the US Olympic Training Center) three days after the event and in the accounts of both Wimbledon and Perkins, the air crews now state that the radar contacts were unimpressive and that no “tail-chase” or action on the part of the target occurred. They also assert no visual contacts were made. Chambers and Brady comment that “my feeling is that there was nothing there, it was some sort of mistake,” while Ivan Logan, the second Venom’s navigator, states that “all we saw was a blip which rather indicated a stationary target.” At the time 23 Squadron decides that the radar contact had, if anything, been with a weather balloon. Martin Shough concludes that there are actually several incidents at different times and places and that the relationship between each is unclear. (Wikipedia, “Lakenheath-Bentwaters incident”; NICAP, “Several Incidents of R/V at Bentwaters”; Center for UFO Studies, [case documents 1, case documents 2, case documents 3]; Condon, pp. 163–164, 248–256; James E. McDonald, “UFOs over Lakenheath in 1956,” Flying Saucer Review 16, no. 2 (Mar./Apr. 1970): 9–17, 29;
J. Allen Hynek, The UFO Experience, Ballantine ed., 1974, p. 91; RAF Fighter Controller (Rtd.), “UFOs over Lakenheath,” Flying Saucer Review 24, no. 1 (June 1978): 31; Ian Ridpath, “New Light on Lakenheath,” IUR 3, no. 8 (August 1978): 6–7; Martin L. Shough, “Background & History”; Martin L. Shough, “Radar and the UFO,” UFOs 1947–1987, Fortean Tomes, 1987, pp. 219–226; Clark III 665–670; Good Above, pp. 44–46; Sparks, p. 238; Ivan Logan, [Letter to Dave Clarke], October 23, 2000; Don Berliner, with Marie Galbreath and Antonio Huneeus, UFO Briefing Document: The Best Available Evidence, Dell, 2000, pp. 64–66; UFOFiles2, pp. 66–69)
August 15 —The RAND Corporation releases a top-secret 1955 summary detailing more than 143 aircraft incidents in the Far East. (Alexander L. George, “Case Studies of Actual and Alleged Overflights, 1930–1953,” Rand Corporation, RM-1349, August 15, 1956; Clark III 56)
Mid-August — 10:15 p.m. North American Aviation research technician Edison F. Carpenter observes a formation of five flat, circular, pinkish UFOs over Boulder City, Nevada. (Center for UFO Studies, [case documents]; UFOEv, p.
58)
August 16 — The CIA’s Richard M. Bissell assembles a group of advisers to begin work on solving the problem of Soviets tracking the U-2 flights. Among the group are Edwin H. Land, Edward Mills Purcell, and Kelly Johnson. They look into radar-absorbing paint. (Wikipedia, “Lockheed A-12”)
August 22 — 3:40 p.m. A man named Sheetz and another civilian in a car chases a 50-foot, black, bell-shaped object bearing two bright, white lights at the top several miles east of Naval Air Station Cecil Field, near Jacksonville, Florida. Their engine stalls when the object hovers 10 feet away. The underside resembles a disc with fins. When a jet takes off from the airfield, the object shoots out of sight almost instantly. The car battery is completely dead. Noise from the object compares to a helicopter, but there is no helicopter in the area. (NICAP, “Car Chases Bell- Shaped Object, Engine Stalls”; Sparks, p. 246)
August 22 — 8:50–11:59 p.m. Radars on the island of Bornholm, Denmark, first report 2–3 objects on an easterly heading at 800 mph. Approximately 2 hours later, four objects appear and orbit over the location. About 90 minutes later, the tracks fade. (NICAP, “Objects Orbiting Location and Tracked on Radar”)
August 27 — 7:20 p.m. Royal Canadian Air Force pilot Robert James “Chick” Childerhose is flying nearly due west over the Canadian Rockies near Fort Macleod, Alberta. He is flying at 36,000 feet in the second position (far left side) of a formation of four F-86 Sabre jet aircraft. While approaching a large thunderhead (cumulonimbus) at a ground speed of about 460 mph, he sees at a much lower altitude a “bright light which was sharply defined and disc- shaped” or “like a shiny silver dollar sitting horizontal.” He takes a color photo. An analysis suggests that it would have been radiating in excess of a gigawatt of power within the spectral range of the film. (NICAP, “RCAF Pilot Photographs Object Radiating Power”; Jacques Vallée, “Estimates of Power Optical Output in Six Cases of Unexplained Aerial Objects with Defined Luminosity Characteristics,” Journal of Scientific Exploration 12, no. 3 (1998): 346–348; Richard F. Haines, “Analysis of Photograph of a High-Speed Ball of Light,” JUFOS 8 (2003): 27–48; Chris Rutkowski and Geoff Dittman, The Canadian UFO Report, Dundurn Press, 2006, pp. 68–69)
August 28 — 11:30 p.m. León Febres, Miguel Talavera, Jesús Prada, and Tomás Hernández are returning home in Calabozo, Venezuela, when the ground around them is lit up by a bright white light. Looking up, they see a large disc hovering silently. Several smaller objects emerge from the large disc, leaving behind a wake of
phosphorescent smoke that dissipates quickly. The whole group flies off to the west in a V formation with the large object in the lead. (Lorenzen, UFOs: The Whole Story, Signet, 1969, p. 74)
August 29 — T. Townsend Brown files incorporation papers for a new UFO group, the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena in Washington, D.C. (“‘Toward a Broader Understanding…’: The Story of How NICAP Began,” UFO Investigator, October 1971, pp. 2–3; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1956 August, The Author, 1994, pp. 46–56, 82, 85; Clark III 792)
August 30 — Day. Two RAF Gloster Javelin interceptors, one piloted by E. H. “Wilbur” Wright, are flying west over the English Channel south of the Isle of Wight, England, when one of the navigators obtains a radar return at 19 miles distance (later calculations indicate it has a diameter of 600 feet). The pilots get permission to abandon their test exercise and investigate the object. Wright turns north toward the object on his right wing, but it has apparently slowed down and is maintaining its position. The second Javelin pilot has caught up from behind and confirms radar and visual sightings. The two aircraft bank steeply so the object is at 15 miles dead ahead on the radar screen They close the distance to 10 miles and see that the object has a metallic gray appearance. At 8 miles distance, the object suddenly climbs vertically too fast for radar to track (estimated at 18,000 mph) and vanishes. After landing at RAF Odiham in Hampshire, the crews are told that ground radar at RAF Sopley [now closed] has tracked the object. They are ordered not to speak about the event. (Jenny Randles, “Scramble, UFO!” Fortean Times 386 (December 2019): 26–27)
September — The General Physics Laboratory of the Aeronautical Research Laboratories (ARL) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio, launches an intense program to coordinate research into gravitational and unified field theories with the hiring of Joshua N. Goldberg. The precise rationale for creating the program and justifying its budgets and personnel may never be determined. Neither Goldberg nor USAF Deputy for Scientific and Technical Information Walter Blados can locate the founding documents. Roy Kerr, a former ARL scientist, says the antigravity propulsion purpose of ARL was “rubbish” and that “The only real use that the USAF made of us was when some crackpot sent them a proposal for antigravity or for converting rotary motion inside a spaceship to a translational driving system.” (Wikipedia, “United States gravity control propulsion research”)
September — Just before 8:00 a.m. A domed, disc-shaped craft allegedly lands within White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico, just 150 feet away from US Highway 70. Radios and ignition systems of passing cars go dead, as witnesses—including two USAF colonels, two sergeants, and dozens of base personnel—observe the object as it takes off with a whirring sound. All personnel at Holloman AFB are assembled in a hangar, debriefed, and sworn to secrecy. (Ralph and Judy Blum, Beyond Earth: Man’s Contact with UFOs, Bantam, 1974; Good Need, pp.
September 4 — Several fireball-like objects fly over Copenhagen, Denmark, tracked by radar at about 1,800 mph. (UFOEv, p. 79)
September 7 — 12:30 p.m. Thomas J. and Maud Hutchinson watch an object drop out of low clouds and land in the middle of a bog at The Loup (near Moneymore), County Derry, Northern Ireland. They wade 600 feet into the bog until they come upon the small (3 feet high, 18 inches in diameter), red, rubbery, motionless object. There are 3 white stripes around the middle and it is pointed at both ends. Hutchinson kicks the object, which rolls over then resumes its upright position. He picks it up and is surprised at its lightness (estimated 2 pounds); the top is spinning while the bottom (a small, saucer-shaped base) remains stationary. It appears to be made of canvas-like material. They try to take it back with them, but Thomas has to put it down to negotiate a hedge, and the object takes off and disappears. (“Irishman Caught a ‘Saucer,’” The Guardian (UK), September 8, 1956, p. 10; Desmond Leslie, “The Strangest UFO Case of All,” Flying Saucer Review 2, no. 5 (Sept./Oct. 1956): 2–4; Lorenzen, UFOs: The Whole Story, Signet, 1969, pp. 74–76; Clark III 328)
September 7 — Test pilot Iven Carl Kincheloe Jr. reaches an altitude of 126,283 feet in the Bell X-2. (Wikipedia, “Iven Carl Kincheloe Jr.”)
September 8 — 9:30 p.m. Frank C. Clark is observing Mars with a 12.5-inch reflector in Las Cruces, New Mexico, when he sees a faint starlike object passing in a direction opposite to the apparent drift of Mars. It is visible for 10 seconds before passing out of the field. Clark moves the telescope and is able to see it again for another 10 seconds. It is a yellowish color. (Frank C. Clark, “An Observation of an Unidentified Celestial Object,” The Strolling Astronomer 10 (May/June 1956): 67–68)
September 11 — The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory officially launches Operation Moonwatch, an effort to enlist amateur astronomers in tracking an artificial satellite that the US intends to launch during the International Geophysical Year. The announcement is made at a news conference by Armand Spitz, coordinator of visual satellite observations. The program is largely the brainchild of Harvard University’s Fred Whipple, who recruits J. Allen Hynek as assistant director to help with the central operation. Until professionally manned optical tracking
stations (using Baker-Nunn camera-telescopes) come online in 1958, this network of amateur scientists and other interested citizens plays a critical role in providing crucial information on the world’s first satellites. The team records some 36 UFO reports from 1957 to 1966. The program is discontinued in 1975. (Wikipedia, “Operation Moonwatch”; Walter N. Webb, “Allen Hynek As I Knew Him,” IUR 18, no. 1 (Jan./Feb. 1993): 4–5; Michael D. Swords, “Gazing at the Moons,” IUR 32, no. 4 (October 2009): 9–16, 24; Center for UFO Studies, “Moonwatch Mystery Satellites, 1958–1962”)
September 15 — About 6:30 a.m. A married couple is driving in Salem, Indiana, when they notice a saucer hovering about 100 feet away in a field by the road. They stop the car and get out for a better look. The object is gunmetal gray in color and looks like two shallow bowls with a dark gap between them. Wisps of smoke are coming from the gap. The object looks as large as the town’s courthouse. It begins undulating as it hovers. After 5 minutes, it tips over on its edge and vanishes. (NICAP case file)
September 22 — 7:50 p.m. An amateur astronomer in Williston, North Dakota, sees a dull-metallic, elliptical object the size of a small plane, oscillating side to side as it moves at 150 mph above the Missouri River. (Williston (N.Dak.) Plains Register, September 22, 1956; Richard F. Haines and Franklin Carter, “A 1956 Military Aircraft–UFO Close Encounter,” IUR 25, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 25)
September 25 — Leonard Stringfield’s wife Adelia observes several white tufts of angel’s hair floating down in the front yard of their home in Cincinnati, Ohio. She places it in an airtight jar. After the Stringfields contact the Air Force, M/Sgt Oliver D. Hill retrieves the sample on October 12. Analysis was done by C. G. Cocks and L. Leatherland, who find that the fibers are “multifilament bundles” that are characteristic of “regenerated cellulose fibers, either viscose or cuprammonium rayon,” perhaps from a defective filter. (Brian Boldman, “Angel Hair Physical Analyses: A Review,” JUFOS 9 (2006): 102–103)
Fall — More than 30 pilots, navigators, and flight engineers are on their way home from special duty in Europe on a US Navy Super Constellation transport. When they are about 50 miles northeast of Gander, Newfoundland, the pilot notices a cluster of lights beneath the aircraft. Suddenly, the lights dim and spread out, the largest light ascending on an apparent collision course with the transport. As it reaches the plane’s altitude, it tilts, shoots to one side, and paces them at a distance of 300 feet. It is a huge metallic disc, 30 feet thick at the center and 350–400 feet wide, with a blurry glow around the rim. Gradually it pulls ahead, tilts upward, accelerates, and zooms away in 5–8 seconds. Gander Airport confirms that it had a radar target near them. (Keyhoe, FSTS, pp. 16–19; Keyhoe, Aliens from Space, Signet ed., 1974, pp. 78–84; Yurko Bondarchuk, UFO Sightings, Landings, and Abductions, Methuen, 1979, pp. 104–106)
Fall — A man in Falls City, Nebraska, sees a winged human with a demonic face that approaches him from three blocks away. It is about 8–9 feet tall and approaches him closely, hovering in the air about 25 feet away. As it passes over him, the man feels numb and paralyzed. The episode haunts him for the next 23 years when he talks to an investigator. (Clark III 778)
Fall or winter — Shortly after 12:00 noon. An Air Force Convair RB-36H of the 28th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing based at Ellsworth AFB, Rapid City, South Dakota, captained by Lt. C. Lenny Marquis, is flying in northern South Dakota at 423 mph when one of the crew sees a metallic disc 100 feet in diameter fly toward the airplane from the left and take up a fixed position on the left wing less than 300 feet away. Other crew members rush to the portholes to take photos. The object has a low dome at the top with three round openings or light sources. The bottom is nearly flat. Its narrow vertical sides are populated by many separate light sources, each a different color. The rest of the disc is a “light golden” hue. After 5–8 minutes, the object suddenly accelerates in parallel with the B-36 and then rises about 30° above the horizontal. The peripheral lights become brighter and turn greenish as it speeds out of sight in several seconds. Both inflight and ground radars detect the object. Substitute navigator Lt. Jimmie Lloyd says the crew turned in all photos, logs, and equipment to an intelligence unit after landing. (Richard F. Haines and Franklin Carter, “A 1956 Military Aircraft–UFO Close Encounter,” IUR 25, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 22–25)
October — Karl L. Veit founds the Deutsche UFO/IFO-Studiengemeinschaft in Wiesbaden, Germany, which publishes the newspaper-format UFO-Nachrichten. (“60 Jahre UFO-Nachrichten,” 2016)
October 2 — 3:45 a.m. Harry J. Sturdevant is on duty as a night watchman at Herbert Elkin and Company, a construction firm in Trenton, New Jersey. He sees a cigar-shaped object some 60–100 feet long and 15 feet in diameter swiftly descending toward him. Emitting a red glow, the object is making a hissing noise like steam and generating a foul odor. It swoops past him and vanishes. He loses his sense of taste and smell, possibly permanently. His face is burned to the point where he cannot shave for two weeks. He begins to lose hearing in his right ear. When he returns to work the next day, he finds leaves on the ground that have burned up like tissue paper. Sturdevant applies for workmen’s compensation from the state for his medical expenses. An adjudicator awards him the
money based on the fact that he may have only thought he saw something, but was injured when he went to investigate it, which his job required. (Emil Sloboda, “He Collected on a Flying Saucer,” Fate 10, no. 6 (June 1957): 66–69; Donald E. Keyhoe and Gordon I. R. Lore Jr., Strange Effects from UFOs, NICAP, 1969, p. 7)
October 7 — 10:45 p.m. UFO reports by police and civilians around Merced, California, reach Castle AFB [now Castle Airport Aviation and Development Center] and a lighted elliptical object about 100–120 feet in diameter is seen by the tower. Two interceptors are scrambled. The object ducks under and above a narrow cloud bank. The pilots can see it from various angles and as close as a few hundred yards. It appears to be a flattened circular shape. The pilots decide to fly one above and one below the overcast. Ground radar picks up the planes but not the UFO. One pilot breaks off to return but sees that the UFO is now chasing his buddy’s plane. Several officers arrive from another base to debrief the pilots and they appear very knowledgeable about UFOs. They seek “confirmation, not information” and tell the pilots not to discuss the sighting at all. Citizen witnesses are told the pilots were chasing ducks or geese. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1956 November– December, The Author, 1994, pp. 52, 59; Richard H. Hall, Uninvited Guests, Aurora, 1988, pp. 242–244; Sparks,
p. 239)
October 19 — NICAP’s initial board of governors includes T. Townsend Brown (founder), Frank Edwards, Leon C. LeVan, Albert H. Baller, Charles A. Maney, Talbot T. Speer, Abraham M. Sonnabend, Col. Robert B. Emerson, Rear Adm. Delmer S. Fahrney, Gen. William E. Kepner, and Brig. Gen. Thomas B. Catron. Gladys Rose Hackett and Margaret Naylor are hired to do secretarial work, and Martin H. Heflin is hired as public relations specialist. The headquarters are at 1536 Connecticut Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. Incorporation is granted on October
24. (“‘Toward a Broader Understanding…’: The Story of How NICAP Began,” UFO Investigator, October 1971,
p. 3; Clark III 792; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1956 September– October, The Author, 1994, pp. 77–78)
October 29 — Howard Menger, a sign painter from High Bridge, New Jersey, goes public on the Long John Nebel show on WOR-AM in New York City with a story of his contacts with “Aryan-type” Venusians in spaceships. Menger reports that his contacts started in childhood, when he experienced flashbacks of life on another world and sightings of flying discs. In 1932 he met a beautiful blonde woman who could read his mind, and in 1946 he again sees her stepping out of a flying saucer. She is supposedly 500 years old, although she looks 25. Many contacts follow. (Clark III 738)
November 4 — NICAP issues its first news release. T. Townsend Brown emphasizes the group’s “growing membership of responsible citizens from every walk of life and profession” and stresses that “there does exist more than enough evidence of certain and obvious aerial phenomena to justify independent evaluation.” (NICAP, “Project Skylight,” November 4, 1956)
November 11 — 10:00 p.m. Stig Ekberg and Harry Sjöberg are building a house on the island of Väddö, about 56 miles northwest of Stockholm, Sweden. Ekberg is driving his Ford V8 pickup when they see a bright flying object with the shape of a flattened sphere 24 feet wide and 9 feet high approaching from the east. It moves about a half mile in front of them at an altitude of 300 feet. As it makes a sharp turn toward them, the truck engine sputters and dies and the headlights go out. The object starts “slowly gliding down,” rocks back and forth, and comes to a stop in the middle of the road, about 300 feet in front of them, 3 feet above the ground. The object illuminates the surrounding landscape with such a tremendous amount of light that a nearby barn is clearly visible. The air smells of ozone and smoldering insulation. After about 10 minutes the object gets brighter, lifts off the ground, moves to the left and up, makes a sudden turn, and speeds away in the direction it had come. Ekberg restarts the truck and the headlights come back on. Seeing that the grass at the landing site is flattened, they investigate further and find a shiny rock that is hot to the touch. It is a heavy, three-sided piece of metal about the size of a matchbox. After several unsuccessful attempts to have the sample studied, it is taken to the Saab aircraft company where Sven Schalin conducts a thorough analysis. Other tests are later run in laboratories in Sweden, Denmark, and Germany. The general conclusion is that the rock is composed of tungsten carbide and cobalt, consistent with manufactured products. (Jacques Vallée, “Physical Analyses in Ten Cases of Unexplained Aerial Objects with Material Samples,” Journal of Scientific Exploration 12, no. 3 (1998): 365–366)
November 14 — 10:10 p.m. Captain William Joseph Hull and his copilot Peter H. Macintosh are flying Capital Airlines Flight 77 from New York City to Mobile, Alabama. While approximately above Jackson, Alabama, they see something like a brilliant meteor flash by the aircraft. The object stops, hovers, and engages in a range of acrobatics (crazy gyrations, lazy 8’s, square chandeliers) for several minutes before shooting out over the Gulf of Mexico at “fantastic speed.” (Sign Historical Group, “Captain Joe Hull’s UFO Sighting”; Condon, pp. 127–129; Sparks, p. 240; Swords 230–231)
November 16 — Morning. Telephones and an automatic railroad block mechanism in Lemmon, South Dakota, fail to operate as a glowing red object about 3 feet in diameter flies over the railroad yards. (Mobridge (S.Dak.) Tribune, November 22, 1956; Schopick, pp. 21–22; Richard F. Haines and Franklin Carter, “A 1956 Military Aircraft– UFO Close Encounter,” IUR 25, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 25)
November 21 — 8:23 p.m. A customs officer named Ueda and a maritime safety officer named Kume are walking along Number 1 Pier, Kobe, Japan, when they hear an explosion. They see something resembling fireworks on the bay and watch as two whirling balls of fire submerge. (Sanderson, InvRes, p. 46)
November 25 — 4:30 a.m. Police radio at Hot Springs, South Dakota, picks up transmissions made by a jet interceptor from the 54th Fighter Interceptor Squadron at Ellsworth AFB in Rapid City that makes three passes at a brilliantly lit UFO bobbing up and down in the sky. On the third pass, the pilot reports that the object registers on his radar. It is rumored that a blip is picked up on ground radar by the 740th Aircraft Control and Warning Squadron. A sheriff and deputy at Rapid City watch a green stationary UFO with a flashing red light for 30 minutes; an upward-shining white light appears at intervals. (NICAP, “Gnd/Air/Visual, Jets Scrambled”; “‘Saucers’ Stir Speculation,” Rapid City (S.Dak.) Daily Journal, November 26, 1956, p. 1; “Hills Residents Tell of Shining Objects,” Rapid City (S.Dak.) Daily Journal, November 26, 1956, pp. 1, 7; Pierre (S.Dak.) Capitol Journal, November 26, 1956; UFOEv, pp. 22, 79; Richard F. Haines and Franklin Carter, “A 1956 Military Aircraft–UFO Close Encounter,” IUR 25, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 25)
December — Chemical engineer Leon Davidson begins to distribute privately printed copies of Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14, together with his analysis and commentary. He has become convinced that UFOs are secret devices developed by the US government and that Special Report No. 14 is a clever attempt to hide the fact.
Mostly, however, he focuses on discrepancies in the Air Force’s public announcements and the actual data in the report. Davidson publishes further editions in October 1957, July 1966, January 1971, and 1976. (Leon Davidson, Flying Saucers: An Analysis of Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14, [1956], 3d ed., Ramsey-Wallace, 1966; Clark III 930)
December 1 — 12:20 a.m. A round object, red to orange in color, is observed moving at approximately 1,000 foot above Valley City, North Dakota. It moves rapidly up, down, sideways, and hovers. A police car approaches it, but the car loses radio contact with the station. Valley City also loses contact with Jamestown, South Dakota. All radio contact returns after the object leaves the area. (NICAP, [Blue Book file])
December 2 — Dorothy Martin sets off from Prescott, Arizona, with the Laugheads, ufologist brothers Ray and Rex G. Stanford, and George Hunt Williamson, his wife Betty, and toddler son Mark. They are acting in response to a series of Williamson channelings that had begun April 18 when Lord Aramu-Muru announced that “those we have commissioned” are to establish a priory of the Brotherhood of the Seven Rays “in a remote area of another country to the south.” After spending some time in Mexico, they head for Moyobamba, Peru, under the direction of their spirit masters. The Laugheads (who apparently were in Mexico in July) and Stanfords leave around this time. After a while, those remaining move to the Valley of Pariahuanca east of Lima, Peru, and set up the Outer Retreat of the Monastery of the Seven Rays, which has some cult-like attributes. There they attract new members, including Williamson’s later coauthor John McCoy. Williamson devotes himself for several years to paranormally guided archaeological expeditions. (Clark III 719–720, 1286; Zirger and Martinelli, The Incredible Life of George Hunt Williamson, Verdechiari, 2016, pp. 105–115)
December 10 — 2:00 p.m. A US Air Force pilot sees a silver object with a “straight wing, having engine rods or large wing pods [or] intakes” flying at 56,000–62,000 feet for 15 minutes at Victoria, Texas. The pilot’s description is a dead ringer for a secret U-2 aircraft, which is what Blue Book suspects. (Mark Rodeghier, “The U-2 Spy Plane and Blue Book: Another Look,” IUR 27, no. 3 (Fall 2002): 20–21)
December 13 — Capt. Karl Hars Dersson and the crew of the Danish ship Dorthe Maersk view an intensely bright fireball giving off weird flashes of light for 2–3 minutes north of Isla La Orchila, Venezuela. It explodes on hitting the water. Afterwards, the surface of the sea shimmers with various colors and is disturbed for 5 minutes. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1956 November–December, Supplemental Notes, The Author, 2003, pp. 39–40)
December 15 — 11:00 a.m. While out gathering Christmas greens near Derry, New Hampshire, A. G. Horne looks up and sees a 2-foot tall green dwarf with a high-domed head, floppy ears, a face like a bloodhound, and lidless eyes like a snake. His skin hangs in folds like an elephant’s. After a few minutes, the being “started for me with a kind of screeching sound,” and Horne flees. (Center for UFO Studies, HUMCAT Index 1956, p. 23; Clark III 271)
December 17 — 4:20 p.m. Near Itazuke Air Base [now Fukuoka Airport] in Fukuoka, Japan, a USAF pilot flying an F- 86D interceptor picks up a large blip on airborne radar. The pilot sees a tan object, round on top, at 9.2 miles and closes to within 5.7 miles. The object starts to pull away from the fighter and at 13.8 miles all radar disappears.
The pilot estimates its speed as 1,700–2,000 mph. Both the pilot and his wingman report interference resembling ECM (radar jamming). (NICAP, “Radar/Visual from F-86”; Sparks, p. 240; “Jet Planes Chased Big Flying Object,” Auckland (N.Z.) Star, October 4, 1957; “Jet Chase of Large Circular Object Investigated by Far East Air Force,” UFO Investigator 1, no. 2 (Aug./Sept. 1957): 1–2; Richard Hall, “Radar/Visual UFOs and Air Force Debunking,” IUR 18, no. 3 (May/June 1993): 15–16)
December 17 — Night. Marie Carow goes outside her home in Conashaugh, Pennsylvania, with a flashlight and discovers two little men, 3.5 and 3 feet tall, standing motionless in her back lawn. Both wear helmets and snug-fitting suits of silvery material. Carow shines the light on them for 3 minutes, then runs back to tell her husband. 15 minutes later, they are gone. (Berthold Eric Schwarz, “UFO Occupants: Fact or Fantasy?” Flying Saucer Review 15, no. 5 (Sept./Oct, 1969): 16–18; Clark III 269; Patrick Gross, URECAT, October 18, 2007)
1957
1957 — Morris K. Jessup publishes The Expanding Case for the UFO, which argues that human “little people” (like the pygmy peoples of the Congo basin) were “planted” from UFOs thousands of years ago. Citing reports of anomalous lights on the moon, Jessup speculates that the pygmy races either colonized the moon or came to the Earth from there. They are the remnants of an advanced civilization that developed levitation, teleportation, and space flight, but had to leave Earth when Atlantis and Mu were sinking into the oceans. (Morris K. Jessup, The Expanding Case for the UFO, Citadel, 1957; Clark III 106–107, 635; Jerome Clark, “Vimanas Have Landed: Ancient Astronautics in Ufology,” IUR 22, no. 3 (Fall 1997): 26)
1957 — Metaphysical author George Hunt Williamson writes Other Tongues—Other Flesh (although it bears a copyright date of 1953), the first of three books that set forth an alternative occult history shaped by Atlantis, Lemuria, reincarnation, and space people—both benign and malevolent. He writes that space people first arrived 1 billion years ago [prior to the earliest known multicellular life on land], were 12 feet tall, and built an underground city beneath Lake Titicaca, Peru. Migrants from the “Sirius system” arrive during the Miocene Epoch [23–5 million years ago] looking for terrestrial bodies to inhabit—they select the evolving apes. The next visitation took place in Arizona in 10,000 B.C. [the beginning of the Neolithic Revolution] when Venusians land and interact with the Lemurians. Records documenting earth’s unknown history are hidden in various inaccessible places (“secret places of the lion”) around the globe. Williamson’s book Secret Places of the Lion follows in 1958 and Road in the Sky in 1959. These are among the first ancient astronaut books. In the latter book, Williamson claims that the Hopi’s ancestors are Martians, while their neighbors the Navajo are from Maldek, the planet whose destruction formed the asteroid belt. (George Hunt Williamson, Other Tongues—Other Flesh, Amherst, [1957]; George Hunt Williamson, Secret Places of the Lion, Destiny Books ed., 1996; Clark III 104–106, 1286; Jerome Clark, “Vimanas Have Landed: Ancient Astronautics in Ufology,” IUR 22, no. 3 (Fall 1997): 23–26; Zirger and Martinelli, The Incredible Life of George Hunt Williamson, Verdechiari, 2016, pp. 113–120, 235–243)
1957 — New Jersey contactee Howard Menger releases an album of “Authentic Music from Another Planet,” featuring a narrative by Menger and bland piano music written by his wife Connie (under her nom de plume Marla Baxter, sister of the blonde spacewoman he had met in 1946). (Discogs, “Authentic Music from Another Planet”; “Authentic Music from Another Planet by Howard Menger,” Libertad450 YouTube channel, February 22, 2016)
1957 — Otis T. Carr announces his invention of a fourth-dimensional space vehicle, a Circular-Foil Spacecraft powered by an Utron Electric Accumulator that makes use of the “free energy of the universe.” (Clark III 860)
1957 — Ground Saucer Watch is established in Phoenix, Arizona, by Ted Starrett. William H. Spaulding is the Western Division Director, with James A. Spaulding as the Eastern Division Director in Cleveland, Ohio. It publishes Ground Saucer Watch Bulletin from 1976 to 1982. By 1979, GSW has analyzed nearly 700 UFO photographs and films, of which they verify 38 as bona fide. (Margaret Sachs, The UFO Encyclopedia, Putnam, 1980, p, 132)
1957 — George Fawcett founds the New England UFO Study Group in Marlborough, Massachusetts. It publishes the
New England UFO Newsletter from 1976 to 1982. ()
1957 — Hayden C. Hewes founds the International UFO Bureau in Edmond, Oklahoma. It publishes the Interplanetary Intelligence Report from 1965 to 1966. ()
1957 — Engineer Pantelimon Mizof and others see an object in the Bucegi Mountains, Romania, pass over them silently and land. Some of them approach to get a better look, but when they are 150 feet away, it takes off suddenly. (Hobana and Weverbergh 158–159)
1957 — The Victorian branch of the Australian Flying Saucer Research Society becomes a separate organization, the Victorian UFO Research Society. It publishes the Australian UFO Bulletin from 1957 to September 2007, edited
by Les Bristol. (Keith Basterfield, Vladimir Godic, and Pony Godic, “Australian Ufology: A Review,” JUFOS 2 (1990): 24; Australian UFO Bulletin 1, no. 3 (December 1957))
1957 — The Centro de Estudios Interplanetarios is founded in Barcelona, Spain. From 1970 to 1981 it publishes a quarterly magazine titled Stendek, and since then it has published occasional groups of papers on UFOs. (Stendek 1, no. 1 (June 1970); Papers d’OVNIs, no. 1 (1994); Nous Papers d’OVNIs, no. 1 (December 2014))
January — Contactee Gabriel Green establishes the Los Angeles Interplanetary Study Groups, which in 1959 evolves into Amalgamated Flying Saucer Clubs of America in Los Angeles, California. It assumes that UFOs are piloted by friendly extraterrestrials. Around the same time, Green announces his meeting with flying saucer crewmen from the hitherto unknown planet Korendor, orbiting the triple star Alpha Centauri. At its peak, AFSCA has more than 5,000 members. (Wikipedia, “Gabriel Green”; Clark III 99; Thy Kingdom Come, no. 4 (April/May 1957))
January — Norbert F. Gariety begins publishing S.P.A.C.E. (Saucer Phenomena and Celestial Enigma), a monthly newsletter, in Coral Gables, Florida. It continues until January 1963. (S.P.A.C.E., no. 1 (January 1957)
January 1 — Shortly before 12:00 midnight. Herbert Naderson and his wife and sons are driving northeast to their home in Ashby, Minnesota, when they see a triangular object traveling slowly at a high altitude. They watch it for 45 minutes. (Fergus Falls (Minn.) Daily Journal, January 3, 1957; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1957 January–March 22nd, The Author, 1995, p. 2)
January 14–16 — T. Townsend Brown has proven so financially inept that the NICAP board asks him to step down.
Delmer S. Fahrney replaces him as board chairman, Keyhoe steps in as director, and Fahrney convenes a press conference in which he announces that UFOs are under intelligent control, but that they are not American or Soviet aircraft. Stringfield is made public relations adviser. (T. Townsend Brown, Letter to NICAP Board of Governors, January 16, 1957; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1957 January–March 22nd, The Author, 1995, pp. 14–20; “High Speed Objects Reported in the Sky,” New York Times, January 17, 1957, p. 31; Stringfield, Situation Red, Fawcett Crest, 1977, p. 15; Clark III 792)
January 16 — 8:00 p.m. The crews of two Air Force B-25s are flying about 90 miles north of Sweetwater, Texas, when they see a round white object make rapid maneuvers. Pilot Lt. Col. Howard T. Wright notes that his radio compass starts pointing directly toward the object, following its movements. The entire object begins blinking on and off. When the aircraft gets within range of Lubbock, Texas, the object flies off on a straight-line course in about 12 seconds. One of the B-25s refuels and is sent on a 4-hour search of the vicinity with no results. (NICAP, “Object Maneuvers near B-25’s / EME”; Sparks, p. 241; Swords 244–245)
January 21 — 10:45 a.m. Near Kagnew Station [now closed], Asmara, Eritrea, five enlisted men of the US Army’s 4th Detachment of the Second Signal Service Battalion (M/Sgt Billy J. Woodruff, Sgt. Frank Haverly, SP2 Robert O. Clewell, SP2 George R. Dean, and SP3 Gerald L. Fennell) watch a large, shiny, metal sphere hovering at about 2,000 feet. It suddenly disappears but reappears later for a few minutes, then disappears again. Later in the day, Woodruff and Capt. Jesse M. Strong see two brownish, disc-shaped objects maneuvering in formation at a high altitude. One breaks away from the other, moving at high speed. (UFOEv, p. 29)
January 27 — Former CIA director Rear Adm. Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter joins NICAP’s board of directors. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1957 January–March 22nd, The Author, 1995,
p. 31)
January 31 — US Army Order number 30-13, “Sightings of Unconventional Aircraft,” stipulates that personnel involved in sightings must “not discuss or disseminate such information to persons or agencies other than their superior officer(s) and other personnel authorized by the Acting Chief of Staff, G-2, this headquarters,” by order of Col. Charles L. Olin. (“Air Force Sees Plenty: Tells Nothing,” CSI News Letter, no. 8 (July 25, 1957): 7–8)
February — Project MKUltra chief Sidney Gottlieb organizes field trials of psilocybin for injection into 9 black inmates at the Addiction Center in Lexington, Kentucky. Allen Dulles approves psychiatrist Donald Ewen Cameron’s application for mind-control experiments to be administered at the Allan Memorial Institute of McGill University in Montreal, funded through the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, a CIA cutout organization.
Cameron does not know that the money originates from the CIA. In addition to LSD, Cameron experiments with various paralytic drugs, electroconvulsive therapy at 30–40 times the normal power, and sensory deprivation in a “sleep room.” This is a dimly lit dormitory of about 20 beds, which the nurses call “The Zombie Room.” His “psychic driving” experiments consist of putting subjects into drug-induced comas for weeks at a time (up to three months in one case) while playing tape loops of noise or simple repetitive statements. His experiments are typically carried out on patients who have entered the institute for minor problems such as anxiety disorders and postpartum depression, many of whom suffer permanently from his actions. His treatments result in victims’ incontinence, amnesia, forgetting how to talk, forgetting their parents, and thinking their interrogators are their
parents. The Canadian government is apparently unaware of these activities. Naomi Klein argues that Cameron’s research and his contribution to the MKUltra project is actually not about mind control and brainwashing, but about designing “a scientifically based system for extracting information from ‘resistant sources.’ In other words, torture.” (Gordon Thomas, Journey into Madness: The True Story of Secret CIA Mind Control and Medical Abuse, Bantam, 1989; Anne Collins, In the Sleep Room: The Story of the CIA Brainwashing Experiments in Canada, Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1988; John D. Marks, The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate”: The CIA and Mind Control, Times Books, 1978; Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Picador, 2008; Jim Keith, Mind Control, World Control: The Encyclopedia of Mind Control, 2014)
February 13 — 2:30 a.m. The USAF operations director and three tower controllers at two radar sites within Lincoln AFB [now Lincoln Airport, Nebraska], the GCA and NCOIC, track several targets flying behind an airliner at a distance of 5–6 miles and traveling twice as fast. There is no IFF response. The objects hover and move at high speed. One splits into two objects, another executes an 180° turn. The radar blips are the size of a B-47. (NICAP, “Radar/Visual at Lincoln AFB”; Sparks, p. 241; J. Allen Hynek, The UFO Experience, Ballantine ed., 1974, pp. 96–97)
February 13 — 9:40 p.m. Amateur astronomer Steve Papina is walking south in Placerville, California, when he notices off to his left the ionized track of what he takes to be a meteor. It is about 20° above the eastern horizon, rising at a 70° angle. The trail begins widening at about 35° above the horizon and veers in a westerly direction. Suddenly a black disc appears directly in front of the trail, whose diameter is approximately the width of the trail and the size of a nickel held at a distance of 5 feet. Its surface is not smooth but crisscrossed with grooves. It continues to move from east to west and acquires a white, dusty appearance before speeding directly away from Papina at high speed. (“ALPO Refers Sighting to APRO,” APRO Bulletin, July 1957, p. 3)
February 15 — 10:00 p.m. A large, circular object is seen by independent witnesses in Wardle, Lancashire, England.
Shortly afterward, a commercial aircraft is seen following the same course as the UFO and displaying unusually powerful lights. Later, at a point along the flight path, a small radio transmitter like those attached to balloons is found, then another piece of meteorological equipment in another spot. In the House of Commons, MP Tony Leavey asks the Secretary of State for Air for an explanation. On March 20, Under-Secretary of State for Air Ian Orr-Ewing responds, saying that the objects were toy balloons illuminated by a flashlight bulb released by Neil Robinson, a laundry mechanic from Rochdale. But on April 17, the Air Ministry sends an investigator to interview the witnesses and tells them not to talk about the sighting. Robinson says he has no idea how to launch a balloon, but there is some evidence that he has considerable technical know-how and a penchant for pranks. (Clifford Thornton, “The Wardle Mystery,” Flying Saucer Review 3, no. 3 (May/June 1957): 4; Geoffrey Norris, “Something in the Sky,” Royal Air Force Flying Review, July 1957, pp. 14–16, 46; Good Above, pp. 46–47; David Clarke, “The Wardle ‘Thing,’” Fortean Times 196 (June 2005): 40–41)
February 19 — In testimony before the House Appropriations Committee, National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics officials Hugh Latimer Dryden and Jimmy Doolittle are asked about UFOs. They “flatly denied the existence of such space vehicles.” When asked why they don’t speak out more often, they remark that they “cannot compete with the science-fiction people.” (US House Appropriations Committee, Hearings, Independent Offices Appropriations for 1958, National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics, February 19, 1957, pp. 1417–1419)
February 26 — UK Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding writes to retired Italian diplomat Alberto Perego that he is most interested in “accounts of intelligible contacts between human beings and the occupants of interplanetary ships.” (Good Above, p. 48)
March 1 — Leonard H. Stringfield publishes the final issue of CRIFO Orbit. (CRIFO Orbit 3, no. 12 (March 1, 1957); Clark III 1114)
March 6 — 2:00 p.m. Hearing the family dogs barking in the backyard, a Mrs. Martin who lives on Hope Road near Great Meadows, New Jersey, looks outside and sees the dogs looking at a white hovering object that looks like a “huge derby hat” about 50 feet in diameter. It is rocking slightly in the air and makes a low, rumbling sound. Beneath it are “streamers or lines” that “twinkle like the fragile strands” of Christmas tinsel. (Hynek UFO Report, pp. 150– 154; Sparks, p. 241)
March 8 — A pilot watches a UFO from the ground at Baudette, Minnesota. It is circular, 15–18 feet in diameter, and its odd glow shines on the snow-covered ground. It is flying so low that it seems to suck the loose snow up under it as it passes. (Keyhoe, FSTS, p. 56; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1957 January–March 22nd, The Author, 1995, p. 74)
March 8 — 9:45 p.m. Victor Hancock and Guy Miller are flying a DC-3 owned by the Tennessee Gas Transmission Company above Pasadena, Texas, when they see a UFO bearing three brilliant white lights. After the UFO speeds by the aircraft, it slows down. When the DC-3 catches up, it speeds ahead. This cat-and-mouse chase continues
for some 10 minutes. (NICAP, “UFO Maneuvers near DC-3”; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1957 January–March 22nd, The Author, 1995, pp. 68–69)
March 9 — 4:33 a.m. Capt. Matthew A. Van Winkle, piloting a Pan American World Airways DC-6A airliner at a point over the Atlantic Ocean approximately 350 miles northeast of Jacksonville, Florida, observes a “burning greenish white round object” to the right of the aircraft that appears to be on a collision course. Van Winkle pulls the plane upward in a climb to avoid the object. This sudden maneuver causes four of the passengers to be thrown out of their seats, resulting in injuries. Copilot Dion W. Taylor and Flight Engineer John Washuta also observe the object. Washuta says the UFO is a high-intensity light that appears to stand still for approximately four seconds until it is lost to sight during the evasive action. Ed Perry, piloting Pan Am Flight 269 about 175 miles behind him, also sees it. Miami Air Traffic Control sends a flash message to the Civil Aeronautics Board describing the incident: “Pilot took evasive action, object appeared to have a brilliant greenish-white center with an outer ring which reflected the glow from the center. … Above description fits with what seven other flights saw…. Miami reports no missile activity…. Original reports of jet activity discounted.” The Air Force quickly explains the sighting as a meteor, but the CAB declares it unexplained after a thorough investigation. (NICAP, “DC6-A Crew Take Evasive Action”; Keyhoe, FSTS, pp. 54–56; Swords 245–246; Frank Edwards, FS Serious Business, Bantam ed., 1966, pp. 38–39; Good Above, pp. 282–283)
March 22–23 — Mrs. Robert Beaudoin, the wife of an Air Force officer, along with her 17-year-old daughter Carol Litten, sees a series of unusual lights at 11:15 p.m. northeast of Camarillo, California. First they see a large, soundless, and pulsing light, with something like a pole on top, making fast and erratic motions. She calls a military friend and then 1st Lt. Leonard E. Ott at nearby Oxnard AFB [now Camarillo Airport]. At 12:30 a.m., they see a green object accompanied by two smaller red lights below the horizon of the Los Palos Hills. The green object seems to be hovering over the North American Rocketdyne plant in the Simi Hills. At this time both the green object and the red objects seem to jump around, and the two red objects are zooming past the green object at tremendous velocities. Ott inquires about radar and a Lt. Martin tells him that radar is detecting a stationary object in the same area. The sheriff’s office is contacted, and they send a patrol car. Deputy Sheriffs Segura and Rausch confirm Beaudoin’s report, with the exception that by that time there are five red objects flying well below the green one. All are in motion and constantly changing altitude. Radar calls Ott back and says they have a scramble underway and they will have the aircraft check the area upon their return. Upon the arrival of the interceptors from Oxnard the red objects join the green object and speed away up and to the east. The aircraft are unsuccessful and return to base. At this time two Navy aircraft are sent to the area. Somehow, between the time of this report to Oxnard and the later Air Force investigation by the 4602nd, these red objects are changed, on the report, to stars and the moon above. This happens despite the witness stating that the red lights were below the hills on the horizon. To deal with that, the Air Force adds the theory that a temperature inversion caused light to bend the images of the stars, or, alternatively, the witness saw lights on a barn. Beaudoin herself is judged hysterical due to her pregnancy. The Air Force’s explanation is completed without anyone bothering to interview the teenage daughter or taking anything associated with the airbase into account (for example, the radar returns). (NICAP, “Objects Seen, Radar Tracked, Jets Scrambled”; Keyhoe, FSTS, pp. 58–61; Hynek UFO Report, pp. 53–54; Sparks, p. 242; Swords 246–247)
March 23 — Agriculturist Luis Petriera, along with several others, watches a glowing object plunge into Lake Maracaibo, Venezuela. No planes are missing. Officials drag the lake but find nothing. (“Report from Venezuela,” APRO Bulletin, July 1957, p. 10)
March 28 — AEC physician and Navy Capt. Charles Wesley Shilling releases a press statement saying that “excessively hot baths can be as damaging to the human sex glands as radioactive fallout in the amount received in the last five years from the testing of atomic weapons.” It is intended to counter the antinuclear activism of biochemist Linus Pauling. (“Says Hot Baths As Bad for Sex Glands As Fallout,” Newport (R.I.) Daily News, March 29, 1957, p. 2)
Early April — USAF Brig. Gen. Arno H. Leuhman, director of Air Force information, tells the press that “There’s no valid evidence that there are flying saucers.” (“AF Intelligence Chief Visits Here,” Miami (Fla.) News, April 14, 1957, p. 12A)
April — 7:30 a.m. An anonymous resident of Córdoba, Argentina, is motorcycling to Rio Ceballos when his engine stops.
He sees a large UFO hovering nearby, from which a human-like occupant emerges. He entices the man to enter the UFO with him. Inside, he sees 5–6 screens and intricate equipment, at each of which a similar occupant is seated. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1957 March 23rd–May 25th, The Author, 1995, pp. 63–64)
April 4 — Pilot Robert L. Sieker takes a U-2 covered in radar-deflecting paint for a test run out of Area 51 and flies almost 90 miles without incident when suddenly the paint causes the aircraft to overheat, spin out of control, and
crash near Pioche, Nevada. Sieker ejects but is killed when a piece of metal hits him in the head. (Aviation Safety Network, “Wikibase Occurrence #155905”)
April 4 — Five unusual radar contacts are detected simultaneously on three tracking radars of the Bombing Trials Unit based at RAF West Freugh [now MOD West Freugh], southeast of Stranraer, Scotland, and followed for 36 minutes. The three radars are located at two different sites near Luce Bay, Wigtownshire, Scotland. The object flashes across the sky at 60,000 feet, dives to 14,000 feet, circles, and speeds away. Wing Commander Walter Whitworth, in command at West Freugh, is ordered to say nothing about the object. (NICAP, “Three Radars Track Maneuvering UFO”; Good Above, pp. 48–49; UFOFiles2, pp. 51–53; Martin Shough, “Study of Unusual Radar Observations near RAF West Freugh, Wigtownshire, SW Scotland, April 4, 1957,” March 2010; Patrick Gross, “The West Freugh Incident, 1957”)
April 8 — USAF Maj. Gen. Joe W. Kelly answers a question from Rep. Lee Metcalf (D-Mont.) and denies that the Air Force has muzzled pilots. “Answers are provided on any unidentified flying objects which have attracted national attention.” He admits that interceptors are still sent up “as a matter of security.” (Keyhoe, FSTS)
April 10 — Delmer S. Fahrney leaves NICAP’s board of directors for urgent and personal reasons, partially because his wife is seriously ill, but also because of the ridicule generated by his peers in the military. (Clark III 792–793)
April 14 — 3:00 p.m. Marie Garcin and Julia Rami are walking along road D24 a half-mile east of Vins-sur-Caramy, Var, France, when they hear a deafening noise and see a 5-foot-tall, 3-foot-wide, metallic, top-shaped object covered with vibrating sharp spines that is landing near a road sign. The sign starts to vibrate loudly, then the object hops over the road at a height of about 15–30 feet. Another witness, Jules Boglio, is about 1,000 feet away and sees the object land a second time in the adjoining road, then jump over another road sign which then vibrates loudly. Two other witnesses see the object at a much greater distance. (NICAP, “Top-Shaped Object Hovers at 300”; Jimmy Guieu, “Vins-sur-Caramy (Var), 14 avril 1957,” Ouranos, no. 21 (1957): 50–52; Lorenzen, UFOs: The Whole Story, Signet, 1969, pp. 145–146; J. Allen Hynek, The UFO Experience, Ballantine ed., 1974, pp. 154–156)
April 19 — 11:52 a.m. Two metallic discs are seen entering the Pacific Ocean about 300 miles southeast of Tokyo, Japan, by Japanese fisherman aboard the Kitsukawa Maru. A violent turbulence disturbs the ocean after they submerge. The objects are 30 feet long and wingless. (NICAP, “Two Discs Enter Pacific”)
April 24 — 6:27 a.m. Project 57 is an open-air nuclear “dirty-bomb” test conducted in Area 13 at the Nellis Air Force Range, Nevada. The high explosives of a nuclear weapon are detonated asymmetrically to simulate an accidental detonation of an XW-25 warhead in an airplane crash. The purpose of the test is to verify that no yield would result, as well as study the extent of plutonium contamination. Some 4,000 galvanized steel pans sprayed with tacky resin are set up around a 10-by-16-square-mile block of land to capture plutonium samples. Some 68 air- sampler stations equipped with micropore paper are spread over 70 square miles. Mock-ups of sidewalks, curbs, and asphalt are set up in the desert; cars and trucks are added; giant air-sampling balloons are tethered in place; 9 burros, 109 beagles, 10 sheep, and 31 white rats are put in cages. Afterward, the contaminated area is fenced off and the contaminated equipment buried in place. Data from the test confirms that plutonium has a 24,000-year half-life; many of the test animals are killed, but security guard Richard Mingus manages not to inhale any particles. A radiological survey team detects alpha radiation, but no serious beta or gamma radiation. In 1981, the US Department of Energy decontaminates and decommissions the site. Hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of soil and debris are removed from Area 13 and disposed of in a waste facility at the Nevada Test Site. (Wikipedia, “Project 57”; Jacobsen, Area 51, pp. 100–116)
Late spring — Between 6:30 and 7:00 p.m. Airman 2nd Class Wallace Fowler is sitting on the front steps of his barracks at Ellsworth AFB near Rapid City, South Dakota, when a silver domed disc with portholes appears directly above him. Shadows are moving behind the portholes. The UFO is motionless and the size of a house. After about 2–3 minutes it takes off straight up at high speed. Many others on the base have seen the object as well, and jets are scrambled. The UFO maneuvers around the jets as if toying with them. One of the pursuing jets allegedly goes missing and the wreckage is never found. (Good Need, pp. 218–219)
May — NICAP is fed a phony UFO crash story in the Everglades, Florida, by an Associated Press employee who is a “former Signal Corps engineer” with possible ties to the NSA. He admits faking the story but refuses to give any motive. (Keyhoe, FSTS, pp. 64–68)
May — 4:50 a.m. A truck driver pulls over at the edge of the disused RAF Winkleigh Airfield [now the site of the West of England Transport Collection], Devon, England, to drink some coffee. He notices an object like a metallic, fluorescent-blue submarine with tail fins sitting at the end of the runway. It is about the size of an airliner. He watches it a while, then gets out of the truck and approaches it. He has the object in sight a total of 10–15 minutes and realizes it is hovering just above the ground. When he is 600 feet away, he encounters a type of force field that prevents him from approaching. The object then rises straight up into the sky to about 1,200 feet and shoots
off to the north. The force field disappears. (Ron Toth, “UFO Landing at War-time Aerodrome,” Pegasus 2, no. 3 (May-June 1970): 2–4)
May — 6:00 a.m. Frances Stichler is working in her barn in Milford, Pennsylvania, when she hears a whirring sound and sees a bowl-shaped object approaching at a height of 15 feet. It is 15 feet in diameter with a rim about 3 feet wide. It hovers with one side tilted toward her 50 feet away. Its lone occupant, a helmeted figure with a long, olive- colored face and a shiny, light gray suit, gazes at her with a quizzical expression on his tanned face. It is sitting on the far rim with feet and legs hidden by the lower part of the object. Inside the open vehicle, she can see levers.
After a minute, the object takes off to the southwest making a spinning sound. Her chickens do not seem disturbed by any of this. (Berthold Eric Schwarz, “UFO Occupants: Fact or Fantasy?” Flying Saucer Review 15, no. 5 (Sept./Oct. 1969): 14–15; Clark III 268; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1957 May 24th–July 31st, The Author, 1996, p. 10; Patrick Gross, URECAT, December 17, 2006)
May? — 3:45 p.m. Two men in Orlando, Florida, see an oval object emerge from a larger cigar-shaped UFO about 75– 100 feet long. (Herbert S. Taylor, “Satellite Objects: A Further Look,” IUR 29, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 7, 25)
May 1 — 7:00 a.m. A man driving a motorcycle about 9 miles from Pajas Blancas International Airport in Córdoba, Argentina, sees a UFO shortly after his engine fails. It is 65 feet in diameter and 16 feet thick, hovering about 50 feet above the ground. He hides in a ditch and sees the craft come down, making a sound similar to air escaping from a valve. A lift descends from its base almost to the ground. In it is a man of average height who makes friendly gestures. He is dressed in a plastic diving suit. The witness enters the machine and sees several people inside seated in front of instrument panels, lit by an extraordinary light. He is then escorted out, and the disc rises to the northwest. During the next hour, there are 6 other sightings made by independent witnesses. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1957 March 23rd–May 25th, The Author, 1995,
pp. 61–64; Mark Cashman, “Behavioral Classification System for UFO Occupants,” IUR 24, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 19)
May 2— 6:55–7:20 a.m. Frank E. Baker, supervisor of civilian camera operators at Edwards AFB, California, sends the standard two-man crews out to their Askania tracking telescopes for their daily shifts. Veterans James D. Bittick and John R. Gettys Jr. are in their pickup expecting a normal day. As they approach their station in the Mojave Desert, they see a bright object in the sky. It is initially at about a 45° elevation and seems to be hovering. They need to get permission from Baker to photograph anything, so they call it in, begin readying the scope, load the film, and wait for the okay. Gettys says the base of the object has a circular appearance when high in the sky.
Baker gives them his approval and they begin filming, each viewing the object through spotting scopes while the film rolls. They shoot about 100 feet then stop. During filming, the object moves from 1 mile away to 5 miles.
What they see is a disc-shaped object with a low dome on top. They contact the base, which scrambles two jets, but they are too late. After they turn the film in, three officers show up and interrogate them. Future astronaut Gordon Cooper claims he was there that day, involved with the tracking. (NICAP, “Edwards AFB Case”; “Unidentified Flying Object Filmed, Studied,” Miami (Fla.) News, May 12, 1957, p. 2; James E. McDonald, “Statement on Unidentified Flying Objects,” in Symposium on Unidentified Flying Objects, Hearings, US House Committee on Science and Astronautics, 90th Cong., 2nd Sess., July 29, 1968, pp. 75–76; Michael D. Swords, “As Great an Enigma As the UFOs Themselves,” IUR 30, no. 1 (October 2005): 10–12; Sparks, p. 243; “Astronaut Gordon Cooper Talks about UFOs,” Elhardt YouTube channel, December 27, 2007; Swords 247–248; Gordon Cooper and Bruce Henderson, Leap of Faith: An Astronaut’s Journey into the Unknown, HarperTorch, 2000, pp. 83–86; Good Need, pp. 220–222)
May 10 — After 10:45 p.m. At Beaucourt-sur-l’Ancre, Somme, France, a 29-year-old Hungarian refugee named Fekete is cycling when he is “dazzled by a strange projectile.” He sees four men 4–5 feet tall approaching him in a threatening manner. One of them carries a bright light which prevents him from seeing much detail. He flees on his cycle to a nearby home, where others look out and see the occupants 300 feet away. The UFO is emitting red and white (or yellow) rays of light alternatively. They watch for about 20 minutes until 11:15 p.m. when the UFO takes off at a 45° angle. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1957 March 23rd–May 25th, The Author, 1995, pp. 69–72)
May 11 — While attending the Giant Rock Interplanetary Spacecraft Convention in the Mojave Desert near Landers, California, Wayne Sulo Aho goes for a walk and sees a “majestic egg-shaped light.” He directs a telepathic message to it, and the UFO lands 2 miles away. He begins receiving subtle psychic messages on his earthly mission. That night, Aho undergoes a “cosmic initiation.” (Clark III 59; Wayne S. Aho, Mojave Desert Experience, May 11, 1957, New Age, 1972)
May 20? (or 1956?) — Near 12:00 midnight. USAF Lt. Milton Torres is flying F-86D Sabre fighters with the 406th Bomber Wing based at RAF Manston [now closed], Kent, England. He receives an order from an RAF controller, who is tracking an unidentified target from Kelvedon Hatch Secret Nuclear Bunker [now closed] in Essex, to go
up with a wingman to 32,000 feet over East Anglia in pursuit. Over the radio he receives an order to fire a salvo of rockets at the target; the order is so unusual that Torres seeks authentication before firing. Torres locates the large target on his aircraft radar, but when he closes in on it, it shoots away at tremendous speed, disappearing from the radar screens. The target might be explained by a secret CIA-MoD experiment, codenamed Palladium, to simulate an aircraft blip on Soviet radar screens. On his return to base, Torres is debriefed by a secret service agent and told his mission is top secret. (NICAP, “Milton Torres / Intercept Mission”; UFOFiles2, pp. 69–72; David Clarke, “Intercept and Destroy,” Fortean Times 242 (December 2008): 34–35; Paul Crickmore, “Project Palladium: Testing Soviet Radars,” Tails Through Time, January 3, 2011; Curt Collins, “Area 51, the CIA, and Cold War UFOS: T. D. Barnes,” Blue Blurry Lines, January 9, 2014)
May 26 — An article in the UK Empire News on “Flying Saucer Clubs Probe: Peace Messages ‘from Outer Space’” reveals that George King’s Aetherius Society has been publishing channeled messages in its Cosmic Voice newsletter that are antiwar and anti-nuclear. It attracts the attention of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch, thanks to an informant on the newspaper. King writes to explain that his group is religious and not political. A Special Branch officer visits King in his home in London, England, on May 31, and the group’s writings and activities are watched for at least the next two years. (Kremlin 121–126)
May 28 — Boltzmann, the first of 29 nuclear tests in Operation Plumbbob, takes place at the Nevada Test Site. At 12 kilotons, it is about the same size as the Hiroshima bomb and causes Area 51 personnel 11 miles away to be temporarily evacuated. Another test blast buckles aircraft hangar doors in Area 51, shatters windows in the mess hall, and breaks a dormitory ventilator panel. The Plumbbob tests continue until October 7, 1957. While
most tests contribute to the development of warheads for intercontinental and intermediate range missiles, they also test air defense and anti-submarine warheads with small yields. (Wikipedia, “Operation Plumbbob”)
May 31 — 7:17 a.m. A British airliner is flying over Kent, two miles south of Rochester, England, when both the captain and first officer see a brilliant light approaching them. All radio communications cut out. The UFO blinks out and the radio equipment goes back into operation. (Schopick, pp. 122–123; Good Above, p. 50)
June 3 — 9:35 p.m. Shortly after takeoff from Shreveport (Louisiana) Airport, Capt. Lynn Kern and Flight Officer Abbey Zimmerman, flying Trans-Texas Airlines Flight 103, are told by the control tower that a small light is visible nearby. They see the star-like, blue-green object at about 400 feet altitude. It then climbs rapidly to 1,000 feet and parallels the airliner at a higher altitude and about a half-mile away. Kern flashes his landing lights, and the object responds with a beam of light. A second blue-green, pulsating object joins the first on the opposite side of the airliner (then at 9,000 feet). A crew from the air tower confirms that it has both objects on radar and visually through binoculars. The objects head south, climbing to about 10,000 feet, and follow the airliner to Converse, Louisiana, where the pilot queries ADC radar site, England AFB [now Alexandria International Airport], which confirms the two targets in the airliner’s vicinity. The objects disappear from sight in a cloud deck to the southwest. (NICAP, “Flight 103 & 2 UFOs Tracked on Radar”; Sparks, p. 244; J. Allen Hynek, The UFO Experience, Ballantine ed., 1974, pp. 94–96)
June 5 — AEC Commissioner Willard Libby tells Congress that nuclear weapons testing is a “small risk” that must be measured against the “risk of annihilation.” (“Bomb Testing Is Viewed As Risk to Be Compared with Annihilation,” Spokane (Wash.) Chronicle, June 5, 1957, p. 2)
June 11 — CIA operative Wallace R. Lampshire sends a memo to CIA operative Richard M. Bissell Jr., explaining that the agency’s involvement with UFOs is passive, handing off reports to its geophysics or former weapons units. Lampshire has talked with Gen. Philip J. Strong, who knows of no Soviet technology that might be responsible for UFOs. (Swords 264–265)
June 15 — A report in the UK weekly newspaper Reynold’s News claims that the Air Ministry conducts top secret UFO research in Room 801 of one of its offices on Northumberland Avenue, London, England. A ministry spokesman is quoted as saying the room has “something like 10,000 sightings” on file and a large map of the British Isles with thousands of colored pins representing sightings. Flying Saucer Review editor Gordon Creighton says the office belongs to the Deputy Directorate of Intelligence (Technical), which employs UFO researchers full-time. (Good Above, p. 49)
June 15 — 5:06 p.m. George Marsden watches a Saturn-shaped UFO with portholes through a telescope at Mawdesley, Lancashire, England. (UFOEv, p. 146; Center for UFO Studies, [case documents])
June 18 — 8:00 p.m. Captain C. G. Wertz and the crew of the Matson freighter Hawaiian Fisherman see two brightly lit objects off the port beam as they are steaming 150 miles off San Francisco, California. A third object joins them at 8:15. They appear as small moons, giving off a cold, white, unchanging light. The three move off in a V formation and pace the ship for a short time. The lights continue their controlled flight as dusk turns to night. (Lorenzen, UFOs: The Whole Story, Signet, 1969, p. 78)
June 20 — Mysterious radar echoes begin turning up on Bluff Hill, near Invercargill, New Zealand, for several months. The targets are visible from several minutes up to an hour and are located somewhere in the ionosphere. Michael Gadsden of the Imperial College in London is in New Zealand for the International Geophysical Year and he says the targets’ movements are unusual and suspects that ionized particles are the cause. (Lorenzen, UFOs: The Whole Story, Signet, 1969, pp. 81–82)
Summer — P. Craig Phillips, curator of the Miami Seaquarium, and two other scientists witness a fall of angel hair for two hours as they are sailing northward toward the Florida Keys. Assuming them to be cobwebs from migrating airborne spiders, Phillips takes some samples and puts them in a mason jar. But when he uncaps the jar later in his office, no trace of the material is found, which is uncharacteristic of spider web. (UFOEv, pp. 99–100; Brian Boldman, “An Analysis of Angel Hair, 1947–2000,” IUR 26, no. 3 (Fall 2001): 15)
Summer — Early morning. Contactee Trevor Constable and an associate named James Woods take many infrared photos of the desert sky over southern California. When developed, the film reveals a variety of shapes from vague blobs and amoeba-like forms to clearly defined discs. Constable calls them “critters” and thinks they are some kind of life form invisible to the naked eye. (Clark III 1102; Trevor James [Constable], They Live in the Sky, New Age, 1958)
Summer — Allan Haney and some friends “on a number of occasions” climb onto someone’s roof in Levelland, Texas, to watch 3–4 objects hovering over Reese AFB [now Reese Technology Center] in Lubbock, 26 miles to the east. (Donald R. Burleson, “Levelland, Texas, 1957: Case Reopened,” IUR 28, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 5)
July — The Air Defense Command disbands the 4602nd AISS and reassigns UFO investigative duties to the 1127th Field Activities Group of the 1006th AISS at Norton AFB [San Bernardino International Airport], California. Soon afterwards, the Air Force reduces funds for the unit, impairing its investigative ability. (Clark III 919)
July — NICAP publishes the first issue of The UFO Investigator. (UFO Investigator 1, no. 1 (July 1957); Clark III 793)
July — NICAP learns that the US Senate Subcommittee on Investigations is considering hearings on UFOs and wants its assistance. Hillenkoetter suggests withholding the best cases, at least initially. Keyhoe asks Ruppelt, who is now an engineer with Northrup Aircraft, to join the NICAP board at a rehearsal for the I’ve Got a Secret Show on which he is appearing. Ruppelt considers it an honor. (Keyhoe, FSTS, pp. 70–79)
July 5 — During the 74-kiloton Plumbbob Hood nuclear test at the Nevada Test Site, the Marine Corps conducts a tactical maneuver involving the use of a helicopter airlift, tactical air support, and an amphibian tractor called the LVTP5. Despite the AEC’s assurance that no thermonuclear devices are being tested, Hood is thermonuclear and is the largest atmospheric test in the continental US. All Area 51 personnel are evacuated prior to the blast, but the military neglects to secure the sensitive information in the buildings with security guards. Seventy anesthetized Chester White pigs in military uniforms (as test fabrics) are placed in cages a short distance from ground zero.
Several types of wood houses are constructed to see how each handles the blast. The Mosler Safe Company sponsors the construction of a steel vault to withstand the blast. Some 100 soldiers, lying in trenches, are stationed to gauge the psychological impact of the bomb. The flash is visible from Canada to Mexico and 800 miles out in the Pacific. The blast wave reaches Los Angeles 25 minutes later. Afterwards, security guard Richard Mingus has to drive through a highly radioactive ground zero to reach the buildings at Area 51 ten miles away. Area 51 remains an evacuated ghost town until the summer of 1959. (Wikipedia, “Desert Rock exercises”; Jacobsen, Area 51, pp. 119–123)
July 10 — George Hunt Williamson, exploring in Peru from his base at the Monastery of the Seven Rays and spurred by his own channelings, rediscovers a wall of petroglyphs [now known as the Petroglyphs of Pusharo, in the Manú National Park] in an area northeast of Cuzco called Cadena del Pantiacolla. (George Hunt Williamson, “Project Scroll,” Flying Saucer Review 3, no. 6 (Nov./Dec. 1957): 18–19; George Hunt Williamson, Road in the Sky, Neville Spearman, 1959; Brother Philip [Williamson], Secret of the Andes, Neville Spearman, 1961; Zirger and Martinelli, The Incredible Life of George Hunt Williamson, Verdechiari, 2016, pp. 97–98, 109–115)
Mid-July — Keyhoe meets with US Rep. James C. Healey (D-N.Y.) regarding USAF secrecy about UFOs. He shows Healey the 1949 Grudge report and apparently convinces him that the Air Force’s explanations for the 24 cases are “sheer speculation” or “deliberately fitted.” He also presents him Gen. Joe W. Kelly’s April 8 letter to Lee Metcalf, indicating serious interest in UFOs. (Keyhoe, FSTS, pp. 81–82, 91, 96)
July 16 — 1:56 p.m. 1st Lt. Clifford E. Pocock, scope operator A2C Walter Lyons, and control technician A1C Armand Therrien at Las Vegas Air Force Station [now closed] at Angel Peak, Nevada, are using the FPS-3A L-band search radar and track an inbound target at about 6,200 mph when it “stopped abruptly” and “remained stationary” for 12 seconds to the east-northeast 85 miles away to the north of Grand Canyon in Arizona. Then it heads outbound at about 7,000 mph before disappearing at the radar’s maximum range at 224 miles (near Marble
Canyon, Arizona). The target responds to encrypted military IFF transponder signals and transmits encrypted responses. (NICAP, “6200 MPH Target Hovers near Grand Canyon”; Sparks, p. 244)
July 17 — Before dawn. The crew of a USAF RB-47 reconnaissance aircraft is flying out of Forbes Field [now Topeka Regional Airport], Kansas, on an electronic warfare training flight over Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. The RB-47 is carrying a 6-man crew, of whom three are electronic warfare officers manning ECM gear in the aft portion of the aircraft. Their names are Lewis Dormon Chase, pilot; James H. McCoid, copilot; Thomas H. Hanley, navigator; John J. Provenzano, No. 1 monitor; Frank B. McClure, No. 2 monitor; and Walter A. Tuchscherer, No. 3 monitor. The crew detects on its Electronic Intelligence (ELINT) equipment an airborne radar source that mimics some but not all of the signal characteristics of a common air defense ground radar. Aircraft normally do not carry such high-powered radars. As the key ELINT officer on the RB-47 puts it, “an antenna bigger than the airplane” would be required to emit as strong a signal as he detected from the UFO. Because the UFO signal appears to have comparable or greater received signal strength than the one-megawatt ground radar beam and the UFOs distance is about 5 times closer than the ground radar, a crude estimate of the UFO radar power output using the inverse-square law would be about 40 kilowatts. The maneuvering radar signal coincides in location with a bright UFO. At times the signal moves ahead of the RB-47, then circles around as if airborne, highly maneuverable, and flying faster than the RB-47. The 55th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing Intelligence report states that the Wing’s director of intelligence “has no doubt the electronic D/F’s coincided exactly with visual observations by a/c numerous times thus indicating positively the object being the signal source.” An air defense radar station near Dallas, Texas, reportedly confirms tracking a UFO at the same location reported by the RB-47 crew but later tries to deny it in an unclassified message to ATIC. The UFO is reportedly tracked by the RB-47’s airborne navigation radar as well, though the crew has differing recollections on this point. Twice the UFO blinks out visually when pursued by the RB-47. At the same time the strange signal disappears, either that, or the ground radar site and the RB-47 onboard radar loses the object from their scopes. At least once, the UFO suddenly reappears visually at about the same time the ground radar regains tracking of the object. The main part of the incident occupies 30 minutes over the Fort Worth, Texas, area from 5:30–6:00 a.m. Some earlier ELINT and visual incidents are noted as early as about 4:30 a.m., but they catch the crew off guard, and consequently reports at the time and later recollections have had to be carefully reconstructed. The UFO may have trailed the RB-47 up to 6:40 a.m. following the main events, for a total duration of possibly more than 126 minutes. The RB
-47 incident is the first conclusive instrumented proof for the existence of UFOs. Calibrations of the RB-47’s electronic measurements provide an irrefutable case. When the Colorado Project scientists asked the Air Force for the Blue Book file on the RB-47 case, the file could not be found. Ultimately, the case was put together by better file searching at Blue Book, James E. McDonald’s success at locating several crew members and interviewing them, and FOIA searches that located more of the lost documents. Particularly in the George T. Gregory years at ATIC, this sort of rejection of the need to clarify almost any significant aspect of a UFO case was constant. If we did not know, from our earlier information, what Captain Gregory understood to be his duty as chief of Blue Book, we would label this as reckless and incompetent. Colorado project investigator Gordon Thayer declares the case unexplained, and later describes the official USAF explanation (airliner) as “literally ridiculous.” Brad Sparks sums it up in 1998 (and in 2018): “This case certainly now ranks as among the best documented unexplained UFO incidents in history, and it has the potential for further revealing disclosures if records of an extremely highly classified investigation can be found and released. All of the UFO observations by multiple visual observers, multiple ELINT receivers, and multiple radar sets, as well as the serendipitous calibrations of the UFO signals against the separately identifiable Duncanville radar signals, provide a unique, tight, interlocking web of intricately fitted evidence.” (NICAP, “RB-47 Incident”; Sparks, p. 244; Condon, pp. 56, 136–139, 260– 266; James E. McDonald, “The 1957 Gulf Coast RB-47 Incident,” Flying Saucer Review 16, no. 3 (May/June 1970): 2–6; Gert Herb, “A Rebuttal to Philip J. Klass’s Analysis of the RB-47 Incident of July 17, 1957,” CUFOS Bulletin, Summer 1977, pp. 3–10; Philip J. Klass, [response to Gert Herb], CUFOS Bulletin, Fall 1977, pp. 7–10; Gert Herb, “Gert Herb Replies,” CUFOS Bulletin, Fall 1977, pp. 9–10; Swords 248–249; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1957 May 24th–July 31st, The Author, 1996, pp. 64–71; Center for UFO Studies, [case interviews]; Center for UFO Studies, [case documents]; Center for UFO Studies, [more case documents]; UFOs Yes, 126–127; Clark III 953–999)
July 17 — Flight 655 en route from Dallas to Los Angeles, piloted by Capt. Ed Bachner, has a near collision with an object “at least the size of a B-47” over the salt flats some 100 miles east of El Paso, Texas. Bachner puts the plane into a dive and the object passes only 50 feet above them. Two passengers suffer slight injuries and are taken to the hospital on landing. No known aircraft are in the vicinity. (Lorenzen, UFOs: The Whole Story, Signet, 1969, p. 79; Good Above, p. 283)
July 18 — 10:46 p.m. Capt. Claiborne F. Bickham and a radar crew at Mount Lemmon Air Force Station [now closed] northeast of Tucson, Arizona, using both MPS-7 L-band search and MPS-14 S-band height-finder radars, track a stationary target at 42,000 feet to the northwest about 82 miles away south of Chandler. The target responds to encrypted military IFF Mode 3 transponder signals and transmits encrypted responses that result in “normal Mode 3 paint” on radar scopes. A very slight strobe comes from the object that appears like ECM jamming. (NICAP, “Ground Radar Track Responds to IFF Mode 3”; Sparks, p. 245)
July 19 — The Plumbbob John nuclear test at Yucca Flats, Nevada, is the only test of the Air Force’s AIR-2 Genie missile with a nuclear warhead. On the ground, the Air Force carries out a public relations event by having five Air Force officers and a videographer stand under ground zero of the blast, which takes place at between 18,500 and 20,000 feet altitude, with the idea of demonstrating the possibility of the use of the weapon over civilian populations without ill effects. (Wikipedia, “Operation Plumbbob”)
July 22 — Night. Capt. G. M. Schemel, the pilot of a TWA Constellation aircraft, is flying at 18,000 feet near Amarillo, Texas, when a big red and green light bears down on his plane in a collision course. He puts the aircraft into a dive and the object passes above him. Schemel has to make an unscheduled landing at Amarillo to hospitalize one passenger who is injured during the maneuver. (“Kenosha Pilot Tells of Mysterious Object,” Kenosha (Wis.) News, July 24, 1957, p. 1)
July 24 — Russian antiaircraft batteries on the Kuril Islands, Sakhalin Oblast, Russia, in the Pacific Ocean open fire on luminous, fast-moving UFOs. No hits are made. The US claims it has no aircraft in the area. However, at 10:00 a.m., two USAF pilots flying F-86s are scrambled to intercept a disc-shaped object over the Nemuro Strait, north of Hokkaido, Japan, that is tracked by ground radar and seen by ground witnesses. (Keyhoe, Aliens from Space, Signet ed., 1974, p. 42; Sparks, p. 245)
July 24 — White Sands Missile Flight Safety Director Nathan Wagner is driving with his wife Alma south of Las Cruces, New Mexico, when they see a large, fast object at high altitude moving east toward the Organ Mountains. They watch it for 30 seconds until it disappears. (“Space Vehicles Sighted?” El Paso (Tex.) Times, July 30, 1957, p. 1; NICAP, “Missile Safety Chief Says Object Unknown”)
July 25 — 4:00 a.m. Several workers are taking a break at the Daye Steel Plant in Huangshi, Hubei, China, when they hear a humming sound. They notice a bright spot in the clear sky that is increasing in apparent size. As it comes closer, it is seen as a circular plate giving off a dazzling white light and leaving a white trail. It flies above the observers at an altitude of 3,300 feet and produces a whistling sound that is louder than a jet. As the object approaches the witnesses, the low pitch changes to a high pitch. (Wendelle Stevens and Paul Dong, UFOs over Modern China, UFO Photo Archives, 1983)
July 28 — A Douglas Aircraft Company employee named Edward K. Current Jr. makes an emergency landing on the former U-2 airstrip at Groom Lake, Nevada. He claims he has been on a cross-country training flight when he became lost and ran low on fuel. The area is still evacuated for nuclear testing. (Jacobsen, Area 51, pp. 125–126; T. D. Barnes, “False Emergency Landings at Groom Lake,” Roadrunners Internationale, November 22, 2021)
July 30 — 10:30 a.m. Jack Stephenson is walking his dog four miles south of Galt, Ontario, when he sees an aluminum- colored object with a dome. It circles, stops, and hovers, then lands in a gulley surrounded by woods. He watches it for 45 minutes as it hovers about 2 feet off the ground. It finally takes off at a 45° angle to avoid a power line, then shoots away. Local residents examine the area and find burned patches on the ground and small tree limbs that are broken. There are four burned or charred areas, each about 1 foot 3 inches in diameter, forming a four- sided figure with these measurements: 20 feet x 20 feet x 6.5 feet x 11.5 feet. Two large three-toed prints are also found, but the relationship of the prints to the object is unknown. (“Boy Reports ‘Saucer,’” Brantford (Ont.) Expositor, August 3, 1957, p. 1; “Says He Saw Flying Saucer for 45 Minutes,” Milk River (Alberta) Review, August 25, 1957; Donald E. Keyhoe and Gordon I. R. Lore Jr., Strange Effects from UFOs, NICAP, 1969, pp.
51–53)
August — Radar technician Edward Lovick Jr. begins work at Lockheed’s secret Advanced Development Projects facility (the Skunk Works) in Burbank, California. His first assignment is to investigate radar-deflecting technology for the U-2 aircraft. (Jacobsen, Area 51, pp. 126–127)
August — Night. A young woman is driving home after work in Peru, Indiana, and notices people standing along the road looking at the sky. She stops, and they point to a large black object hovering above some nearby trees at about 100 feet. It is about 1,000 feet long and has a “soft delta” shape with rounded corners and window-like lighted areas underneath. There seems to be movement within the lighted areas. In the middle of the bottom is a round area that looks like it might be the outline of an entryway. It moves slowly away, making a noise like a quiet vacuum cleaner. (Michael D. Swords, “Timmerman’s Triangles,” IUR 29, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 16)
August 1 — The North American Air Defense Command is announced by the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. (Wikipedia, “North American Aerospace Defense Command”)
August 3 — 7:45 p.m. 1st Lt. Robert J. Springer Jr., T/Sgt. Herman L. Giles, and 16 other air crewmen, while on routine Airborne Operations Center radar early warning patrol over the Pacific Ocean about 175 miles southwest of San Francisco, California, aboard an RC-121D aircraft, detect a radar target on IFF Mode 2 transponder only. At 7:56 p.m., the IFF target becomes a direct radar “skinpaint.” At 8:02 p.m., the IFF equipment APX-6/APX-7 is turned off, but the target is still tracked on airborne radar. At 8:15 p.m., the target is at a 2 o’clock position 10 miles away when the aircraft starts a right turn to reverse course, putting the target dead ahead. It suddenly takes off to the northwest at very high speed, disappearing 58 miles away. Radar contact is regained at 8:18 p.m. as the target is tracked moving right to left, crossing in front of the aircraft again, and closing distance to 8 miles at 11 o’clock. At 8:20 p.m., the target turns to head on a parallel path. The crew loses contact at 8:24 p.m., 15 miles behind the plane. No visual confirmation. (NICAP, “RC-121D Has IFF Radar Targets”; Sparks, p. 246)
August 4 — An Italian Air Force noncommissioned officer on duty in the control tower at Naples International Airport, Italy, and about 30 other witnesses see a number of luminous, disc-shaped objects passing above them. (Lorenzen, UFOs: The Whole Story, Signet, 1969, p. 80)
August 5 — 10:00 p.m. Policeman Ernst W. Akerberg and his wife Karin are at their summer cottage on the island of Gotland, Sweden, in the Baltic Sea when they see a disc-shaped object heading toward them from the sea. When it reaches the shore about 600 feet away, the object changes course and executes a sharp turn at less than 90° of arc and turns on its edge, swaying briefly. The disc moves toward the southeast and makes another sharp turn just over a half-mile away, again turning on its edge and fluttering before passing out of view. A second, smaller object approaches and goes through the same maneuvers. Air currents from both objects make the water surface ripple and the treetops swing. Estimated to be about 80 feet in diameter, the objects seem to be made of shining metal, and the upper part rotates slowly over the lower part. Both objects have a kind of tube with two red lights. They are silent except for a hollow clicking sound. (Story, pp. 152–153; Clas Svahn, “1957 Diskusarna svängde framför polismannen,” Riksorganisationen UFO-Sverige)
August 14 — 8:55 p.m. Varig Airlines pilot Capt. Jorgé Campos Araujo and First Officer Edgar Onofre Soares observe a domed disc pacing their C-47 cargo plane at 6,300 feet over Joinville, Santa Catarina, Brazil. The UFO speeds up and crosses just in front of them, hovers briefly, then dives into the undercast at 5,700 feet. When the object hovers, it affects the engines, which cough and wheeze, and dims the cabin lights. (UFOEv, p. 120; Olavo T. Fontes, “Top Secret Report Unveiled,” APRO Bulletin, September 1959, pp. 1, 5; Schopick, pp. 123–127; Loren
E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1957 August–September, Supplemental Notes,
The Author, 2003, pp. 11–13; Lorenzen, FS Hoax, pp. 153–155)
August 20 — 11:28 a.m. Shinichi Takeda takes a photo of a silvery disc near Enoshima Beach, Kanagawa, Japan. The object is also seen by his sister, who calls his attention to it. It gives off a brilliant glow at an estimated altitude of 3,000–4,000 feet, traveling north to south. The object makes a 90° left turn, speeds up, and disappears in the clouds. The photo shows capsule-shaped image near bank of cumulus clouds. A few minutes later, 15 people on the beach report a similar object that passes over at high speed. (NICAP, “Capsule-Shaped Object in Clouds / Takeda Photo”)
August 20 or 22 — A member of the Argentine Air Force guarding a downed aircraft is in a tent near Quilinos, Córdoba, Argentina, when he hears a high-pitched hum. Dashing out, he sees a disc slowly descending, making the grass and plants flutter wildly. Reaching for his revolver, he feels that something is preventing him from drawing his weapon, which seems glued in his holster. A voice from the disc tells him in Spanish that spacecraft have a base in the Salta region and that they are here to warn about nuclear energy. The craft rises vertically and speeds off to the north. Probable hoax. (“UFO Bases in South America?” Flying Saucer Review 11, no. 4 (July/Aug. 1965): 30– 31; Patrick Gross, URECAT, December 8, 2006)
August 22 — 3:40 p.m. A couple named Sheetz in a car at Naval Air Station Cecil [now Cecil Airport] in Jacksonville, Florida, chase a 50-foot, black, rotating, bell-shaped object bearing two bright white lights at the top. Their engine stalls when object hovers 10 feet away. Its underside resembles a disc with fins. When a jet takes off from the airfield, the object goes out of sight almost instantly. The car battery is completely dead. Noise from the object is compared to a helicopter, although there are no helicopters in the area. (NICAP, “Car Chases Bell-Shaped Object, Engine Stalls”; Mark Rodeghier, UFO Reports Involving Vehicle Interference, CUFOS, 1981, p. 7)
August 27 — Russia makes the first successful long flight of an ICBM, the R-7 Semyorka, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The dummy warhead lands in the Pacific Ocean. (Wikipedia, “R-7 Semyorka”)
August 30 — Night. A Capital Airlines pilot is flying a Viscount at 12,000 feet approaching Norfolk, Virginia, with a Northeast Airlines DC-6 directly above on the same heading at 20,000 feet. The Viscount pilot sees a brilliant object that “flew fast and then abruptly halted 20 miles in front of us at 60,000 feet altitude.” The Northeast pilot
tries to acquire the object on radar. With the antenna at 0° elevation, nothing is detected, but with the antenna elevated to 15° he acquires “an excellent blip right where I told him to look for the object.” According to the Viscount pilot, the object “dissolved right in front of my eyes, and the crew above lost it from the scope at the same time. They said it just faded away.” The entire incident lasts several minutes. (NICAP, “Two Aircraft Observe Object / Excellent Blip on Radar”; Condon, pp. 128–129)
August 31 — After nuclear test Plumbbob Smokey, Army troops conduct an airlift assault. (Wikipedia, “Desert Rock exercises”)
August 31 — Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.) sends a letter to a constituent about UFOs, saying, “I, frankly, feel that there is a great deal to this.” (UFOEv, p. 173)
September — Soviet defector Nikolai Khokhlov suffers a sudden and severe illness while attending an anti-Communist meeting in Frankfurt, Germany. He is treated for thallium poisoning and survives. This case is often claimed to be the first radiological attack by the KGB, especially when compared to the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in 2006, although it remains unclear what isotope was used, if any. Former KGB officer Stanislav Lekarev claims, however, that Khokhlov is poisoned by radioactive polonium (not thallium), exactly as Litvinenko is later.
Litvinenko’s poisoning is also initially mistaken for thallium. A unique mechanism for administering poison is described by a knowledgeable source at the time as a pneumatically operated poison ice “atomizer” that leaves no wound or other evidence of the cause of death. (Wikipedia, “Nikolai Khokhlov”; Andy Wright, “The Russian Spy Who Convinced America to Take ESP Seriously,” Atlas Obscura, January 13, 2017; Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB, Basic Books, 1999; David Kurlander, “Ending in a Fall: America’s Response to the Poisoning of Soviet Defector Nikolai Khokhlov,” Café, September 3, 2020)
Early September — Several people fishing near Ubatuba, São Paulo, Brazil, watch a disc dive down from the sky and explode, showering the area with flaming fragments. One of the witnesses writes an anonymous letter and sends three pieces to O Globo, but no witnesses to the event have ever come forward. APRO representative Olavo T. Fontes examines the fragments, which are dull gray, irregular, and strongly oxidized. One sample is shot through with microscopic cracks and shows a fissure running through two-thirds of its length. All three have whitish smears of a powdery substance like cinders. Fontes takes one sample to the Mineral Production Laboratory of the Ministry of Agriculture for analysis, which shows it to be “magnesium of a high degree of purity.” Chemist Luisa Maria A. Barbosa, who conducts a spectrographic analysis, says that not even trace elements are apparent. Fontes also has it analyzed by chemist Elson Teixeira and the Brazilian Army. The Laboratory of Crystallography conducts some X-ray diffraction work. All conclude that the material is pure magnesium, while one gives it a density of 1.866 (normal magnesium is 1.741). APRO sends a second fragment to the US Air Force, which accidentally destroys it. The third sample is sent to the Colorado Project in February 1968. Roy Craig runs tests on it at the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax Division of the IRS in Washington and Dow Chemical’s Metallurgical Laboratory. Both determine that the level of purity is not as high as was determined in 1957 (although this is now seen as a major misrepresentation of the actual results). APRO does two further tests with University of Arizona metallurgical engineer Walter A. Walker and Robert W. Johnson of the Materials Research Corporation at Orangeburg, New Jersey. Walker and Johnson both find that the sample “had undergone a directional crystal growth type of manufacture.” Walker concludes that the material was likely exposed to the earth’s atmosphere at elevated temperatures. Researchers Brad Sparks and Michael Swords examine Roy Craig’s archived original notes from the Colorado Project and find that the team had covered up the fact that an abnormal concentration of magnesium isotope Mg-26 had indeed been found and knowingly misrepresented the sample to APRO as “essentially the same as terrestrial magnesium,” blaming them for cherry-picking the Brazilian lab results. Peter
A. Sturrock acquires the remnant of the samples from APRO and performs further analysis on two of them in 1997. In 2018, Michael Swords and Robert Powell borrow one Ubatuba sample from Sturrock and arrange for further tests at an accredited lab, finding variations well outside the normal range for magnesium, strontium, copper, and barium. (NICAP, “The Ubatuba Incident”; “Physical Evidence,” APRO Bulletin, March 1960, pp. 1, 3; Olavo T. Fontes, “A Report on the Investigation of Magnesium Samples from a UFO Explosion over the Sea in the Ubatuba Region of Brazil,” 1962; Lorenzen, FS Hoax, pp. 104–145; Lorenzen, UFOs: The Whole Story, Signet, 1969, pp. 212–216; Condon, pp. 94–97, 257–260; Michael D. Swords, “Analysis of Alleged Fragments from an Exploding UFO near Ubatuba, Brazil: An Introduction,” JUFOS 4 (1992): 1–5; Walter W. Walker and Robert W. Johnson, “Further Studies on the Ubatuba UFO Magnesium Samples,” JUFOS 4 (1992): 6–25; Walter
W. Walker, “Scientific Studies of the Ubatuba Magnesium Fragments: A 1992 Perspective,” JUFOS 4 (1992): 26–37; Peter A. Sturrock, “Letter: Ubatuba,” IUR 18, no. 2 (March/April 1993): 19; Paul R. Hill, Unconventional Flying Objects: A Scientific Analysis, Hampton Roads, 1995, pp. 226–234; Peter A. Sturrock, “Composition
Analysis of the Brazil Magnesium,” Journal of Scientific Exploration 15, no. 1 (2001): 69–95; Pierre Kaufmann and Peter A. Sturrock, “On Events Possibly Related to the ‘Brazil Magnesium,’” Journal of Scientific Exploration 18, no. 2 (2004): 283–291; Clark III 1143–1155; Brazil 510–517; Robert M. Powell, Michael D. Swords, Mark Rodeghier, and Phyllis Budinger, “Isotope Ratios and Chemical Analysis of the 1957 Brazilian Ubatuba Fragment,” Journal of Scientific Exploration 36, no. 1 (Spring 2022): 39–48)
September — 3:00 p.m. Hélio Penteado and his foreman Zaca Sabiá are repairing a fence on Penteado’s farm in Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil, when Sabiá’s dog begins growling at something in the mint field. They hear a loud, irritating sound and see a disc about 50 feet wide landing in the field and supported by three legs with spheres on the end that pierce the ground. Penteado goes closer to investigate and sees two beings about 4 feet tall leave the UFO wearing green coveralls. They seem to float along the ground and take a vessel from under the craft. One of them is carrying something like a gun or flamethrower. They pass through a fence on the way to a river. After 10 minutes the beings return with the vessel apparently full of river water. The entity with the flamethrower shoots it at a jacaranda tree and a eucalyptus tree, damaging their trunks. They reenter the object via the dome, which takes off toward the city. Back at his barn, Penteado notices that all his metallic tools are stacked in a cone, the birds are dead, his monkey is agitated, and his watch has stopped working. The same day, people observe a UFO over a hospital on the Avenida Julio Mesqita, where the object dumps two drops of liquid metal that falls in the street.
The UFO goes so low that it hits the corner of a parked truck. An analysis of the metal by an unnamed organization (possibly the Brazilian Air Force) shows that the metal is high in magnesium. Penteado later goes to the landing site and takes plaster casts of the footprints, which he sends to the Agronomy Institute of Campinas. (“Caso do disco proximo de Campinas,” Boletim SBEDV, no. 14 (March 1, 1960): 1–3; Brazil 35–37)
September 2 — After the Plumbbob Galileo nuclear shot at the Nevada Test Site, Army troops are tested to determine their psychological reactions to witnessing the nuclear detonation. (Wikipedia, “Desert Rock exercises”)
September 4 — Four Portuguese jet fighter-bombers under the command of Capt. José Lemos Ferreira are flying at night at 24,600 feet between Ota, Portugal, and Granada, Spain. Near Granada they turn to head to Portalegre, Portugal. At this point, Ferreira notices a UFO like a bright star with a scintillating, colored nucleus that changes from deep green to blue. The object suddenly grows to 5 or 6 times its original size, then shrinks to a barely visible yellow point. These changes repeat several times, possibly due to changes in position. The UFO maintains its position 90° to the left of the squadron. Suddenly a small circle of yellow light emerges from the object and three smaller yellow objects appear, maneuver, then disappear. (NICAP, “Portuguese Air Force Jets Have 40-Min. Encounter / E-M”; Marciano Alves, “Air Force Pilots Spend 40 Minutes with Saucers,” Flying Saucer Review 4, no. 3 (May/June 1958): 2–3; Good Above, pp. 147–148; Kean, p. 50)
September 12 — NORAD’s command headquarters is established at Ent Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Canada and the United States agree that the NORAD commander will always be a US officer, with a Canadian vice commander, and Canada “agreed the command’s primary purpose would be…early warning and defense for SAC’s retaliatory forces.” Every continental US military radar UFO case in the Blue Book files from now on is a NORAD case because the subordinate USAF Air Defense Command belongs to NORAD. (Clark III 801; Wikipedia, “North American Aerospace Defense Command”)
September 16 — ATIC briefs Howard P. Robertson, now chairman of the Defense Science Board, on Project Blue Book, presumably because he wants to find out how the Air Force is implementing the recommendations of the 1953 Robertson Panel. The briefing book (including Special Report no. 14 as well as reports on Keyhoe and the UFO movie) is delivered by the Pentagon’s Maj. James F. Byrne. (Swords 265–266)
September 19 — The Plumbbob Rainier nuclear shot at the Nevada Test Site is the first fully contained underground nuclear test, meaning that no fission products are vented into the atmosphere. This test of 1.7 kilotons can be detected around the world by seismologists using ordinary seismic instruments. (Wikipedia, “Operation Plumbbob”)
September 20 — 3:05 p.m. A national defense alert is called when the first of two or three supersonic objects, varying in speed for the next 30 minutes from 800 to 12,000 mph and varying in altitude from 50,000 to 135,000 feet, is picked up over the Atlantic by NORAD radar at Montauk, New York. A second (or same) UFO heads straight toward SAC headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska, in what is perceived as a threat trajectory potentially aiming for a nuclear knockout kill of the entire US nuclear force. At 3:10 p.m., interception is attempted by two F-102 jets from Kinross AFB [now Chippewa County International Airport] south of Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, and later from Truax AFB [now Truax Field Air National Guard Base] northeast of Madison, Wisconsin. At 3:24 p.m., another UFO joins the first on a similar trajectory 150 miles behind. It passes over Ontario, Michigan, Illinois, and Iowa. The UFO sends radio replies to IFF interrogation signals, on different frequencies, confirming its location on the radar plots and making it impossible to explain as a malfunction or interference. Interception is impossible at these speeds and altitudes. SAC goes on high alert and apparently launches nuclear bombers toward
Russia, but the alert is called off when the UFOs disappear. NORAD triggers a White House alert. High-level meetings of CIA and USAF intelligence, and the Intelligence Advisory Committee meet in executive session. The CIA Director of the Office of Scientific Intelligence, Herbert Scoville Jr., suggests that the object might be a maneuverable Soviet cruise missile, but that is not yet in the Soviet inventory. President Eisenhower is briefed multiple times. One year later, NORAD still cannot identify any malfunction that could possibly make the radar targets agree with the IFF signals. (NICAP, “Multiple Radars Track 4,500 MPH Target”; Clark III 802–804, 814– 824; Sparks, pp. 249–250; Swords 266–267)
September 29 — 4:20 p.m. A nuclear waste storage tank explodes spontaneously at the Mayak plutonium production site (Chelyabinsk-40) for nuclear weapons and fuel reprocessing at Ozyorsk, Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russia. It launches a kilometer-tall pillar of dust and smoke into the sky. Gray radioactive ash and debris settles over the industrial zone. There are no immediate fatalities, though up to 200+ additional cancer deaths perhaps ensue from the radioactive contamination of some 20,000 square miles; 270,000 people are exposed to dangerous radiation levels. Over 30 small communities are removed from Soviet maps between 1958 and 1991. (Wikipedia, “Kyshtym disaster”)
October — Leonard H. Stringfield privately publishes Inside Saucer Post…3-0 Blue that summarizes his early years as a UFO investigator and as director of Civilian Research, Interplanetary Flying Objects. (Leonard H. Stringfield, Inside Saucer Post…3-0 Blue, The Author, 1957)
October — 10:00 p.m. Mrs. James Masterson and her sister Bernice Childers while driving see a reddish-orange disc, 30 feet in diameter, just above the treetops in Allen Park, Michigan. They chase it for a block or two before it streaks off. One of the women sees two figures wearing white Navy uniforms in a window on the lower section. (Center for UFO Studies, HUMCAT Index 1957, p. 17; Clark III 268)
October 4 — The USSR launches the first artificial earth satellite, Sputnik 1, which transmits radio pulses for 21 days. Some 4% of Americans claim to have seen Sputnik in orbit. However, what most are actually seeing is the 100- foot-long R-7 rocket core stage, outfitted with reflective panels that make it a first magnitude object, trailing 600 miles behind the 22-inch satellite until October 26 when the batteries run out. The satellite is barely visible at sixth magnitude. (Wikipedia, “Sputnik 1”; Walter N. Webb, “Allen Hynek As I Knew Him,” IUR 18, no. 1 (Jan./Feb. 1993): 7)
October 4 — 10:00 a.m. A tadpole-like UFO is seen at Ichinoseki, Iwate Prefecture, Japan. Afterwards, material like spider web falls in great profusion around Saguramachi Middle School for about 2 hours. Chemical analysis reveals that it is organic, dissolvable in hydrochloric acid, and burns. The crystal structure is different from spider web. (“Angel Hair,” Flying Saucer Review 4, no. 1 (Jan./Feb. 1958): 21; Robert N. Webster, “Things That Fall from UFO’s,” Fate 11, no. 10 (October 1958): 26; George M. Eberhart, “Postcards with a UFO Theme,” IUR 29, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 21; Brian Boldman, “Angel Hair Physical Analyses: A Review,” JUFOS 9 (2006): 103;
Clark III 124–125)
October 5 — 11:00 p.m. Antonio Villas-Boas gets up from bed on his family’s farm near São Francisco de Sales, Minas Gerais, Brazil, to open a window and notices a silvery reflection over the corral. After a short time, it moves towards the window. He and his brother watch as an object approaches and lights up the room. It disappears. (Clark III 1226)
October 6 — 4:15 p.m. Amateur astronomer Earl Sydow spots a bright object with the magnitude of the planet Venus through his telescope over Tucson, Arizona. Six other observers also watch the object, which measures approximately 3 minutes in diameter along its major axis and 1 minute along its minor axis. Smaller flat-white or silver-white objects, as many as 6–10, seem to emerge from the primary object as observations continue. The smaller objects are apparently short traces of light at some times and semi-wedge-shaped at other times. The smaller objects disappear from the field of the telescope until only the original object is visible, and it disappears as if moving directly away. (Lorenzen, UFOs: The Whole Story, Signet, 1969, p. 80)
October 8 — Day. Four Fijians in a punt with an outboard motor off Nabouwalu, Viti Levu, Fiji, see a white, circular object, which is hovering about 20 feet above the ocean. They approach it. It appears to be revolving, and they can see the figure of a man standing on the outside. The figure shines a blinding light at their boat, which makes them feel dazed and weak. As they draw closer, the figure disappears and the object rises rapidly upward, disappearing straight up. R. O. Aveling, an official of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, sees a similar object at the same time but at a different location. It is hovering at about 5,000 feet and swinging in a balloon-like fashion. Its color varies from bright white to deep, flashing red. (“Fiji Reports Sighting Object Like Texas Saucer,” Honolulu (Hawaii) Advertiser, November 5, 1957, p. 1; “Strange Object Seen in South Pacific Skies,” Long Beach (Calif.) Press- Telegram, November 5, 1957, p. 3; Lorenzen, UFOs: The Whole Story, Signet, 1969, p. 81; Loren E. Gross, The
Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History, 1957, October 1st–November 2nd, The Author, 1997, p. 19; Patrick Gross, URECAT, February 16, 2007)
October 9 — Evening. Fire ignites Windscale Pile Number One, an air-cooled, graphite-moderated, uranium-fueled reactor used for plutonium and isotope production at the Windscale facility [now Sellafield] in Cumbria, England. It burns for three days, and there is a release of radioactive iodine that spreads across the UK, contaminating surrounding dairy farms, as well as the rest of Europe. (Wikipedia, “Windscale fire”)
October 9 — Night. Radio station CKOV in Kelowna, British Columbia, after reports on Sputnik, rebroadcasts Orson Welles’s 1938 War of the Worlds radio drama. Some 60 phone calls come in from listeners who think that Russians have landed in North America. (“Welles, ‘Moon,’ Terrify Town,” Windsor (Ont.) Star, October 10, 1957, p. 28)
October 9 — 7:24 p.m. The tower operator at Naval Air Station South Weymouth [now the Shea Field Naval Aviation Historical Museum], Massachusetts, sights a constant, conical, greenish-blue object with a phosphorescent glow through binoculars. In sight approximately 90 seconds, the observer sees no navigation lights. It is traveling faster than a jet plane on a track from northeast to south-southwest. The object comes out of the horizon and toward the end of its path makes three “crazy” gyrations then vanishes, possibly behind cloud cover. The object has no trail like a meteor. (Walter N. Webb, “Allen Hynek As I Knew Him,” IUR 18, no. 1 (Jan./Feb. 1993): 7)
October 10 — 4:00 a.m. A huge fireball plunges from the sky near Myton, Utah, just missing a US Navy DC-6 transport plane out of NAS Alameda [now closed], California, with 36 persons aboard. Pilot Lt. Cmdr. W. F. Norris reports the incident to Salt Lake City Airport. (“Big Fireball Perils Plane,” Oakland (Calif.) Tribune, October 10, 1957, p. 1)
October 10 — The coffee truck driven by Miguel Espanhol Navarrete and his driver stalls northwest of Ceres near Quebra Coco, Goiás, Brazil, as a UFO lands nearby. They see an intense light as they begin a steep ascent, and then realize that the flying object appears to be more than 600 feet long. It lights up the entire area, even though it is gliding at a great height. The driver panics and tries to speed away, but the truck’s engine stalls as the object approaches and flies over the vehicle about 130 feet away. The object is about 3 feet in diameter by 40 inches high and is unevenly oval, with the upper section greater than the lower section. It looks like two superimposed plates separated by a strip 65 feet thick. When it is at an altitude of 20 feet, the UFO stops in the air and its light goes out. It lands, a door opens, and seven apparently human people come out dressed in luminous suits. Then the crew reenters the UFO and takes off, stopping at about 1,650 feet altitude. At that moment a smaller object detaches itself from the larger one and flies north. The larger object follows in a southeasterly direction. Navarrete is interviewed by Judge Gabriel Barbosa de Andrade, then-Secretary of the Interior and justice of the State of Goiás; Joaquim Neves Pereira; and Antenor Gomes, then-Secretary of Public Security for Goiás. (Lorenzen, Occupants, Signet, 1967, pp. 192–193; Clark III 230; “Caso Ceres,” Portal Fenomenum, June 15, 2016; Patrick
Gross, URECAT, October 17, 2006; Brazil 40–41)
October 12 — 9:15 p.m. Many witnesses see a luminous oval object pass over Ciudad Bolivar, Venezuela, at great speed. The same or a similar object is seen at Coro at 9:25 p.m. and at Trujillo at 12:00 midnight. (Lorenzen, UFOs: The Whole Story, Signet, 1969, p. 82)
October 14 — 7:00 p.m. The Naval Air Station North Island tower in San Diego, California, directs a Navy S2F-1Tracker anti-submarine aircraft toward a bright light over Point Loma. The aircraft, piloted by Lt. Allen L. Ries, tracks the UFO on airborne radar at some points suddenly moving at 1,700 mph average speed (3,500 mph at peak) and 1,100 mph average relative to the aircraft’s (peak 2,200 mph). Radar indicates the object is about 12 miles ahead. After 3 minutes the aircraft loses the object visually and on radar. Blue Book explains this as the star Arcturus, which is in the wrong direction in the sky, then changes the explanation to a balloon. (NICAP, [Blue Book documents]; Clark III 389–390)
October 14 — Around 9:30 p.m. Antonio Villas-Boas and another brother are plowing and see a bright object hovering 300 feet in the air. He approaches it, but it evades him and disappears. (Clark III 1226–1227)
October 15 — Afternoon. Robert Moudy sees a glowing object hovering above his combine in Franklin County, Indiana, at about 1,500 feet. It appears to be silver and platter-shaped, perhaps 12 feet in diameter, with a pink flame coming from its base. It makes a loud whirring noise as it hovers. When it starts ascending at a 22° angle, its color changes from pink to light blue and the combine stops working. He notices two stalled cars on a nearby road. (“Indiana Farmer Says ‘Whatsit’ Was Overhead,” Indianapolis News, November 5, 1957, p. 17)
October 16 — 1:00 a.m. Antonio Villas-Boas is plowing alone near São Francisco de Sales, Minas Gerais, Brazil, when a red, egg-shaped object appears above him. His tractor motor and lights fail. It lands nearby and something grabs him as he tries to run away. Three small figures bring him into the object, where he is subjected to tests and made to have sex twice with an odd-looking woman. Afterwards, she points to her belly then points to the sky. Then he is given a tour of the craft and taken outside again around 5:30 a.m. (“The A.V.B. Contact Case,” Boletim
SBEDV, no. 26/27 (Apr./July 1962): 7–9; Gordon Creighton, “The Most Amazing Case of All, Part 1: A Brazilian Farmer’s Story,” Flying Saucer Review 11, no. 1 (Jan./Feb. 1965): 13–17; Gordon Creighton, “The Most Amazing Case of All, Part 2: Analysis of the Brazilian Farmer’s Story,” Flying Saucer Review 11, no. 2 (Mar./Apr. 1965): 5–8; Gordon Creighton, “Postscript to the Most Amazing Case of All,” Flying Saucer Review 11, no. 4 (July/Aug. 1965): 24–26; Gordon Creighton, “Even More Amazing…: Further Light on the A.V.B. Case,” Flying Saucer Review 12, no. 4 (July/Aug. 1966): 23–27; Gordon Creighton, “Even More Amazing…Part 2: The A.V.B. Case Continued,” Flying Saucer Review 12, no. 5 (Sept./Oct. 1966): 22–25; Gordon Creighton, “Even More Amazing…Part III,” Flying Saucer Review 12, no. 6 (Nov./Dec. 1966): 14–16; Gordon Creighton, “Even More Amazing…Part IV,” Flying Saucer Review 13, no. 1 (Jan./Feb. 1967): 25–27; Olavo T. Fontes, “Even More Amazing…Part V,” Flying Saucer Review 13, no. 3 (May/June 1967): 22–25; Gordon Creighton, “Even More Amazing…Part VI: The Medical Report,” Flying Saucer Review 14, no. 1 (Jan./Feb. 1968): 18–20; Lorenzen, Occupants, Signet, 1967, pp. 42–72; “Brazil: New Light on a Sexual Abduction,” IUR/Probe, Sept.
1980, p. 79; Kim Hansen, “UFO Casebook,” UFOs 1947–1987, Fortean Tomes, 1987, pp. 56–59; Brazil 41–47; Clark III 1227–1229; Mark Cashman, “Behavioral Classification System for UFO Occupants,” IUR 24, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 19)
October 16 — Day. Nurse Ella Louise Fortune is driving north of Tularosa, New Mexico, when she sees a brilliant-white, elliptical object hovering in a deep-blue sky. It seems to have a faint exhaust trail at one edge. She stops her car and snaps a 35mm Kodachrome photo. Analysts generally agree this is a bright lenticular cloud with a trail of ice crystals. (Walter N. Webb, “The Fortune Photo Revisited,” IUR 18, no. 5 (Sept./Oct. 1993): 14–15)
October 16 — Evening. Former Australian Air Marshal George Jones and his wife see a round object like a “flying balloon” moving silently at the speed of a jet over their home in Mentone, Victoria, Australia. It moves from south to north at an altitude of 1,000–1,500 feet. (George Jones, “Former Air Chief Sees Saucers,” Flying Saucer Review 4, no. 3 (May/June 1958): 6)
October 21 — 9:18 p.m. Flying Officer D. W. Sweeney is flying a Meteor jet at 28,000 feet on a training exercise from RAF North Luffenham [now St. George’s Barracks] when he nearly collides with an unidentified object over RAF Gaydon [now closed], North Warwickshire, England. After taking evasive action, Sweeney tries to approach the object, whereupon its six lights go out and it disappears. The UFO is tracked on radar at RAF Langtoft [now closed] in South Kesteven. (“UFO over British A-Bomber Base: Air Ministry Baffled,” Flying Saucer Review 4, no. 1 (Jan./Feb. 1958): 6; Good Above, pp. 50–51)
October 22 — The US Continental Army Command sends a memo to the Army Chief of Research and Development indicating its interest in the flying saucer concept and requesting initiation of a feasibility study of a “manned flying saucer.” (Richard P. Weinert, History of Army Aviation, 1950–1962, US Army Training and Doctrine Command, November 1976, pp. 220–221)
October 25 — On a farm near Petrópolis, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, a housekeeper (pseudonym = Anazia Maria) is taking care of a family member who is dying of stomach cancer. She claims that two diminutive, long-haired beings emerge from a landed UFO, come inside the house, examine the girl for an hour with a device that looks like a flashlight, communicate telepathically to the family, cure the girl, and leave behind some medication to give her. (Olavo T. Fontes, “Dying Girl Saved by Humanoid Surgeons,” Flying Saucer Review 13, no. 5 (Sept./Oct. 1967): 5–6)
October 30 — 9:00 p.m. Hugh Pulju and Shirley Moyer are driving 10 miles north of Casper, Wyoming, when a round, shiny object appears in the road about 250 feet ahead. Pulju tries to turn around, but the engine keeps stalling. It works well once he reaches a main highway. (“‘Mystery Object’ Is Reported Here,” Casper (Wyo.) Tribune- Herald, November 5, 1957, p. 1; Aimé Michel, Straight-Line, pp. 237–238; Schopick, p. 24)
October 31 — Keyhoe meets with Rep. James C. Healey again, who tells him the Air Force has “made a strong attempt to disprove your claims.” (Keyhoe, FSTS, p. 113)
October 31 — A businessman and his wife at Longchaumois, Jura, France, see a large lighted object with openings. It hovers close to the ground and takes off with a great increase in brightness, silently, at high speed. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1957, October 1st–November 2nd, The Author, 1997, p. 83)
October 31 — 8:00 p.m. Barbara Jean Stokes, her husband Paul, and another couple are driving in Lumberton, North Carolina, when they spot an object about 200 feet long in the sky. Suddenly the object rises straight up and flames. As this happens, the car stalls until the object disappears a few seconds later. (“Woman Says She Saw Ball of Fire on Road,” Charlotte (N.C.) Observer, November 5, 1957, p. 1)
Late October — Late one afternoon, a British RAF team is planning to return home from the Maralinga, South Australia, nuclear test site where the Operation Antler series of blasts have occurred (September 14, 25, October 9). They go outside and see a silvery-blue, metallic UFO with a flat base and a dome on top. Several squarish portholes are
visible around the center. The object tilts at 45° and hovers. After 15 minutes, the UFO shoots up out of sight without a sound. One of the witnesses is Derek Murray, later a Home Office photographer. (Bill Chalker, “The UFO Connection: Startling Implications for Australia’s North West Cape, and for Australia’s Security,” Flying Saucer Review 31, no. 5 (July 1986): 18–19; Jenny Randles, UFO Conspiracy, Cassell, 1987, pp. 94–95; Good
Above, p. 163)
November — Lt. Gen. John A. Samford succeeds Maj. Gen. Ralph Canine as director of the National Security Agency. ()
November — Gene Duplantier launches the quarterly magazine Saucers, Space, and Science in Willowdale, Ontario. It continues through 1972. (Saucers, Space & Science, no. 1 (November 1957))
November 1 — 9:15 a.m. More than 50 workers at the Luipaardsvlei mine near Krugersdorp, Gauteng, South Africa, watch two UFOs hanging motionless in the air at a great height until the afternoon. A Sabre jet from the South African Air Force is sent up to investigate. It climbs to 45,000 feet, but the objects are still above it. One of the witnesses is Maj. G. Ogilvie-Watson, from an ACF squadron at Pretoria. They move off at great speed. (“Jet Unable to Reach UFO,” Flying Saucer Review 4, no. 1 (Jan./Feb. 1958): 2; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1957, October 1st–November 2nd, The Author, 1997, p. 85)
November 2 — 3:30 a.m. Three miles west of Canadian, Texas, S/Sgt. Alfred A. Calvin and a civilian witness see a submarine-shaped object, red and white, about 40–60 feet long and about 10 feet high, at ground level. A figure is near the object holding a white flag. When he stops the car, a flash of light from the object coincides with the sudden failure of the headlights. (NICAP, “Submarine-Shaped UFO, Entity, E-M Case”; Sparks, p. 253; Randle, Levelland, 2021, pp. 11–12)
November 2 — 8:30 p.m. A witness is driving between Seminole and Seagraves, Texas, on US Highway 62 when he sees lights on the road ahead. As he approaches them, his headlights go out and his engine dies. A few seconds later, the lights rise into the air and disappear. (Hobbs (N.Mex.) News-Sun, November 5, 1957; Schopick, p. 25)
November 2 — 10:50 p.m. Farmhand and veteran Pedro Saucedo and Joe Salaz are driving four miles west of Levelland, Texas, on Route 116 [now 114] south of Pettit (near its intersection with Five Mile Road). They see a flash of light to the right of the road. Then a 200-foot-long, 6-foot-wide blue rocket-shaped object, with yellow flame and white smoke coming from the rear, rises up out of the field, heads straight toward their truck, passes directly overhead at about 200 feet with a loud thundering roar, a rush of wind, and great heat. Their truck engine dies and the headlights to go out. The UFO disappears in the east towards Levelland. The lights come back on spontaneously and the engine restarts. A frightened Saucedo calls the occurrence in to Patrolman A. J. Fowler of the Levelland sheriff’s office. At Pettit, Texas, the same night, two grain combines, each with two engines, fail as a UFO passes overhead. The Air Force calls the Levelland sightings ball lightning or St. Elmo’s fire, even though there are no electrical storms in the area. Donald Menzel calls it a mirage. (Wikipedia, “Levelland UFO case”; NICAP, “The Levelland Sightings / Saucedo”; “Whatnik Sidelines Sputnik, Woofnik,” Fort Worth (Tex.) Star- Telegram, November 4, 1957, pp. 1–2; “The Levelland Case,” APRO Bulletin, November 1957, p. 1; “Did the Air Force Deceive the Public about the November Sightings?” UFO Investigator 1, no. 3 (January 1958): 1, 3; Schopick, pp. 26–27, 32; Clark III 683–684; UFOEv, p. 168; J. Allen Hynek, The UFO Experience, Ballantine ed., 1974, pp. 141–142, 146–147; Sparks, p. 253; Walter N. Webb, “Allen Hynek As I Knew Him,” IUR 18, no. 1 (Jan./Feb. 1993): 8; Don Berliner, with Marie Galbreath and Antonio Huneeus, UFO Briefing Document: The Best Available Evidence, Dell, 2000, pp. 67–70; “Levelland 1957,” Texas UFO Museum & Research Library, March 15, 2002; Donald R. Burleson, “Levelland, Texas, 1957: Case Reopened,” IUR 28, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 4;
Antonio F. Rullán, “The Southwestern UFO Wave of 1957,” IUR 31, no. 3 (October 2007): 8–15, 22; Randle,
Levelland, 2021, pp. 12–16, 43–55, 128–136, 150–152, 215–217, 234)
November 2 — 11:55 p.m. Two married couples driving near Shallowater, Texas, see a flash of orange light in the southwestern sky. The headlights and radio of their car fail for three seconds as they see the light. The car motor is not affected. (Mark Rodeghier, UFO Reports Involving Vehicle Interference, CUFOS, 1981, p. 9; Randle, Levelland, 2021, pp. 16, 220–221)
November 2 — About midnight. José Alvarez is driving along Route 51 in Whitharral, Texas, when he comes across a 200-foot-long object sitting in the road. His car engine stops as he approaches, and the headlights go out. At that point, the object rises quickly into the air. (UFOEv, p. 168; Schopick, pp. 27–28; Donald R. Burleson, “Levelland, Texas, 1957: Case Reopened,” IUR 28, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 4; Randle, Levelland, 2021, p. 19)
November 2 — About midnight. Jim Wheeler sees a 200-foot-long, egg-shaped, brightly lit object on Route 114 four miles east of Levelland, Texas. As he gets close to it, his engine and lights cease functioning. He gets out of his car as the light ascends; its lights blink out, and his engine and lights resume functioning. (UFOEv, p. 168; Schopick, p. 27; Donald R. Burleson, “Levelland, Texas, 1957: Case Reopened,” IUR 28, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 4;
Randle, Levelland, 2021, pp. 17–18)
November 3 — 12:05 a.m. Texas Tech college student Newell H. Wright is driving west one mile west of Smyer, Texas, when the ammeter gauge on his car dashboard starts fluctuating widely. The car motor gradually goes out then the headlights and radio die. He gets out to check and sees a white or aluminum-colored, oval-shaped object flat on the bottom like a loaf of bread, with a bluish-green tint, about 75–125 feet long. After a few minutes, the object suddenly rises up from the road ahead and ascends almost vertically at great speed slightly to the north, disappearing in seconds. Afterward the car can start again. (NICAP, “Oval-Shaped Object & EME on Ammeter”; UFOEv, p. 168; Schopick, pp. 28–29; J. Allen Hynek, The UFO Experience, Ballantine ed., 1974, p. 143; Sparks,
p. 254; Donald R. Burleson, “Levelland, Texas, 1957: Case Reopened,” IUR 28, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 4; Swords
253–256; Randle, Levelland, 2021, pp. 16–17, 212–214)
November 3 — 12:15 a.m. Frank Williams, a farmer, is near Whitharral, Texas, when he encounters an object described as an egg sitting on the crossroads. The UFO pulsates steadily; each time it glows bright, the car’s power goes on and off. The object leaves with a thunderous sound. (UFOEv, p. 168; Schopick, pp. 29–30; J. Allen Hynek, The UFO Experience, Ballantine ed., 1974, pp. 143–144; Donald R. Burleson, “Levelland, Texas, 1957: Case Reopened,” IUR 28, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 4; Randle, Levelland, 2021, p. 17)
November 3 — 12:45 a.m. Ronald Martin is on Highway 116 near Smyer, Texas, when he sees a glowing red UFO land ahead of his truck, then turn to bluish-green. The truck’s electrical system fails. When the UFO takes off, it turns reddish again. (UFOEv, p. 168; Schopick, pp. 30–31; J. Allen Hynek, The UFO Experience, Ballantine ed., 1974,
p. 144; Donald R. Burleson, “Levelland, Texas, 1957: Case Reopened,” IUR 28, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 4; Randle,
Levelland, 2021, pp. 18–19)
November 3 — Around 1:00 a.m. Levelland (Texas) Fire Marshall Ray Jones, while out driving around and looking for some explanation of the many UFO reports, sees a “streak of light” north of the Oklahoma Flat. His headlights dim and engine sputters as he sees the light. (UFOEv, p. 168; Schopick, p. 32; J. Allen Hynek, The UFO Experience, Ballantine ed., 1974, pp. 145–146; Randle, Levelland, 2021, p. 21)
November 3 — 1:15 a.m. James Long is 5 miles northwest of Levelland, Texas, on a farm-to-market road. He reports a bright object that is egg or oval-shaped, about 200 feet long, 200 feet away, sitting in the road. He hears a “thunderclap.” The car’s lights and motor quit. The object rises quickly and speeds away. (UFOEv, p. 168; Schopick, p. 31; J. Allen Hynek, The UFO Experience, Ballantine ed., 1974, pp. 144–145; Randle, Levelland, 2021, p. 19)
November 3 — 1:30 a.m. Near the same spot as James Long, Hockley County (Texas) Sheriff Weir Clem and Pat McCullough see a flash of light “like a brilliant red sunset” 300–400 yards to the south of them, lighting up the pavement. (UFOEv, p. 168; Schopick, pp. 31–32; J. Allen Hynek, The UFO Experience, Ballantine ed., 1974, pp. 145–146; Donald R. Burleson, “Levelland, Texas, 1957: Case Reopened,” IUR 28, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 4;
Randle, Levelland, 2021, pp. 19–21, 170–181, 218–219)
November 3 — About 3:00 a.m. Two MPs at White Sands Missile Test Range, New Mexico, Cpl. Glenn H. Toy and Pfc. James E. Wilbanks are making rounds in their jeep when they notice a bright object high in the sky. It drops down to about 150 feet and the light goes out. A few minutes later the light goes on again and it drops to the ground in a bunker area 3 miles away and goes out. The UFO is egg-shaped and about 225–300 feet in diameter. (NICAP, “Three MPs Report Object over White Sands Base”; Schopick, pp. 37–38; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1957 November 3rd–5th, The Author, 1997, p. 6; UFOEv, p. 169; Sparks, p.
254; Swords 259; Randle, Levelland, 2021, pp. 23–27)
November 3 — 7:00 p.m. Edna Ireland is driving with two friends near Sibbald, Alberta, when a blinking light appears in the sky and passes nearly above the car toward the northwest. Their engine coughs and the headlights flicker. (Winnipeg (Man.) Tribune, November 7, 1957; Aimé Michel, Straight-Line, p. 239; Schopick, pp. 42–43)
November 3 — 8:00 p.m. Army Specialist 3rd Class Henry R. Barlow and Specialist 3rd Class Forest R. Oakes, Army Garrison Detachment 5, are in a jeep patrol driving west near the site of the first A-bomb explosion, Trinity Site, in White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico. They see a pulsating red light thar turns to white, possibly 200– 300 feet in size and 4–5 miles away. It brightens and dims then sometimes goes out, rising in the sky from the ground or from about 50 feet over the bunker up to about 45° elevation until it looks like a star or point source. They watch it for 25 minutes before it disappears. Possibly Venus in the southwest, which sets at about 8:30 p.m. (Sparks, p. 254; Schopick, p. 38; Randle, Levelland, 2021,pp. 27–31)
November 3 — The USSR launches Sputnik 2 carrying Laika the dog. (Wikipedia, “Sputnik 2”)
November 4 — Portuguese Air Force Capt. Lenos Ferreira is conducting a training mission at the head of three jet fighters over Grenada, Spain, when he observes a luminous object changing color from an intense green to bright red. The object maintains a constant altitude while oscillating. Ferreira orders a change of course toward Córdoba, but the object follows his group for 40 minutes, dropping four smaller objects that also accompany the jets. Suddenly the objects go into a dive and disappear. (Patrick Gross, “UFO Chasing Jet Fighter Squadron, Lisbon, 1957”)
November 4 — After 12:00 midnight. A young couple are returning to Amarillo, Texas, from Palo Duro Canyon when they see a glowing object in the middle of the road, surrounded by fog. As they drive closer and enter the fog, the car engine and battery die. Another car has to push them into town to get the battery recharged. (Amarillo (Tex.) Daily News, November 4, 1957; Schopick, pp. 43–44)
November 4 — 1:30 a.m. Chief Pilot Captain Jean Vincent de Beyssac and his copilot are flying a Varig Airlines C-46 cargo plane from Porto Alegre to São Paulo, Brazil. They are near Araranguá, Santa Catarina, when de Beyssac notices a red light on his left. It seems to be getting bigger, so he banks towards it out of curiosity. The light gets much bigger then begins to glow more brilliantly. The pilot and copilot smell smoke and, as they are looking for the source, the light disappears. De Beyssac returns to Porto Alegre. It turns out that the right engine’s magneto (or generator), automatic direction finder, and the radio (both receiver and transmitter) have burnt out, allegedly simultaneously. (NICAP, “Aircraft Encounters UFO / ADF, etc. Affected”; Olavo T. Fontes, “Top Secret Report Unveiled,” APRO Bulletin, September 1959, pp. 5–6; Lorenzen, FS Hoax, p. 155; Schopick, pp. 126–127; Patrick Gross, “UFO / Aircraft Close Encounter in Brazil, 1957”)
November 4 — 2:00 a.m. Two sentries at the Fortaleza de Itaipu in Praia Grande, São Paulo, Brazil, watch an orange object approaching the fort. It holds its course until it is directly above them. Its diameter is at least as large as the wingspan of a DC-3 and scarcely 300 feet away. Suddenly there is a strange buzzing noise and the men feel a wave of glowing heat. One of them collapses on the spot, but the other succeeds in reaching safety in the shadow of the gun emplacements. His shouts of alarm rouse his comrades inside the fort, where the lights suddenly go out. In the meantime, the emergency power is switched on but immediately gives out. Only a few minutes after the alarm, two other men are out of the fort and at their sides. They too see the UFO, which is now heading out to sea. It leaves a luminous trail as it shoots away across the Atlantic. The two sentries are taken to a hospital in Rio de Janeiro. They suffer second and third-degree burns on large areas of their body, chiefly in areas covered by clothing. Afterwards, Brazilian Army and USAF personnel, along with investigators of the Brazilian Air Force, fly to the fort to interview them. There is some reason to think that Olavo T. Fontes made this case up, as no first- hand witnesses to the event have come forward. (NICAP, “Fort Itaipu Incident”; Wikipedia, “Caso do Forte de Itaipu”; Olavo T. Fontes, “Top Secret Report Unveiled,” APRO Bulletin, September 1959, pp. 6–7; Jules Lemaître, “A Strange Story from Brazil,” Flying Saucer Review 6, no. 1 (Jan./Feb. 1960): 9–11; Schopick, pp.
135–140; Kevin D. Randle, “Fort Itaipu and Footnotes,” A Different Perspective, October 12, 2014; Kevin D. Randle, “Fort Itaipu and Olavo Fontes Revisited,” A Different Perspective, June 15, 2016; Clark 537)
November 4 — 3:12 a.m. At Elmwood Park, Illinois, three policemen (Clifford Shaw, Joseph Lukasek, and Dan Diglovanni) see a bright cigar-shaped object in the sky. The headlights and spotlight on the squad car dim. The car chases the UFO for a mile and a half, which dips and rises before speeding off. Fireman Bob Volz also sees a reddish-orange UFO about the same time. (NICAP, “Bright Cylinder Chased by Police, E-M Effects”; Aimé Michel, Straight-Line, p. 239; Keyhoe, FSTS, p. 117; Schopick, pp. 90–91; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1957 November 3rd–5th, The Author, 1997, pp. 22–27; Sparks, p. 255)
November 4 — 1:10 p.m. James W. Stokes, electronics technician at Holloman AFB, New Mexico, is driving on US 54 about 8 miles south of Orogrande, New Mexico. The car radio fades, and the car slows as if the battery is failing. Stokes notices 6–12 cars ahead of him have also stopped and drivers are out looking at the sky (looking behind him to the northeast), including a Mr. Duncan and Allan D. Baker. Stokes stops and gets out, sees a pearl-white oval or egg-shaped object about 500 feet wide with a slight purplish tinge heading south at an estimated speed of 1,500–2,000 mph. It is below the elevation angle of the Sacramento Mountains ridgeline, descending from about 5,000 feet above ground level in a shallow dive to about 1,500–2,500 feet altitude as it swerves to pass to the south of Stokes and the other stopped cars. At its closest it is about 2–5 miles away. It then circles around headed west and disappears. The same or another object appears in the northeast (as if the object has completely circled) and performs the same rounded course but passing farther to the south of the parked cars and disappears in the west. Duncan takes a 35mm film of the object. Stokes notices a wave of heat from the object at closest approach. Later that evening he is sunburned, but it clears up the next day. The Air Force calls it a hoax based on the Levelland sightings. (NICAP, “Stokes Incident”; “The New Mexico Story,” APRO Bulletin, November 1957, pp. 1–2; L. J. Lorenzen, “The Stokes Case,” APRO Bulletin, January 1958, pp. 2, 6; UFOEv, p. 169; Schopick, pp.
39–42; Sparks, p. 255; Swords 256–259; Randle, Levelland, 2021, pp. 32–42, 228)
November 4 — 7:30 p.m. A Texas state border inspector is driving 3 miles southeast of El Paso Airport in Texas when his car engine stalls and the headlights go dim then out. He gets out and notices an object approaching that is making a whirring sound like an artillery shell. It passes above his car at about 150 feet, heading west and changing altitude occasionally. When it gets to the Franklin Mountains, it lifts into the air vertically. (NICAP, “Egg-Shaped Object Stalls Car”; Hynek UFO Report, p. 181)
November 4 — 10:00 p.m. Jan Boucher, a policeman in Kodiak, Alaska, sees a red ball of fire with a greenish-yellow trail as he is patrolling on Mission Road. It apparently moves 50 feet above a nearby school. He tries to radio in a report but his radio gets interference for 2 minutes after the sighting. (Anchorage (Alaska) Daily News, November 7, 1957; Schopick, pp. 89–90)
November 4 — 10:45 p.m. CAA air traffic controllers R. M. Kaser and E. G. Brink see a highly maneuverable 15–20-foot egg-shaped object with a white light at its base circle over one end of Kirtland AFB in Albuquerque, New Mexico, at 150–200 mph. It comes down in a steep 30° dive as if landing on Runway 26 to the north of the tower at about 1,500 feet. Radar tracks part of this maneuver. The object then crosses the flight line, runways, and taxiways heading towards the tower at about 50 mph and 20–30 feet above ground, observed through 7x binoculars until it reaches about 3,000 feet near the northeast corner of the flood-lit restricted Manzano Nuclear Weapons Storage Area and a B-58 bomber service site. It hovers for 20–60 seconds, then heads east again at about 200–300 feet altitude. Suddenly it shoots up in a steep climb. Controllers contact Radar Approach Control, which tracks the object on CPN-18 radar traveling east, then turning south, circling the Albuquerque Low Frequency Range Station. It then heads north, disappearing at 10 miles and reappearing 20 minutes later to follow 1/2 mile behind a USAF C-46 that has just taken off to the south. It continues for 14 miles until both go off the scope. A hovering radar target then appears to the north over an outer marker for 90 seconds before fading. (Wikipedia, “Kirtland AFB UFO sighting”; NICAP, “Kirtland UFO Incident / Radar Case”; Sparks, p. 256; J. Allen Hynek, The UFO Experience, Ballantine ed., 1974, pp. 87–90; Condon, pp. 141–143; James E. McDonald, “The Kirtland Airfield UFO,” Flying Saucer Review 16, no. 5 (Sept./Oct. 1970): 6–8; Swords 259–260)
November 5 — 5:10 a.m. The US Coast Guard Cutter Sebago (WHEC-42), Commander Clarence H. Waring Jr., cruising in the Gulf of Mexico about 200 miles south of Mobile, Alabama, tracks a radar target at a range of 22 miles moving at 650 mph. It disappears at 55 miles range. Three other unusual radar contacts are made in the next 10 minutes. A visual object like a brilliant planet is seen at 5:21 a.m. speeding north to south for five seconds by Ensign Wayne Schotley, Lt. Donald E. Shaffer, 1stClass Quartermaster Kenneth Smith, and radio operator Thomas Kirk. The Air Force ascribes it to confused radar operators who mistake ordinary plane blips for a UFO. (NICAP, “The Coast Guard Cutter Sebago Case”; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1957 November 3rd–5th, The Author, 1997, pp. 50–51; Condon, pp. 165–167; Sparks, p. 256; Swords
260–262)
November 5 — Late afternoon. Grain buyer Reinhold O. Schmidt is driving through the countryside near Kearney, Nebraska, when he notices a large, cigar-shaped object resting in a field. He is soon escorted inside the spaceship, which turns out to be crewed by completely human-looking space aliens, four males and two females, who apparently speak perfect German and claim to be from the planet Saturn. They also claim to be interested in the recently launched Russian sputniks and the satellite-launching plans of the US. Later Schmidt brings local police to view the landing site, where they find deep imprints and some “mysterious green residue.” Schmidt also claims subsequent visits to the spaceship and many friendly conversations with its learned crew. Schmidt notices they drink MJB brand coffee, and also carry in their cigar-shaped craft an ordinary terrestrial MG sports car, which they use for running errands and buying groceries. (A schematic drawing of the ship’s interior in Schmidt’s later booklet depicts a Volkswagen Beetle.) Unlike most spaceships, the Saturnian ship has large propellers at both ends. Eventually Schmidt gets a ride up to earth orbit and a tour of the mother ship. On October 26, 1961, Schmidt is convicted in Oakland, California, for grand theft after bilking a widow out of $5,000 for a worthless mining venture in Tulare County, where he claims to have seen huge quartz crystals from a spaceship. Judge Donald K. Quayle sentences him to 1–10 years in prison. (Clark III 1038–1039; Swords 262; Curt Collins, “The Trial of a UFO Gold Digger,” The Saucers That Time Forgot, August 27, 2020)
November 5 — The Department of Defense Office of Public Affairs issues a new UFO fact sheet, emphasizing the high percentage of explained cases and the lack of a threat to national security. (UFOEv, p. 107; Swords 262)
November 5 — 6:30 p.m. Larry and Marilynn Beaman are driving near Antioch, Illinois, when they notice a ball of fire fluctuating from white to yellow pacing their car on the right side, about 1,000 feet up. It goes out for a time then switches back on. At its largest, it seems 30 feet in diameter. It follows them all the way to Ringwood and then lands in some trees behind a school building two blocks from where they live. It glitters like a welder’s arc and makes a sound like water swishing. Beaman rounds up some other witnesses and goes back to the landing site, but the object takes off, changes to purple, and moves away to the southwest. TV sets in town dim, finally losing both picture and sound during the same time period. (Schopick, pp. 104–109)
November 5 — 8:43 p.m. A witness in Woodstock, Illinois, sees a large, red, triangular object with a green light in the front and a yellow light in the rear. It makes a low droning sound and moves west to east. Woodstock police officers and another individual in Genoa City see the same object. At 10:15 p.m., an amber or orange UFO 200
feet long is seen for 5 minutes at Delavan, Wisconsin. Project Blue Book claims it is an aurora or jet aircraft. (Marler 131–132)
November 5 — 9:30 p.m. Civil service employee Lon Yarborough is driving along US Highway 81 about 1.5 miles southwest of San Antonio, Texas, when he sees an extremely bright object settle down in a ravine about 600 feet from him. The egg-shaped object is approximately 60 foot long and causes the lights and engine of his car to fail. The object rests a few minutes and finally takes off to the northeast. (San Antonio (Tex.) Light, November 6, 1957; NICAP, “60ʹ Egg-Shaped Object Disables Auto”; Schopick, pp. 44–45)
November 5 — 11:00 p.m. Two young men see a red light north of US Highway 62 at a point 38 miles west of Hobbs, New Mexico. They watch for 9–10 minutes, thinking it is an oil flare, but the light suddenly rises straight up. After pacing their car for a few minutes, the light turns toward the car, passes over it, and hovers over the Permian Basin Pipeline plant. As it passes overhead, the car engine sputters, then dies, and the lights go out. After the men coast the car down the road, the motor restarts and they drive away. The battery is found to be dead the following morning and the dashboard clock is stopped. (Schopick, pp. 45–47; Mark Rodeghier, UFO Reports Involving Vehicle Interference, CUFOS, 1981, p. 12)
November 6 — Just after 12:00 midnight. A taxicab company owner, Joe Martinez, and one of his drivers, Alberto Gallegos, sees a UFO approach them in Santa Fe, New Mexico. They hear a humming sound as it comes close. The object is egg-shaped and multicolored. As it passes over their car, the engine stalls and the dashboard clock stops. The UFO then pulls up and moves rapidly into the southeast. One witness later discovers that his wristwatch has also stopped at the time of sighting. (Aimé Michel, Straight Line, pp. 246–247; Schopick, pp. 47– 48; Mark Rodeghier, UFO Reports Involving Vehicle Interference, CUFOS, 1981, p. 12)
November 6 — 4:30 a.m. William Rush II is driving on Long Point Road in Houston, Texas. A brilliant red, egg-shaped UFO kills his car engine and causes static on his radio. (Houston (Tex.) Chronicle, November 6, 1957; Schopick,
p. 48)
November 6 — 5:40 a.m. Richard Kehoe is driving along Vista Del Mar in Playa Del Rey, California, when his engine fails. Two other cars on the highway are also affected, and the drivers (Ronald Burke and Joe Thomas) all get out. They see an egg-shaped object that seems to be wrapped in a blue haze. It is tan or cream-colored and has two metallic rings around it. Two smallish men, about 5 feet 5 inches tall and wearing black leather pants, a white belt, and a light-colored jersey, exit the object. They ask Kehoe and the others where they are and what time it is in something approaching English. They walk back to the object, which takes off. After it leaves, Kehoe’s car starts with no problem. (Lorenzen, Flying Saucer Occupants, Signet, 1967, pp. 126–127)
November 6 — 6:30 a.m. Everett Orain Clark, 12 , of Dante, Knoxville, Tennessee, lets his dog Frisky outside and sees an object like an elongated egg in a field 300 feet away from his house. 20 minutes later, he calls to bring the dog back and sees Frisky with other dogs on the other side of the road close to the object. Clark walks toward the UFO and sees two men and women, apparently dressed in a normal manner. One of the men tries to catch Frisky who grunts and moves away. They are speaking in a foreign language that sounds like German to him. The four people go into the craft by seemingly walking right through the wall. Journalist Carson Brewer goes back to the site with Clark and finds an “oblong ring of pressed grass” 24 feet by 4.5 feet. In the afternoon, two men from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (engineer Wallace Russell Gambill and physicist N. D. Greene) collect soil samples and check for radiation (they find none). (“Scientists Check ‘Space Ship’ Field,” Knoxville (Tenn.) News-Sentinel, November 7, 1957, pp. 1, 12; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1957 November 6th, The Author, 1997, pp. 17–19; Clark III 672–673; Patrick Gross, URECAT, August 17, 2006)
November 6 — US scientists are “pretty shook up” about the recent UFO sightings, according to astronomer Charles F. “Chick” Capen in the November 7 El Paso Times. However, Capen talks more about missile launches and lunar photography than UFO sightings. (“Sighting ‘Shakes’ Scientists,” El Paso (Tex.) Times, November 7, 1957, p. 21; “El Pasoans Take Look at Sputnik,” El Paso (Tex.) Times, November 7, 1957, pp. 1, 3; Swords 264)
November 6 — 5:00 p.m. Two Malay fisherman are in a waterway near Bagansiapiapi, Sumatra, Indonesia, when they see a black and red object swiftly approaching their boat and trailing black and greenish smoke. The top and bottom of the object are curved like discs. When it is 60 feet away it stops in mid-air about 35 feet above the water, and the bottom part continues to rotate as the water foams below it. The object is a triangular shape and white smoke is coming out from each point. The object speeds up and disappears, leaving behind black and greenish smoke lines. (Marler 133)
November 6 — Early evening. Varine “Rene” Gilham sees a brilliant object radiating a strong red light as he is using an outhouse on his farm near Merom, Indiana. The whole farm and surrounding area are bathed in the light for 10 minutes. A small object joins the larger one and the light grows more intense. The two objects fly away. The next day, Gilham has “sunburn” in many places. Two days later he is admitted to a hospital for treatment. (NICAP, “Merom/Gilham Incident”; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1957
November 6th, The Author, 1997, pp. 67, 72–73. Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1957 November 6th, Supplemental Notes, The Author, 2003, pp. 6–7; Michael D. Swords, “Messing Around with the Force,” IUR 31, no. 4 (March 2008): 30)
November 6 — 8:02 p.m. Six people in Toronto, Ontario, watch a yellow-white light travel silently from south to north across the eastern sky. One experiences static on his TV set as the object passes, slower than a meteor. (Aimé Michel, Straight-Line, pp. 248–249; Schopick, pp. 80–81)
November 6 — Night. Two state policemen in Danville, Illinois, observe a brilliant white light that changes color successively to amber and orange. They chase it for 15 miles because the light appears to be low in the sky. During the chase, their communications radio does not function. The light eventually flies out of sight. (“2 State Troopers See ‘Object,’” Hammond (Ind.) Times, November 7, 1957, p. 12; Schopick, pp. 91–92)
November 6 — 9:00 p.m. Jacques Jacobsen and three others are in a hunting lodge on the Baskatong Reservoir, Quebec, listening to a battery-powered radio. Outside, they see a glowing, yellow-white sphere 2–3 miles away to the southwest. It remains in place for 15 minutes. During this time the radio goes off, and one of the men’s shortwave radios is working on only one frequency that emits a strong, rapidly modulated tone that sounds like, but is not, Morse code. The UFO rises into the clouds and the radios function normally again. (Aimé Michel, Straight-Line, pp. 248–249; Schopick, pp. 79–80; Randle, Levelland, 2021, p. 114)
November 6 — 9:43 p.m. Kenneth J. Delano, who is participating in aurora and meteor watches for the International Geophysical Year, is observing the sky at St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore, Maryland, when he sees a brilliant white light in the northwest. He watches it approach until it is nearly overhead. Then a faint, silvery-gray, elliptical disc is visible for a few seconds above the light. It is silent, except for a faint whirring sound. He watches it for a total of 4 minutes until it passes behind some buildings. (Kenneth J. Delano, “UFO over Baltimore,” IUR 32, no. 4 (October 2009): 17–18, 24)
November 6 — 11:30 p.m. Olden J. Moore is driving home in Montville, Ohio, when he sees an object like a bright meteor split into two pieces, one of which heads straight up. The other becomes larger while its color changes from bright white to blue green. It hovers about 200 feet above a field and lands with a soft whirring sound, perhaps 500 feet away. Moore watches cautiously for 15 minutes, then approaches it. The UFO is shaped like a “covered dish,” and is about 50 feet in diameter, 15 feet high, with a cone on top about 10 feet high. It is pulsating slowly, and a haze surrounds it. Moore goes home to get another witness (his wife) but when they return the UFO is gone. Mrs. Moore reports the sighting to County Sheriff Louis Robusky the next morning, and a civil defense director, Kenneth Locke, visits the site. Locke finds high levels of radioactivity (a maximum of 150 microroentgens/hour, suggestive of an approximately one-hour radionuclide half-life or less) two perfectly formed holes six inches in diameter, and unusual footprints that come from nowhere and go nowhere. (NICAP, “Olden Moore Case / Close Encounter”; UFOEv, pp. 169–170; Center for UFO Studies, [case files]; Clark III 772–773, 950; Sparks, p. 257)
November 7 — 1:45–1:55 a.m. Seven airmen at Holloman Air Force Base near Alamogordo, New Mexico—Bradford Rickets, James Cole, Dennis Murphy, Wayne Hurlburt, and Harry Uhlrich—see a UFO while on duty at a salvage yard on the north side of the base. The object makes a whistling noise and turns from white to orange to red. (Lorenzen, FSHoax, pp. 100–101)
November 7 — 7:25 a.m. Truck driver Melvin Stevens stops one mile east of House, Mississippi, because a silvery “blimp” about 5 feet high and 2 feet long is blocking the road. He walks toward it, a sliding door opens, and three small, pasty-faced men about 4.5 feet tall emerge. Stevens feels paralyzed. After a short time, the beings make a military about-face and reenter the UFO, which takes off vertically. (Center for UFO Studies, HUMCAT Index 1957, p. 32; Clark III 269)
November 7 — 9:20 a.m. Trent Lindsey and his wife and son Byron are driving on US Highway 54 near Orogrande, New Mexico, when Byron notices that the speedometer is jumping wildly back and forth from the top to the bottom of its range. It then stops just as suddenly. The three witnesses later see a metallic-appearing UFO high in the sky to the southwest. It continues moving away for three minutes until it was lost from view over the Organ Mountains. The speedometer functions normally after the UFO is gone. (“Family Reports Seeing Large Object over NM,” Albuquerque Tribune, November 8, 1957, p. 1; Lorenzen, FSHoax, pp. 99–100)
November 7 — 9:38 a.m. Mysterious radio signals on the 108 megacycle radio band are recorded by RCA Communications at Riverhead, Long Island, New York. The signal is a continuous, tone-modulated hum at a low pitch of 200 cycles per second. The FCC admits it is baffled, but suspects that it comes from a radio amateur or equipment testing in the New York City area. Another report claims that Vanguard and Federal Communications Commission watchers at 18 monitoring stations throughout the Western Hemisphere are picking up signals at
14.286 megacycles, possibly connected with Sputnik 2. The signal is a long note of low pitch followed after a few
seconds by two short notes. (“Mystery Signals Are Unconnected with Satellites,” Fort Myers (Fla.) News-Press,
November 8, 1957, pp. 1–2; Lorenzen, UFOs: The Whole Story, Signet, 1969, p. 83)
November 7 — 7:46 p.m. Bright, flashing objects hover for 30 minutes over the Atomic Energy Commission’s Pantex Plant 15 miles east of Amarillo, Texas. The UFOs are reported to the State Highway Patrol office by plant guards, and a patrolman dispatched to the plant arrives at 8:15 p.m. and sees a strange light. Guards at the plant are “all shook up” from watching three objects floating 50 feet above the ground. One of the objects apparently lands on Farin Road 2373, three miles north of Highway 60. Guards tell the patrolman they tried to approach the objects by turning off their lights, “but the things would just slip away from them when they got near.” They are unable to estimate the size of the objects but seem positive “they saw more than just lights.” (NICAP, “Lights Shake Up Guards at Nuclear Plant”; Sparks, p. 258)
November 7 — Night. Paul Rutledge, a packinghouse worker at Waterloo, Iowa, sees an object hovering above his garage. He can see two figures walking around inside. The object is about 30 feet long and has a shiny bottom and a glass top. (Lorenzen, UFOs: The Whole Story, Signet, 1969, p. 84; Patrick Gross, URECAT, January 24, 2007)
November 8 — 3:03 a.m. Polish-Australian astronomer Antoni Przybylski and Dutch-American astronomer Bart Bok see a vivid pink object moving slowly across the sky at Mount Stromlo Observatory near Canberra, Australia. It is visible to the naked eye for two minutes. Przybylski has just finished observing Sputnik 1 and 2, so it wasn’t a satellite or a meteor. Assistant Director Arthur Robert Hogg thinks it might be circling the earth like a satellite. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1957, November 7th–12th, The Author, 1998, p. 36; Michael D. Swords, “Gazing at the Moons,” IUR 32, no. 4 (October 2009): 10–11; Center for UFO Studies, “Moonwatch Mystery Satellites, 1958–1962”)
November 8 — 6:22 a.m. Connie Foster watches a lighted triangular object flying from southeast to northwest over Camarillo, California. It is moving with the base facing forward and has bright lights on the tips of the triangle. She watches it for nearly 30 minutes before it disappears. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1957, November 7th–12th, The Author, 1998, p. 37)
November 8 — Spencer Whedon, chief of Air Intelligence at Wright-Patterson AFB near Dayton, Ohio, tells the press that of 5,700 UFO reports received by his office since 1940, 97% have been identified satisfactorily and the other 8% remain unidentified due to insufficient information. (“Seeing Things? No, Sky Really Red,” Cincinnati (Ohio) Post, November 7, 1957, p. 8)
November 8 — 6:00 p.m. Pan Am Flight 7, a Boeing Stratocruiser flying across the Pacific mysteriously crashes midway between San Francisco and Honolulu. One of the crew is UFO witness Capt. William H. Fortenberry. The cause of the crash is never determined. Fortenberry’s journalist son, Ken H. Fortenberry, suspects that the bereaved and mentally unstable purser Oliver Eugene Crosthwaite, has deliberately caused the crash, killing himself and murdering 43 innocent people in the process. (Wikipedia, “Pan Am Flight 7”; Ken H. Fortenberry, Flight 7 Is Missing: The Search for My Father’s Killer, Fayetteville Mafia, 2020)
November 8 — Night. 12 female and 4 male farmworkers are in a truck on the Newhailes Road returning to Edinburgh from picking Brussels sprouts in a nursey at Musselburgh, Scotland. One of them spots a gray, round object seemingly following the truck at a distance of 60 feet. Mary Horne says it is domed on the top and bottom. It follows them for 5–10 minutes then moves off towards Portobello leaving a double vapor trail. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1957, November 7th–12th, The Author, 1998, pp. 54– 55)
November 9 — 12:15 a.m. A man is driving in Sacramento, California, when his car engine and headlights fail. He looks up and sees an elongated egg-shaped object with delta-shaped wings, 150–200 feet long and 40–50 feet wide. The wings come back to about 30 feet from the rear of the fuselage. It has a bright bluish hue and leaves a bluish fluorescent trail. The sighting lasts 2–3 minutes. (Herbert S. Taylor, “An Update on Vehicle Interference Reports, Part Two,” IUR 34, no. 1 (September 2011): 19)
November 9 — 9:15 a.m. Eastern Airline pilot Capt. Truman Gile Jr. is preparing to take off from Lafayette (Louisiana) Airport when he sees a big silvery object about 20,000 feet in the air. Gile watches it for 3 minutes and it doesn’t move. He alerts copilot James E. Hall, the stewardess, and the ground agents, and they all watch it another 5 minutes before it fades away. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1957, November 7th–12th, The Author, 1998, pp. 61–62)
November 9 — 7:20 p.m. Several witnesses are driving 12 miles northeast of Carrizozo, New Mexico, on US Highway 54 in the vicinity of White Oaks when a large, rapidly moving light approaches their car from the south and apparently causes the vehicle’s lighting system to fail. The light changes course and speeds off to the southwest. Jim and Coral Lorenzen are driving east on US Highway 380 about 10 miles east of Carrizozo when they spot an anomalous light that might be the same object. (Lorenzen, FSHoax, pp, 101–102)
November 10 — 1:25 a.m. Leita Mae Kuhn is checking the stove in her Doberman dog kennel at Madison, Ohio, when she notices a glowing, domed disc hovering 60 feet above the rear of the kennel. It is about 40 feet in diameter and emitting puffy clouds of smoke. Her eyes begin to burn after watching it for 20–30 minutes, and she runs back into the house and locks the door. She has rashes and her eyes hurt so badly she visits a doctor. (Donald E. Keyhoe and Gordon I. R. Lore Jr., Strange Effects from UFOs, NICAP, 1969, pp. 11–12; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1957, November 7th–12th, The Author, 1998, pp. 69–71; Michael D. Swords, “Messing Around with the Force,” IUR 31, no. 4 (March 2008): 30–31; Michael D. Swords, “Can UFOs Cause Physiological Effects? Part 1,” IUR 33, no. 4 (May 2011): 10)
November 10 — Residents of Skaryszew, Poland, watch a huge, radiant, cigar-shaped object slowly moving west. (Poland 20)
November 10 — Evening. UFO witness Olden Moore of Montville, Ohio, is visited by Sheriff Robusky, a deputy, and a USAF officer who asks him to go with them to Youngstown to be interviewed by military officers. They drive him to the field where the encounter took place and put him aboard a military helicopter. He is interviewed in Youngstown, then he is returned to the field at 11:00 p.m. (Clark III 773)
November 10 — 5:55 p.m. Wilfred S. Hardy, an assistant safety engineer at the Tokyo, Japan, Engineer Supply Center, sees (along with his wife and a Japanese boat boy) a huge cigar-shaped object with lighted portholes above Lake Imba-numa 10 miles away. He estimates it is about 200–500 feet long. The object lights up the entire lake, then disappears to the south 10 seconds later. (Lorenzen, UFOs: The Whole Story, Signet, 1969, p. 86)
November 10 — 7:00 p.m. Many people see a UFO at Hammond, Indiana. Two policemen (Sgt. Charles J. Mauder, Office Steve Betuslak) see a red and white light hovering 500–1,000 feet overhead. They hear a beeping sound and there is interference on the police radio while the object is in view. Another witness sees a green light on a basket-shaped object; his car radio fails. The lights fly away when anyone tries to approach. (Aimé Michel, Straight-Line, p. 268; Schopick, pp. 92–95; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1957, November 7th–12th, The Author, 1998, pp. 73, 75)
November 10 — Night. French astronomer Jacques Chapuis at Toulouse Observatory in France observes a maneuvering, yellow, star-like object for 5 minutes. It ascends straight up out of sight. (UFOEv, p. 50)
November 11 — A silvery elliptical UFO is seen flying below Western Airlines Flight 61 over the desert east of Los Angeles, California. Robert D. Hahn, a jewelry designer, is a passenger and describes it as a large, elliptical, metallic object with dark patches zigzagging about 200 feet above the ground. (UFOEv, p. 67)
November 13 — An object explodes over the State Hospital at Crownsville, Maryland, and two or three burned pieces of metal fall on the hospital grounds. It is recovered by employees William A. Zick and J. Caswell. The pieces are checked for radiation and confiscated by army intelligence officers at Fort George G. Meade. They are apparently sent to the Air Research and Development Center in Baltimore. An ARD colonel tells NICAP member and WFBR news director Lou Corbin that he has no idea what the metal is. Some of the material is perhaps sent to ATIC. (“Metal Object from Skies Rushed to ATIC for Analysis,” UFO Investigator 1, no. 3 (January 1958): 5–6)
November 14 — Afternoon. Evalyn Riead hears a sputtering noise like someone is pulling into her driveway in Tamaroa, Illinois. She looks outside and sees a bright, moon-shaped object with a tail moving above the trees bordering US Highway 51. It disappears after 5–6 booms and 3 flashes of light. As soon as this happens, the lights in her home go out. Electrical power in a 4-mile area between Tamaroa and Du Bois is interrupted for 10 minutes. Power is restored when the company closes an open circuit breaker, but they could find no cause. (“Current Cut Off As Flying ‘Thing’ Appears in Illinois,” Lima (Ohio) Citizen, November 15, 1957, p. 10; Schopick, pp. 140–141)
Mid-November — The US Senate Committee on Government Operations, chaired by Sen. John L. McClellan (D-Ark.), begins an inquiry into UFOs. Ruppelt is called to give testimony. (Ruppelt, 1960 ed., p. 253)
November 16 — Afternoon. Cynthia Appleton blacks out unexpectedly at her home in 87 Fentham Road in Aston, a suburb of Birmingham, England. On November 19, she feels faint again as the light outside dims, and a man with blond hair and wearing coveralls materializes in the center of the room. She hears him speaking to her telepathically. He tells her not to be afraid and that he is from a world he calls Gharnasvarn (which we know as Venus) and he shows her what seems to be a holographic image of two spaceships. She has other visitations by entities on January 7 and February 7, 1958. In September 1958, the spaceman informs her that she is pregnant, which is apparently true, as she gives birth on June 2, 1958, to a boy with blond hair that she and her husband Ron name Matthew. Appleton says the Venusians visited her a few more times, but the trail grows cold in July 1960. (“Birmingham Woman Meets Spacemen,” Flying Saucer Review 4, no. 2 (March/April 1958): 5–6; Jenny Randles, “A Visitor from Gharnasvarn,” IUR 13, no. 4 (July/Aug. 1988): 4–8; Birmingham Sunday Mercury, January 26, 2003; Andy Roberts, “The Space Baby,” Fortean Times 191 (December 2004): 32–38; Bill Chalker, “Flying Saucery, Cosmic Bethlehem, and Midwich Cuckoos: The Cynthia Appleton Contacts (1957–1959),” Australian UFO Researcher Bill Chalker, 2005)
November 17 — An Air Force car with two officers comes to UFO witness Olden Moore’s house in Montville, Ohio. He is told they are taking him to Washington, D.C., for extended questioning. They drive him to a waiting airplane, which stops briefly at Wright-Patterson AFB to pick up one officer and drop another off. In Washington, Moore is housed in a building said to be a federal courthouse [US Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces?]. He is kept there and interrogated for several days. Officers watch him constantly, even when he is sleeping. Toward the end of his stay, Moore is shown slides of UFO photos and a UFO film taken from inside a military plane. Moore is asked to sign a document that swears him to secrecy. (UFOEv, p. 114; Clark III 773)
November 21 — The Army Chief of Research and Development responds to CONARC’s October 22 request on the feasibility of building a manned “flying saucer,” stating that he had reviewed the Avrocar disc concept and that it looked promising. (Richard P. Weinert, History of Army Aviation, 1950–1962, US Army Training and Doctrine Command, November 1976, pp. 220–221; Wikipedia, “Avro Canada VZ-9 Avrocar”)
November 21 — Merchant Hans Haugaard Hansen is driving out of Gesten, Denmark, on the road to Egholt when he sees a triangular UFO moving low over a field some 300–600 feet away. It is emitting a red or orange light and makes no sound. The bottom of the object is solid, but the upper part is transparent, and he can see two figures inside. He stops the car to watch as it moves about 40 mph. Similar objects are seen at Jordrup and Vorbasse. (“Flying Saucer Reports Pour in from Denmark,” Flying Saucer Review 4, no. 4 (July/Aug. 1958): 2; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1957, November 13th–30th, The Author, 1998, p. 56; Willy Wegner, “UFO bogen, Kapitel 19: Rumfolkene viser sig,” Skeptica, September 1, 2004)
November 21 — Night. Frank Dickenson and two friends are driving up Reasty Hill near the village of Silpho, North Yorkshire, England, when their car stalls and they see a glowing object in the sky that appears to fall to the ground on a ridge above Broxa Forest. Dickenson leaves the car with a flashlight, climbs up a bank, and finds in a patch of bracken a metallic saucer shaped like a “large flattish spinning top,” 18 inches in diameter and weighing 33 pounds. As he returns to tell his friends, he passes a young couple walking toward the scene. When the tree men return to search for it, the disc is gone. Dickenson places an advertisement in a Scarborough newspaper about the disc, and he is able to recover it for £10 from a man who claims he was the mystery man on the moor. Photos taken by UFO researcher John Dale show that the copper base of the object is inscribed with a mystery script. The top of the disc is made from layers of laminated metal that has been painted with a white substance. The two halves are stuck together with a grayish substance resembling cellulose, and a pencil-thick iron rod runs through a “white metal bearing” in the top. When the bearing is drilled out, they find a heap of ash inside the cavity, as well as pieces of fused glass and a tightly rolled cylinder of copper. Also inside is a tiny booklet of 17 sheets of thin copper foil fastened at one edge. The booklet is engraved with script similar to that found on the outside. The coded script is translated by a café proprietor from Scarborough named Philip Longbottom, who claims the 2,000- word inscription is from an alien named Ulo, with later text added by an apparently female companion named Tarngee. A metallurgist at the University of Manchester analyzes the disc and finds the outer casing is made primarily from lead, and the copper foil is triple laminated an unusually free from impurities. In 2017, David Clarke discovers that five specimens from the Silpho disc have been preserved in a tin cigarette box housed in London’s Science Museum. The specimens were sent to aviation historian Charles Harvard Gibbs-Smith in 1963 by Essex ufologist C. C. Stevens for analysis. Gibbs-Smith judged the items to be of terrestrial origin, and they were donated to the Science Museum with his papers after his death in 1981. Veteran Scarborough Evening News editor Mick Jefferson said in 2003 the newspaper had long ago exposed the object as a hoax made from a “domestic hot-water cylinder.” However, the hoaxers have never surfaced. (“The Silpho Moor Mystery,” Flying Saucer Review 4, no. 2 (March/April 1958): 4; “Silpho Moor Controversy,” Flying Saucer Review 4, no. 4 (July/Aug. 1958): 19; Philip Longbottom, “The Silpho Moor Mystery,” Flying Saucer Review 4, no. 6 (Nov./Dec. 1958): 15–17; Jenny Randles, UFO Retrievals, Blandford, 1995, pp. 77–82; David Clarke, “The Return of the Silpho Moor Saucer,” Fortean Times 364 (March 2018): 42–46)
November 23 — 6:10 p.m. Fighter pilot 1st Lt. Joseph F. Long’s car engine stalls 30 miles west of Tonopah, Nevada. He hears a high-pitched whining noise and sees four 50-foot, domed, saucer-shaped UFOs landed on the right side of the road about 900–1,200 feet away. They are glowing brightly and equipped with three landing gears. Long estimates they are about 10–15 feet tall. When he approaches to within 50 feet of the closest object, the hum increases in intensity and Long’s ears begin to hurt. The objects take off abruptly, retracting the landing gears.
The rise about 50 feet into the air and proceed across the highway to the north at about 10 mph. The total time of the sighting is 20 minutes. Shallow, bowl-shaped ground impressions in the shape of a triangle are found at the landing site. (NICAP, “Four Huge Saucers Land near Car, Engine Stalls”; Hynek UFO Report, pp. 182–186; Good Need, pp. 222–223, 228; Sparks, p. 259; Randle, Levelland, 2021, pp. 101–106)
November 23 — 7:30 p.m. Six truck drivers watch a strange object with three lights in a triangular pattern hovering above a field off State Highway 8 just north of the Butler Valley Turnpike exit in Richland Township, Allegheny
County, Pennsylvania. It has a green light at the bottom, a red light at the right corner, and a yellow light at the left corner. They get out of their car and approach the object, but when they are 75 feet away, it moves to the east, then south. They go back to the car and shine their lights on the object, which is about 20 feet above some trees. The lights go out and the object disappears. (“3-Lighted ‘Whatsit’ Floats over Field,” Pittsburgh (Pa.) Sun- Telegraph, November 27, 1957, p. 3)
November 25 — 10:00 p.m. All the lights in the town of Mogi Mirim, São Paulo, Brazil, suddenly dim and fail.
Numerous people see a circular light traveling directly overhead. Two similar lights follow a short time later. The blackout only lasts 5 minutes, but the power station has no explanation. (Schopick, pp. 141–142)
November 27 — The director of an engineering firm and four of his staff members see five black, disc-shaped objects hovering in the French Alps for 8 minutes. The group performs a series of maneuvers, after which a parachute- shaped object emerges from one of them. Suddenly they all shoot away at supersonic speed toward the Swiss border. (Lorenzen, UFOs: The Whole Story, Signet, 1969, p. 87)
November 28 — 8:30 p.m. Regino Lacuesta is driving on the Hawaii Belt Road near Ninole, Hawaii, when his car engine begins missing. Suddenly he sees a bright flash of light 20 feet above the highway in front of him. The engine dies, the headlights go out, and the car rolls to a stop at the point where the light had been. Lacuesta feels numb and cannot move. Soon the headlights come on and the car starts up again, although it is in high gear and he has not touched the starter. He drives straight home. (Schopick, pp. 49–51)
November 29 — 2:30 a.m. Capt. Fred Sutton, skipper of the fishing trawler Ella Hewett, is 4 miles off Port Jack, Douglas, Isle of Man, when an orange ball of fire crosses the sky. As it passes over the hull of the small boat, the vessel grows luminous, with firefly-like sparks of luminescence everywhere. The fireball bursts like fireworks, seen by others on the island as well as Scotland. The crew notices that the white paint on the metal railings at the edge of the boat has disappeared, leaving only the red undercoating. At daybreak, however, the paintwork is perfectly normal again. (Jenny Randles, “Mysterious Island: The UFO Legacy of the Isle of Man,” IUR 29, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 13–14)
November 29 — Two German expatriates, G. R. Miczaika and Eberhart W. Wahl, form Project Space Track in Building 1535 of the Geophysics Research Directorate at the Air Force Cambridge Research Center at Hanscom AFB in Bedford, Massachusetts. Its mission is to track and compute orbits for all artificial earth satellites and space probes, including US and Soviet payloads, booster rockets, and debris. (Wikipedia, “Project Space Track”)
December — National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) 11-10-57 predicts that the Soviets will “probably have a first operational capability with up to 10 prototype ICBMs” at “sometime during the period from mid-1958 to mid- 1959.” The numbers of the missile gap start to inflate. (Wikipedia, “Missile gap”)
December — A classified Canadian Department of National Defence memorandum states that the “RCAF has no official policy concerning the subject” of UFOs and “there has never been a serious investigation of any report on file” at RCAF headquarters. (Gregory M. Kanon, “UFOs and the Canadian Government, Part One,” no. 22 (1975): 22)
December — Several UFO sightings take place along the Finland-Russia border. A cigar-shaped object is seen by two Finnish farmers moving horizontally at a high altitude from west to east. (Good Above, pp. 307–308)
December — Walter K. Buhler launches the Sociedade Brasiliera de Estudos sobre Discos Voadores in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It publishes the Boletim SBEDV through 1988. (Boletim SBEDV, no. 1 (December 1957))
December — Night. Edmund Rucker is awakened by a roaring noise in El Cajon, California, and watches a strange object land near his house. Its windows are lighted and he can see some strange-looking heads inside. An opening becomes visible, and four creatures emerge. They have large heads, dome-like foreheads, and bulging eyeballs.
They deliver a message to Rucker in English, saying they have philanthropic and scientific purposes. (Patrick Gross, URECAT, July 28, 2007; Mark Cashman, “Behavioral Classification System for UFO Occupants,” IUR 24, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 19)
December — Keyhoe is invited to appear on the CBS Armstrong Circle Theater anthology drama TV program hosted by Douglas Edwards to talk about UFOs with Kenneth Arnold and Clarence S. Chiles. Others invited are Edward J. Ruppelt, Donald Menzel, and an Air Force representative. But Keyhoe finds out that it will not be a panel discussion but a scripted conversation, and he will only have 7 minutes. He is promised he will have final say over his part of the script, and he agrees. However, writer Irve Tunick cuts out critical portions of Keyhoe’s material (including references to the Estimate of the Situation and the Robertson Panel), saying it is too long.
Ruppelt, Chiles, and Arnold soon withdraw from the program, expanding Keyhoe’s segment to 11 minutes. (Clark III 167–168)
December 1 — 1:30 a.m. Swissair pilot Walter Borner is flying a DC-6B at 18,000 feet over Ras El-Kanayis, Egypt, when he sees a “giant, red, burning cylinder falling down vertically, leaving a yellowish trail.” It is possible that this is
the reentry of the final stage of the rocket that launched Sputnik I. (Luis Schoenherr, “Unknown Missiles,” IUR
19, no. 6 (Nov./Dec. 1994): 22)
December 3 — 2:30 p.m. Z. Thad Fogl, radio officer of the SS Ramsey, claims to have taken a photo of a saucer off the coast of San Pedro, California. The photo appears in Flying Saucer Review in 1959 and Life in 1966. However, in 1967 Fogl admits that he had faked the photo using parts of plastic airplane models. (NICAP, “Disc with Landing Gear Photo / Fogl Case”; “Radio Officer’s Amazing Story: UFO Snapped from Ship,” Flying Saucer Review 5, no. 1 (Jan./Feb. 1959): 6–7; “A Hoax Exposed,” Flying Saucer Review 12, no. 5 (Sept./Oct. 1966): 7)
December 3 — 7:00 p.m. Many residents of the Menastash Ridge area of Ellensburg, Washington, watch a “strange ball of fire” for 20 minutes. A truck driver sees the light hovering above his truck, causing the motor to cough and sputter. His engine does not stop completely, however, so he drives away. The night is misty, but the object is so bright that it lights up the sky as if it were daytime. (Schopick, pp. 51–52)
December 4 — Blue Book Capt. George T. Gregory complains that as a result of pressure from the press and public, “Assistant Secretary of Defense requested that ATIC immediately submit a preliminary analysis to the press” of the Levelland, Texas, cases, even though he has “limited data.” (J. Allen Hynek, The UFO Experience, Ballantine ed., 1974, p. 147)
December 6 — A letter written to contactee George Adamski on State Department stationery from R. E. Straith, Cultural Exchange Committee, is a hoax concocted by ufologists Gray Barker and James W. Moseley. The letter informs Adamski that the State Department knows his claims are true and they encourage his activities. (James D. Villard, “The ‘R. E. Straith’ Case,” Saucers 6, no. 4 (Winter 1958/1959): 2–6; Clark III 44–45; Saucer Smear, January 10, 1985; Lou Zinsstag and Timothy Good, George Adamski: The Untold Story, Ceti, 1983, pp. 148–153; James W. Moseley and Karl T. Pflock, Shockingly Close to the Truth! Confessions of a Grave-Robbing Ufologist, Prometheus, 2002, pp. 124–127, 381–402; Marc Hallet, A Critical Appraisal of George Adamski: The Man Who Spoke to the Space Brothers, The Author, 2016)
December 7 — 10:00 p.m. In western Victoria and eastern South Australia, witnesses see a moon-like object explode with a vivid flash. Unexpected blackouts are reported in the area. (Lorenzen, UFOs: The Whole Story, Signet, 1969, p. 87)
December 8 — 5:30 p.m. A disc-shaped UFO with a dome and three pads on the underside suddenly comes toward a car with three passengers at Woodward, Oklahoma. The car heater, wipers, and radio fail and finally the car stalls out as the UFO hovers overhead at 200 feet. It emits a high-pitched whining sound. It is over 50 feet in diameter and has portholes. The whine increases in pitch after about two minutes, and the UFO rises vertically out of sight. The headlights come on and the engine of the car starts by itself. The driver spends 4 hours with two officers from Kirtland AFB in New Mexico who tell him of similar observations. (Vallée, Magonia, pp. 267–268)
December 8 — 9:00 p.m. Eight people traveling together in two cars on Highway 17 between Coulee City and Soap Lake, Washington, see a huge, fiery object pass overhead from north to south. Both cars stall out and their headlights also fail as the UFO passes overhead. In addition, the inside dome lights come on, even though they aren’t turned on. The cars remain stalled until the object passes out of sight. Police say the object stalled as many as six cars along that sparsely traveled road. (Schopick, pp. 52–53)
December 11 — Night. Mexican pilot Gilberto Castillo del Valle is flying at 10,000 feet near Mexico City when a brilliant light illuminates his cockpit. He turns off the aircraft lights and sees a large luminous object darting from left to right and back again ahead of him. Passengers and crew also see the light, as do personnel at the Mexico City control tower. (Lorenzen, UFOs; The Whole Story, Signet, 1969, p. 88)
December 5 — Morning. An unidentified beeping sound is picked up for three minutes on KBR Rural Public Power Radio in Ainsworth, Nebraska, operating at 72.3 AM. (“Unidentified Beeping Heard on KBR Power Radio on Thursday,” Ainsworth (Neb.) Star-Journal, December 12, 1957, p. 1)
December 12 — A USAF pilot attains 1,208 mph in a McDonnell F-101A Voodoo at Edwards AFB, California. (Wikipedia, “McDonnell F-101 Voodoo”)
December 12 — 5:45 p.m. At least 13 witnesses see a bright light over the Sea of Japan. The object is tracked on radar and seen through binoculars. At 7:22 p.m., a scramble is ordered and two F-86D’s take off from Misawa Air Base, Japan. Multiple radar and visual sightings take place over the next three days. (NICAP, “Jets Scrambled after Radar/Visual UFO”; Sparks, p. 261)
December 14 — Night. Ed Waslashi sees a lighted green object fall into a haystack on his farm at Langdon, North Dakota. He picks out a strange metallic substance from the ashes of the burned hay. The material finds its way to geologist Nicholas N. Kohanowski at the University of North Dakota, who finds that it is light, porous, and mostly magnesium dioxide. (“What Is It?” Winona (Minn.) Daily News, December 17, 1957, p 1; Lorenzen, UFOs: The Whole Story, Signet, 1969, p. 87)
December 15 — 1:00–2:00 a.m. Three young men see a huge light in the sky at Almind, Denmark. It is oval-shaped, emits red or orange rays, and appears to be descending. They watch it for 18–19 minutes as it hovers at a 10° angle and quivers. Suddenly it becomes still and from its center emerge two small objects that drift away in a northerly direction and soon disappear. The large object lies on its side and quivers some more. Later it ascends and a fan-shaped tail of light spreads after it. The UFO is seen later along the coast and photographed. (“Flying Saucer Reports Pour in from Denmark,” Flying Saucer Review 4, no. 4 (July/Aug. 1958): 2; Herbert S. Taylor, “Satellite Objects: A Further Look,” IUR 29, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 25)
December 16 — Between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m. Mary M. Starr, a resident of Old Saybrook, Connecticut, and a former teacher with a master’s degree from Yale, is awakened by a bright light in her room. A cigar-shaped object, brightly lit and with square portholes, hovers just above her clothesline. She can see men inside. The object is approximately 20–30 feet long and dark gray or black in color, hovering motionless about 5 feet above the ground. Through its lighted windows Starr sees two figures that pass each other, walking in opposite directions. (Donald E. Keyhoe and Gordon I. R. Lore, eds, UFOs: A New Look, NICAP, 1969, pp. 27–28; Clark III 269)
December 17 — Skandinavisk UFO Information is founded in Denmark by Hans-Christian Petersen under the name Sydjysk UFO Information. It publishes the journal UFO-Nyt from 1958 to 2010. (Wikipedia, “Skandinavisk UFO Information”)
December 17 — The US conducts its first successful launch of an SM-65A Atlas missile at Cape Canaveral, Florida. (Wikipedia, “SM-65A Atlas”)
December 18 — Luis E. Corrales of Caracas, Venezuela, finds an odd luminous streak on a photographic plate recording the passage of Sputnik 2. It is a luminous trail running parallel to the satellite’s trail, then veering away. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1957 December, The Author, 1998, p. 57)
December 21 — 6:30 p.m. Yvonne Torres de Mendonça, her three small children, and a servant are traveling in a jeep driven by her mechanic, Marcio Gonçalves, towards Ponta Porã, Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil, along the Paraguayan border. They see a large ball of light about the size of the full moon that starts moving toward them, and they realize that it is two lights flying silently side by side. The lights straddle the road, oscillating from one side to the other in a strange wobbling motion and spinning on their axes. One of them stops in mid-air and dives toward the ground in a falling-leaf motion 60 feet ahead of them, while the other maneuvers in circles around the jeep. The lights are spherical and encircled by a Saturn-like ring at the center. The upper hemisphere and rim are fiery red, while the lower hemisphere is silvery white. The two objects follow the jeep for 2 hours, all the way to town, maneuvering intelligently around them, especially when the jeep stops twice to evaluate the objects. (Olavo
T. Fontes, “Shadow of the Unknown, Part II: UAOs Chase Cars,” APRO Bulletin, March 1959, pp. 3–6; Lorenzen, UFOs: The Whole Story, Signet, 1969, pp. 148–150; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1957 December, The Author, 1998, pp. 60–63; Clark III 245–246)
December 30 — Night. George Chowanski is cutting wood at his home in Schooley’s Mountain, New Jersey, when his two dogs begin to bark and howl. He hears a whirring noise like an electric shaver that persists for one minute. Then he sees a saucer-shaped object, 5 feet high and 15 feet wide, hovering about 2 feet above the ground in a grove of trees 100 feet from the back porch. Three individuals come out of the craft and walk about in the clearing. One of them bends over to pick something up and carries something heavy back to the object. After 2–3 minutes, it slowly rises, spiraling through the tall trees, and flies off. (Lorenzen, UFOs: The Whole Story, Signet, 1969, pp. 88–89)
1958
1958 — The Atomic Energy Commission puts a barbed wire fence around Area 13 at the Nellis Air Force Range, Nevada, where the Project 57 “dirty bomb” had been detonated in April 1957, with signs indicating “do not enter / nuclear material.” (Jacobsen, Area 51, p. 297)
1958 — Project Orion, an effort to build a nuclear-powered spacecraft, begins at a maximum-security facility in Area 25 of the Nevada Test Site. Led by Ted Taylor of General Atomics and physicist Freeman Dyson, its initial focus is to send astronauts to Mars and back. The spaceship would be 16 stories tall and piloted by 150 men. Soon ARPA and the Air Force take over the project and redesign it for a space-based battleship that could launch nuclear missiles from space. But no one builds Orion and it is effectively disbanded by the 1963 nuclear test ban. (Wikipedia, “Project Orion (nuclear propulsion)”; Jacobsen, Area 51, pp. 304–305)
1958 — French ufologist Aimé Michel publishes Flying Saucers and the Straight-Line Mystery, an examination of the UFO wave of September–October 1954 in France. The book’s preface is written by Gen. Lionel-Max Chassin, in which he expresses his opinion that UFOs are genuinely mysterious (“That strange things have been seen is now
beyond question, and the ‘psychological’ explanations seem to have misfired”). Michel contends that each day’s sightings, when plotted on a map, occur along straight-line paths, even though different objects seem to figure in each sighting. The alignments, which he calls “orthotenic lines,” do not necessarily correspond to a trajectory.
However, Jacques Vallée later concludes that the alignments can be explained by chance alone. (Aimé Michel, Flying Saucers and the Straight-Line Mystery, Criterion, 1958; “An Evaluation of Aimé Michel’s Study of the Straight Line Mystery,” in C. A. Maney and Richard Hall, The Challenge of Unidentified Flying Objects, NICAP, 1961, pp. 90–98; Jacques Vallee and Janine Vallee, Challenge to Science: The UFO Enigma, Regnery, 1966, pp. 57–82; Don Johnson, “New Lines in UFO Research: Orthoteny Revisited,” IUR 25, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 18–19, 32; Claude Maugé, “Orthoteny: Lost Cause, or a Redeemed One?” IUR 25, no. 3 (Fall 2000): 24–28; Clark III 747, 858–860)
1958 — Trevor James Constable writes They Live in the Sky, which explains UFOs as etheric (good) and astral (bad) entities that are engaged in a battle for control of earthly minds. He bases this on his analysis of occult texts and channeled communications from cosmic informant Ashtar. The astral entities are based inside the earth, but they can leave it through an opening in the South Pole and fly 125,000 miles into space. Only the atomic bomb can penetrate the astral realm, which is why astrals disguised as benevolent Space Brothers argue fervently for nuclear disarmament. The men in black are reincarnated versions of Richard Shaver‘s deros. (Trevor James [Constable]. They Live in the Sky, New Age, 1958; Trevor James [Constable], “Scientists, Contactees, and Equilibrium,” Flying Saucer Review 6, no. 1 (Jan./Feb. 1960): 19–21; Clark III 1102)
1958 — Night. A sergeant in charge of a fire truck crash crew at an air base in South Korea is positioned near the runway awaiting an emergency landing by an American jet fighter low on fuel. The men see a bright light approaching from across the Yellow Sea. It grows bigger and, within several hundred yards of the shore, stops and hovers. The control tower operators, watching the object through binoculars, do not know what it is. Suddenly the object shines a beam of light straight down on the water. It soon goes out, but the water remains luminescent for a while before fading out. The object again shines a light on the water and turns it off a minute or so later. By this time, the jet that is low on fuel is landing. A second jet is asked to check out the object, which instantly shoots back toward China and disappears in seconds. (Bob Pratt, UFO Danger Zone: Terror and Death in Brazil—Where Next?, Horus House, 1996, online ed., p. 164; Carl W. Feindt, “Beam of Light into a Body of Water,” IUR 33, no. 3 (December 2010): 22)
January — The US Senate Committee on Government Operations asks to meet with representatives from the Secretary of the Air Force Office of Legislative Action to discuss the possibility of holding open hearings on the Air Force UFO program. USAF fears “uncontrolled publicity,” but agrees to go along with it. Soon, however, Richard E. Horner, USAF assistant secretary for research and development, persuades the committee’s chief counsel, Donald O’Donnell, that hearings are “not in the best interest of the air force,” nor necessary for national security. Horner says Project Blue Book has things well in hand, and he tells Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.) that allegations about the Air Force withholding information are “entirely in error.” People who report UFOs simply want confidentiality, and the Air Force respects that. (Jacobs, UFO Controversy in America, Signet ed., 1976, pp. 140– 141, 144)
January — Lackland AFB in San Antonio, Texas, asks for Keyhoe’s permission to use The Flying Saucer Conspiracy to develop a script for closed-circuit broadcast at the base. Keyhoe agrees. (Keyhoe, FSTS, p. 218)
January — 1:30 a.m. A woman is driving along the New York State Thruway near Niagara Falls, New York, when she sees an illuminated 50-foot pole in the center parkway ahead. It seems to be retracting and getting shorter. As she closes in on it, her engine stops and the headlights go out. The pole is attached to a saucer-shaped object, and she sees shadowy figures floating around it. The UFO rises and moves away, and she starts the car again. An area of snow a foot in diameter has melted dry where the pole has been. (Michael D. Swords, “Messing Around with the Force,” IUR 31, no. 4 (Mar. 2008): 16)
January 3 — Cliff DeLacey, a 23-year-old college student from Vallejo, California, shoots 90 seconds of film of UFOs at Diamond Head, Hawaii. DeLacey sees nine UFOs flashing across the sky and immediately grabs his camera. He is careful enough to shoot the tops of nearby trees, allowing a reference to the height and relative speed of the unknown objects. The objects appear to be about 3–4 miles away from the camera, flying at an altitude of 7,000– 8,000 feet, and moving at a speed slightly greater than that of a jet. The silvery globules appear to be no more than 20 feet in diameter. They are spherical, and no tail fins or protrusions of any kind are visible. The film, in color, is said to be clear and to show at least two of the nine UFOs in considerable detail. (NICAP, “‘Genuine Flying Saucer…Caught on Movie Film’”; Max B. Miller and Norman S. Kossuth, “How to Film Unidentified Flying Objects,” Saucers 6, no. 3 (Autumn 1958): 8)
January 10 — Day. Capt. Chrysólogo Rocha is sitting with his wife on the porch of a house in Guarujá, São Paulo, Brazil, overlooking the South Atlantic. He is trying to focus with his binoculars on what appears to be a small island.
When he does get focused, he realizes the island is getting bigger and is in two parts, both a clear, gray color. One part is in the sea, while the other seems suspended above it. Without warning, both parts suddenly sink out of sight. Shortly afterwards, a steamer comes into view, on a course that will take it very close to the object. About 15 minutes later, when the ship is out of sight, the object again rises slowly out of the sea. He now sees clearly that the two parts are joined by several narrow upright shafts or tubes that are bright and visible to the naked eye. These shafts, “like beads on a necklace” pass in a “disorderly and simultaneous movement.” Shortly afterwards the two parts of the object close up again, and it disappears below the waves. Probably an inferior mirage of an island in combination with a towering effect. (Charles Bowen, “A South American Trio,” Flying Saucer Review 11, no. 1 (Jan./Feb. 1965): 20–21; Wim van Utrecht, “A UFO Dives in and Out of the Ocean,” Caelestia)
January 13 — 11:45 p.m. Brian Crittenden sees a dome-shaped light with a long narrow light underneath coming directly towards him as he is leaving a friend’s house southwest of Casino, New South Wales, Australia. He jumps into his car and heads home. The UFO chases his car along Benns Road, practically touching the telephone poles. His car radio develops interference when the UFO approaches him. It follows him all the way to town, 7 miles away. (Schopick, p. 81; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1958 January– February, The Author, 1998, p. 21)
January 16 — Around 12:00 noon. As the International Geophysical Year research ship Almirante Saldanha is anchored on the south side of Ilha da Trindade, Brazil, 730 miles off the coast in the Atlantic Ocean, the commander and many crew members, including photographer Almiro Baraúna, see a Saturn-shaped object maneuvering over the island. It reportedly comes toward the island from the east, flies towards the Pico Desejado, makes a steep turn, and goes away very quickly to the northwest. Baraúna takes four photos with a Rolleiflex 2.8 model E. Commander Paulo Moreira da Silva of the Brazilian Navy Hydrography and Navigation Department (who technically outranks the ship’s captain, José Santos de Saldanha da Gama), is apparently an eyewitness and states, “the object was encircled by a greenish glow, our [meteorological] balloon was of a red color.” Baraúna is officially there to take photos of the island, underwater photos, photos of the IGY activities, and the ship’s operations. The radar detection of an unexplained supersonic target reportedly occurs the day before, at about 12:05 p.m. There is a power failure on the ship when the object is seen; the power returns upon the object’s departure. Instruments like radio transmitters and apparatus with magnetic needles cease operating while the flying object remains in the island’s proximity. Willy Smith’s April 20, 1983, interview of Baraúna takes on more significance: “I asked if the object had been detected by ship’s radar. He [Baraúna] replied that it hadn’t because all the electrical power aboard ship was out at the time. He was sure of the reality of the power outage because just before the object appeared a launch was being hauled up from the water by electric pulley, and it stopped midway just as the UFO appeared!” The ship’s log is provably incomplete since it does not even mention the UFO photo incident. A 1999 analysis by Martin J. Powell seems to indicate that the object photographed is an airplane, distorted by Baraúna through a double-exposure process. In August 2010, a major TV show in Brazil airs information stating that the original photographer had made hoax photographs in the past. (Wikipedia, “Trindade Island UFO hoax”; Wikipedia, “Caso da Ilha da Trindade”; NICAP, “Trindade Island Photo (E-M, Radar, AR) Case”; Olavo T. Fontes, “The UAO Sightings at the Island of Trindade, Part 1,” APRO Bulletin, January 1960, pp. 5–9; Olavo T. Fontes, “UAO Sightings over Trindade, Part II,” APRO Bulletin, March 1960,
pp. 5–8; Olavo T. Fontes, “UAO Sightings at the Island of Trindade, Part III,” APRO Bulletin, May 1960, pp. 4– 9; John T. Hopf, “Exclusive IGY Photo Analysis,” APRO Bulletin, May 1960, pp. 1, 4; “New Evidence on IGY Photos,” APRO Bulletin, January 1965, pp. 1, 3–8; Lorenzen, UFOs: The Whole Story, Signet, 1969, pp. 205– 210; Willy Smith, “Trindade Revisited,” IUR 8, no. 4 (July/Aug. 1983): 3–5, 14; Willy Smith, “UFOs in Latin America,” UFOs 1947–1987, Fortean Tomes, 1987, pp. 109–111; Martin J. Powell, “The Trindade Island UFO: A Detailed Study of Photos 1 and 2,” Aenigmatis, Summer 1999; Don Berliner, with Marie Galbreath and Antonio Huneeus, UFO Briefing Document: The Best Available Evidence, Dell, 2000, pp. 71–77; Martin Shough, “The Trindade Island Photographs, 16 Jan 1958,” Aerial Phenomena Studies Index, 2004; Equipe UFO, “Documento raro sobre o caso Trindade ressurge no exterior,” Portal UFO, August 31, 2010; Sparks, p. 262; Story, pp. 366–369; Swords 463–465; Brazil 49–57; Clark III 1132–1136; Patrick Gross, “The Trindade Island Photographic Case of 1958”)
January 22 — The “UFO: The Enigma of the Skies” segment of Armstrong Circle Theater airs on CBS. USAF Reserve Lt. Col. Spencer Whedon from ATIC says all UFOs are explainable. Keyhoe comes on and starts reading his script for a few minutes, then shocks everyone by deviating from it, saying “And now, Mr. Edwards, I would like to make a disclosure, something which has never been revealed to the public. For the last six months our committee has been working with a Senate committee which is investigating official secrecy on UFOs. If the
hearings are held, open hearings, I feel it would prove beyond doubt that flying saucers are real—”. Then his microphone is cut off, although the filming continues. Menzel then appears, then USAF spokesman Richard E. Horner comes on afterward and says that the Air Force is not hiding anything about UFOs. Keyhoe later claims this is not censorship by the show, although he thinks it is the Air Force silence group at work. In April, CBS director of editing Herbert A. Carlborg tells NICAP that Keyhoe’s deviation “might lead to statements that neither this network nor the individuals on the program were authorized to release. As a consequence, public interest was served.” (Clark III 167–168; Keyhoe, FSTS, pp. 22–23, 155–165; “UFO Archives: Project Blue Book—Col.
Spenser Whedon, Dr. Donald Menzel, Major Donald Keyhoe” [audio only], UFO Archives YouTube channel, May 22, 2014; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1958 January– February, The Author, 1998, pp. 23, 28–30, 35–39; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1958 March–April, The Author, 1998, pp. 10–17; Swords 272; Good Above, pp. 286–287)
January 23 — Capt. G. H. Oldenburgh, public information officer at Langley AFB, Virginia, writes to a NICAP member who has been denied a request to place an ad in the base newspaper asking for UFO reports: “I felt it would encourage Air Force personnel to violate present Air Force policy and specifically AF Regulation 200-2.” (Frank Edwards, FS Serious Business, Bantam ed., 1966, p. 51)
January 26 — 4:00 p.m. Some chemical workers at Shimada, Japan, see a bright object land and claim that beings fell from the sky without parachutes. They wear strange suits and speak an unknown language. (“They Are Landing in Japan, Too,” Flying Saucer Review 4, no. 3 (May/June 1958): 33)
January 28 — Hillenkoetter announces that “two committees on Capitol Hill” are investigating the UFO controversy. Rep.
William Hanes Ayres (R-Ohio) writes a letter to constituent Melvin V. Knapp, saying that “Congressional investigations have been held and are still being held on the problem of unidentified flying objects (UFO’s). Since most of the material presented to the committees is classified, the hearings are never printed. When conclusions are reached, they will be released if possible.” (“Flying Saucer Proof Clouded by Air Force, Private Probers Say,” Rochester (N.Y.) Democrat and Chronicle, August 3, 1958, p. 8; UFOEv, p. 173)
January 30 — 11:45 p.m. Attorney José Valencia Dongo, his wife, and their nephew feel an electric shock as they are driving between Arequipa and Lima, Peru, at a point (roughly around the Yauca District) along the Pan American Highway 220 miles northwest of Arequipa. Several seconds later the headlights and engine of their car fails. They then see an inverted mushroom-shaped object, about 15 feet in diameter, descending from the sky. It hovers for about 8 minutes at a 150-foot altitude, glowing red. A truck and bus are also affected. (Civilian Saucer Intelligence, “Shapes in the Sky,” Fantastic Universe, 10, no. 4 (October 1958): 111; Charles A. Maney and Richard Hall, The Challenge of Unidentified Flying Objects, NICAP, 1961, p. 82; Schopick, pp. 58–59; Mark Rodeghier, UFO Reports Involving Vehicle Interference, CUFOS, 1981, p. 14)
January 31 — A meeting is held in the office of Assistant Secretary of the Air Force Richard E. Horner under the auspices of the Subcommittee on Investigations of the Senate Committee on Government Operations, even though Sen.
John L. McClellan (D-Ark.) and other senators are absent. The Air Force is represented by Maj. James F. Byrne, Maj. Joseph E. Boland, and Maj. Lawrence J. Tacker who meet with the subcommittee’s FBI liaisons. Tacker declares that USAF does not want a congressional investigation, and the McClellan effort dies immediately. (Swords 275)
January 31 — 10:48 p.m. The US launches its first satellite, Explorer 1, from Cape Canaveral Missile Annex, Florida. It is the first spacecraft to detect the Van Allen radiation belt. (Wikipedia, “Explorer 1”)
February — Keyhoe meets again with Rep. James C. Healey and tells him that the Armstrong Circle Theater incident was Air Force censorship. A few days later, Healey tells Keyhoe that the Air Force is claiming that the program proves “there are no such things as flying saucers.” Keyhoe gives Healey the facts about the 1956 Ryan case pointing to USAF ordering a commercial flight to pursue UFOs, citing the Meet the Millers tape from April 16, 1956, which he has obtained. He offers to get the committee a transcript. (Keyhoe, FSTS, pp. 166–167, 182–184)
February — Ufologist Raymond Veillith launches the UFO journal Lumières dans la Nuit in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, Haute-Loire, France. It continues on under various editors until at least 2018. (Lumières dans la Nuit, no. 1 (February 1958); Wikipedia, “Lumières dans la Nuit”; Story, p. 218)
February 2 — An elliptical UFO with two porthole-like markings is seen somewhere in New South Wales, Australia. (UFOEv, p. 137)
February 3 — OTC Enterprises runs a two-page ad in a Baltimore, Maryland, newspaper and distributes a well-printed brochure announcing that Otis T. Carr has approached the US government and offered to build it a working spacecraft called the OTC-X1—circular, 45 feet in diameter and 15 feet high—for $20 million. He sets a date of December 7, 1959, to take a three-man crew on the spacecraft on a round trip to the Moon. Some press accounts treat Carr as if he is a real scientist. (Clark III 860)
February 5 — The Air Force revises AFR 200-2 and recreates the system of air base commanders conducting initial investigations of sightings in their areas. It also continues ATIC’s responsibility to “reduce the percentage of unidentifieds to the minimum.” (Department of the Air Force, “Intelligence: Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO),” Air Force Regulation 200-2, February 5, 1958; Department of the Air Force, “Intelligence: Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO),” Air Force Regulation 200-2A, July 3, 1958)
February 7 — In response to the launching of Sputnik, President Eisenhower creates the Advanced Research Projects Agency and houses it in the Pentagon. (Wikipedia, “DARPA”)
February 17 — Evening. Flora Evans and Bernice McIntosh twice encounter an intensely brilliant orange light about 15 feet in diameter that sends out peculiar grid-like or diamond-shaped patterns and lights up a canyon northeast of Alcalde, New Mexico, along State Highway 68. The two women are temporarily blinded. Their trip home to Albuquerque inexplicably takes 4 hours instead of the normal 2 hours. Both witnesses are exhausted and have burned or reddened areas on their skin, some on their kneecaps and the back of their lower legs, even though they have not left the car. Evans has a reddened area shaped like a triangle on her back. An acquaintance, Paul Boyett, has a Geiger counter, with which he gets a high radiation count from both women on February 19. The next day Evans, who is working in some capacity in civil defense, goes to her doctor at the Lovelace Clinic in Albuquerque, to see about possible radiation burns and exposure. She overhears a comment about “178 roentgens” exposure, but the doctor says there is nothing to worry about. McIntosh’s symptoms (nausea, vomiting, rash) are initially more irritating but subside substantially, although both women have swellings in their lower legs, and both gain serious weight (some 50 pounds) over the next few months. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1958 January–February, The Author, 1998, pp. 60–64 ; Michael D, Swords, “Can UFOs Cause Physiological Effects? Part 2” IUR 34, no. 1 (Sept. 2011): 4–5; Swords 280–281;
Clark III 1–2, 950)
February 19 — 10:30 p.m. Cicero Claudino da Silva, Mustafa Esgaib, Alegario Campos, and João Manuel Vasquez are investigating the Ponta Porã case from December. They are at Porteiro Ortiz, Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil, along Highway 463 and shining their lights in the direction of the Paraguayan frontier when a reddish light appears and becomes larger, as if approaching them. The ground around their car is illuminated for a few seconds, and they realize that another red light is nearing them on the other side of the car. They head for Ponta Porã at breakneck speed. (Olavo T. Fontes, “The Shadow of the Unknown,” APRO Bulletin, March 1959, p. 6)
February 24 — 3:05 a.m. Attorney Carlos José de Costa Pereira, Manoel Mendes, and Antônio de Araujo are driving near Santo Antônio de Jesus, Bahia, Brazil. The car engine sputters and fails. All attempts to detect the trouble fail.
The next inhabited place is far away, so the travelers decide that the best thing to do is to sleep at that spot, beside the road. Next morning they will try to do something about their situation, getting help from some nearby village or farm. It was then that they notice a large luminous Saturn-shaped object silently approaching to about 240 feet from them and only 90 feet from the ground. It then descends in a falling-leaf pattern to about 12 feet. They can see it is about 60–75 feet in diameter with a rotating center section. Suddenly it climbs vertically to 600 feet, makes a tight circle, then tilts to 45° and makes a number of high-speed maneuvers, then descends again in a falling-leaf motion before shooting up vertically at tremendous speed. After this, the car starts easily and they proceed to Salvador. (Olavo T. Fontes, “The Shadow of the Unknown,” APRO Bulletin, May 1959, p. 7; Schopick, pp. 59–61)
February 28 — USAF Director of Information Gen. Arno H. Luehman naively inquires of the McClellan Senate subcommittee whether, based on its “preliminary informal investigation,” it would state that the Air Force is investigating UFOs and not withholding information. (Swords 275)
February 28 — Brig. Gen. João Adil Oliveira, chief of the Brazilian Air Force’s General Staff information service, tells O Globo that the UFO phenomenon is a “fact confirmed by material evidence. There are thousands of documents, photos, and sighting evidence demonstrating its existence.” (Good Need, p. 233)
February 28 — Police detective Faustin Gallegos and his wife Dorothy see something like a “large medicine ball” descend and land in their back yard in Miami, Florida. Outside, he sees a football-shaped object 20 inches long and 8 inches high, lined with “thousands of minute cells resembling those of a honeycomb. It is clear and pulsating. He touches it and his fingers leave marks. They put it in a jar, but it evaporates on the way to the police station. (Faustin Gallegos, “The Pulsing Honeycomb from Space,” Fate 11, no. 9 (September 1958): 40–43; Clark III 1102)
March — The Air Force releases parts of the 1953 Robertson Panel report, a mere three paragraphs recommending that “the national security agencies take immediate steps to strip the Unidentified Flying Objects of the special status they have been given and the aura of mystery they have unfortunately acquired.” (“CIA Evades, Then Denies Charge of Attempted UFO Censorship,” UFO Investigator 1, no. 4 (June 1958): 4)
March — A French Foreign Legionnaire on sentry duty at Bouamama, near Sidi Chami, Algeria, hears a whistling noise and sees an enormous, elliptical-shaped object descend and hover 115–131 feet above the ground 165 feet away. The object is surrounded by pale green light, and a relaxing emerald-green beam of light is coming from its base to the ground. Seemingly paralyzed, he stares at the object for 45–50 minutes. The noise returns, the object rises gently, and flies off at tremendous speed. (Joël Mesnard, “Tranquillizing Visitation at Bouahmama: An Algerian Report of 1958,” Flying Saucer Review 19, no. 3 (May/June 1973): 17–18)
March 2 — The Brazilian Navy, after an analysis of the January 16 Ilha da Trindade sighting and photos, offers an ambiguous conclusion: “the existence of personal testimonies and of a photographer, of some value given the circumstances involved permit the admission that there are indications of the existence of the UFO.” (Brazil Department of the Navy, “Clarification of the Observation of Unidentified Flying Objects Sighted on the Island of Trinidad, in the Period of 12/5/57 to 1/16/58,” March 2, 1958)
March 3 — Gen. Joe W. Kelly responds to Luehman, falsely stating that the Air Force has done “considerable work” with the McClellan subcommittee. (Swords 275–276)
March 8 — A USAF radar site in Korea tracks a UFO slowly descending from 77,000 to 25,000 feet. (UFOEv, p. 80)
March 8 — Keyhoe appears on ABC’s The Mike Wallace Interview and mentions the Estimate of the Situation, Fournet’s motion study, and the CIA Robertson Panel. Wallace surprises him by saying Assistant Secretary of the Air Force Richard E. Horner told his producers that the Senate Committee “show no interest in any hearings.” This is news to Keyhoe. Wallace also quotes from the Robertson Panel summary that was just released. A few days later, Keyhoe receives two letters from the Senate Committee confirming that it “does not intend to investigate the United States Air Force.” (“Major Donald Keyhoe Interviewed by Mike Wallace (1958),” pfreal1 YouTube channel, August 25, 2012; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1958 March–April, The Author, 1998, p. 9; Keyhoe, FSTS, pp. 189–190; Swords 272–273; “Mike Wallace Interview of Maj. Donald E. Keyhoe: A Sequel to the Arnstrong Circle Theater,” Journal of UFO History 2, no. 1 (March/April 2005): 8–11)
Late March — NICAP begins a new campaign to open another government UFO investigation. This time it approaches the Department of Justice, the National Security Council, the CIA, and the US Army. It receives rebuffs and denials. (Keyhoe, FSTS, p. 191)
April — Edgar Sievers begins publishing a pro-Adamski newsletter titled Approach in Pretoria, South Africa. It folds in March 1960. (Approach 1, no. 1 (April 1958))
April — 6:00 a.m. At some place along the Brazilian coast between Maceió and Paripueira, Alagoas, Brazil, Wilson Lustosa stops to ask some fishermen what they are looking at. He hears a humming sound and sees a disc-shaped object hovering about 50 feet above the ocean and 120 feet away. It has a small lighted dome on top and a band of square portholes around its midsection through which a red light is shining. Under the UFO the water seems disturbed. The object is visible for an hour. (Gordon W. Creighton, “A Brazilian Sighting,” Flying Saucer Review 10, no. 6 (Nov./Dec. 1964): 18)
Early April — Night. A 2-foot red blinking light frightens children over the Walnut housing area in Ellwood City, Pennsylvania. Police officers Joseph Scala and Emanuel Mavero investigate and watch the bright disc for 10 minutes. Their police radio malfunctions. They try to get closer, but it disappears when they get to the top of a hill. (C. W. Fitch, “Monitoring and Scanning Discs,” APRO Bulletin, September 1964, p. 5)
April 9 — A family in Cleveland, Ohio, sees a flight of nine UFOs that suddenly separates into two groups of four and five objects. (UFOEv, p. 15)
April 9 — 7:15 p.m. Mr. and Mrs. B. Mills are driving on St. Vincent Street in Nelson, New Zealand, when they see a bright-red triangular object with white lights around its perimeter. It is descending from the northeast at a 45° angle and moving across Tasman Bay. They see the object again, somewhat dimmer, around 8:00 p.m. from a friend’s house on Matipo Terrace. (“Triangular Object over New Zealand,” Flying Saucer Review 4, no. 4 (July/Aug. 1958): 6)
April 10 — A Danish fighter pilot reports seeing a formation of UFOs. They are also tracked on radar at Skrydstrup Airport in Vojens, Denmark. The pilot attempts to overtake them, but they accelerate and disappear. The commander of Fighter Wing Skrydstrup appeals to the public to report any UFOs. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1958 March–April, The Author, 1998, p. 69)
April 13 — 9:40 p.m. Lester Billheimer and Carl Kern watch an object shaped like a “solid right angle” glowing like a white neon light over Allentown, Pennsylvania. It travels northwest at first, then turns west and disappears after three seconds. (NICAP case file)
April 15 — Day. A witness in Broager, Denmark, sees a large, black, low-flying, triangular object. As it flies over town, a number of horseshoe-shaped objects emerge, emitting a strong light. Twenty other witnesses see a triangular
“spaceship” at the same time. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1958 March–April, The Author, 1998, p. 77)
April 25 — The officer for UFO investigation in Denmark, Lt. Col. Hans-Christian Petersen, tells the magazine B-T that multiple-witness sightings are commonplace and that the current Danish wave is comparable to that of the US 1952 wave. “Nothing is gained by rejecting all the accounts as fantasy,” he tells reporters. Petersen has founded the Skandinavisk UFO Information group in December with five other Danish military jet pilots. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1958 March–April, The Author, 1998, pp. 97–99)
May 4 — Dewey Fournet confirms, in a statement to NICAP, the existence of the Estimate of the Situation and his own motion study from 1952. (UFOEv, p. 110; Swords 509)
May 5 — 3:40 p.m. Experienced pilot Carlos Alejo Rodriguez is flying his Piper Cub in the vicinity of Capitán de Corbeta Naval Air Base [now part of Capitán de Corbeta Carlos A. Curbelo International Airport] near San Carlos, Uruguay, when a brilliant top-like object (symmetrical above and below) suddenly approaches his plane head-on. The UFO is about 45–60 feet in diameter, stops about 6,500 feet away and “rocked twice, in a balancing motion.” Rodriguez feels strong heat, so he removes his jacket and opens the aircraft windows. The UFO takes off abruptly toward the sea “at a fantastic speed,” leaving a thin vapor trail. (NICAP, “Top-Like Object Heats Up Piper Cub”; UFOEv, p. 120; Donald E. Keyhoe and Gordon I. R. Lore Jr., Strange Effects from UFOs, NICAP, 1969, p. 16)
May 6 — In a letter to NICAP member George Stocking of St. Petersburg, Florida, Ruppelt says he is “now convinced that the reports of UFO’s are nothing more than reports of balloons, aircraft, astronomical phenomena, etc. I don’t believe they are anything from outer space.” (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1958 May–July, The Author, 1999, p. 5)
May 7 — Keyhoe’s friend Lou Corbin has received from a military friend of Gen. Nathan Twining news that Twining is still concerned about UFOs. Keyhoe writes to him and receives a note from Twining’s executive officer, Col.
James C. Sherrill: “No effective means have been developed for the establishment of communication by radio or otherwise with unknown aerial objects. The technical obstacles involved in such an endeavor, I am sure, are quite obvious to you.” (Keyhoe, FSTS, pp. 198–199)
May 8 — US Rep. John E. Henderson (R-Ohio) writes to Secretary of Defense Neil H. McElroy asking about the status of UFO reports and the USAF investigation. ATIC decides to give Henderson a formal briefing. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1958 May–July, The Author, 1999, pp. 5–8, 42; Swords 276)
May 13 — 12:15 p.m. A Royal Canadian Air Force Dakota DC-3 is flying to RCAF Station Cold Lake, Alberta, from Victoria, British Columbia. When it changes its heading about 25 miles southwest of Calgary, Alberta, a large, thick, black cloud suddenly appears directly across their flight path at the same altitude. Their VHF communications with Cold Lake and Calgary suddenly cease working. The cloud has indistinct, hazy edges, and it increases in size as they approach at about 155 mph. The pilot unsuccessfully tries to radio Calgary to request a flight path change to avoid the cloud, which is now about 10 miles away. Suddenly he sees a brilliant white pinpoint of light materialize in the dark mass. It grows in size, forming a brilliant ball that quickly approaches the aircraft on a collision course. He braces himself, but the light disappears, and the black cloud vanishes. (Don Ledger, “Two Spherical UAP Cases Witnessed by Pilots in Canadian Airspace,” IUR 33, no. 2 (July 2010): 7–9)
May 15 — The Soviets launch Sputnik 3 from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. (Wikipedia, “Sputnik 3”)
May 15 — Lackland AFB’s chief of education planning for the officer candidate school, Maj. Warren Akin, suggests, at a meeting of the Junior Chamber of Commerce in San Antonio, Texas, that UFOs are spacecraft. (“Visitors from Outer Space Already May Have Visited Us, Major Says,” San Antonio (Tex.) Express, May 16, 1958, p. 2)
May 16 — USAF Capt. Walter W. Irwin reaches 1,404 mph in a Lockheed YF-104A Starfighter at Edwards AFB, California. (Wikipedia, “Lockheed F-104 Starfighter”)
May 31–June 1 — The fifth Interplanetary Spacecraft Convention takes place at Giant Rock, near Landers, California. Dana Howard, Truman Bethurum, John McCoy, Wayne Aho, Daniel Fry, and Reinhold O. Schmidt join host George Van Tassel for two days of contactee conviviality. (Dana Howard, “Dana Howard Reporting the Giant Rock Convention, 1958,” Flying Saucer Review 4, no. 4 (July/Aug. 1958): 20–21, 25)
Summer — At an unidentified Air Force base in the Southwest US, two jets are vectored in on two UFOs flying together as seen on radar. As the jets close in, one UFO disappears from the radarscope and quickly reappears behind the first jet. The first pilot reverses his course and again tries to close in. The UFO climbs out of range. The second pilot has the same difficulty with the other UFO. (“UFO Chase by AF Jets Revealed to NICAP,” UFO Investigator 1, no. 8 (June 1959): 7)
Summer — Evening. A mechanic at Holloman AFB, New Mexico, allegedly sees a disc-like craft hovering silently above the tarmac. As the object retracts its landing gear, he manages to alert another mechanic in time for them both to see it take off at high speed. The Air Force officers who interrogate them tell them the object was also seen by control tower operators. (Good Need, p. 223)
June — A USAF officer secretly meets with Keyhoe and gives him three UFO reports and warns him that the Air Force will ask him for “certain UFO information. Think it over carefully before you decide.” NICAP could be in trouble, he says. Two days later, NICAP receives a request from the Air Force requesting any cases that indicate intelligent maneuvers by UFOs. Keyhoe refuses the request, sensing a setup. (Keyhoe, FSTS, pp. 199, 232–233)
June — Richard H. Hall joins NICAP as executive secretary and associate editor. (Keyhoe, FSTS, pp. 30, 208)
June — Lackland AFB in San Antonio, Texas, has prepared a 17-page TV script based on a straightforward interpretation of Keyhoe’s The Flying Saucer Conspiracy, even including the 1953 Moncla case. The script states that “the most logical explanation is that the saucers are interplanetary.” It also says that USAF has “concealed information which was thought to be of danger because of the impending possibility of hysteria and panic.” Keyhoe approves the script, but Lackland withdraws it from consideration by December. (Keyhoe, FSTS, pp. 219–227)
June — 4:00 a.m. A woman doctor at a resort at Sinaia, Romania, sees a silvery domed disc traveling slowly and silently toward the southeast at 1,500 feet. On its underside it has a bluish triangular section with rounded points. It passes within 900 feet of her hotel. (Hobana and Weverbergh 159–160)
June — 9:00 p.m. B. Muratov and his father are returning home to Chimbay, Uzbekistan, after a fishing expedition to the Aral Sea. They notice a disc-shaped object approaching them directly at low altitude from the northeast. It flies over them and see that its diameter is about 82 feet and it is traveling at 150–180 mph. Its hull is shiny and one side shines with a red color. A pipe is attached to one side, and it gives off a steady “zing zing zing” sound. (Stonehill and Mantle, Russia’s USO Secrets, Flying Disk, 2020, p. 123)
June 1 — 11:15 a.m. Bjørn Taraldsen, Nils M. Turi, Kate Julsen, and Rasmus Hykkerud watch a silent “unknown aircraft” like a twin-engine, delta-wing jet with no identifying marks plunge into the Altafjord, Troms og Finnmark, Norway. A column of water rises up, and dead fish float to the surface. The frigate KNM Arendal and the submarine KNM Sarpen, along with divers, search fruitlessly for more than a week, although the Arendal does get a sonar reading of a mobile object. (Ole Jonny Brænne, “Observations of Unidentified Submarine Objects in Norway,” IUR 20, no. 1 (Jan./Feb. 1995): 12)
June 3 — Physicist Freeman Dyson in Princeton, New Jersey, writes a speculative paper on “The Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation” in which he discusses how an advanced civilization might be visible from Earth. He suggests that the logical endpoint of the drive to capture as much energy from a sun would be for engineers to completely enclose it in a hollow sphere. Once the builders have completed it, the only light visible from their star would be the muted infrared glow of radiation heat. Such a structure, which becomes known as a “Dyson sphere,” would be a sure sign of an advanced race. (Freeman J. Dyson, “Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation,” Science 131 (1960): 1667–1668; Wikipedia, “Dyson sphere”)
June 6 — Keyhoe writes to NICAP member George Stocking saying that Ruppelt has a job at an aircraft company that contracts with the Air Force and thus might be playing it safe about UFOs. (Clark III 1023)
June 10 — MP George Chetwynd in the UK House of Commons asks the Air Ministry how many instances of UFOs were reported in the past 12 months and what steps were taken to look into them. Under-Secretary of State for Air Ian Orr-Ewing replies that 54 reports were received and that most were meteors, balloons, aircraft, and satellites. (“Unsatisfactory Answer to M.P.’s Question on UFOs by Undersecretary for Air,” Flying Saucer Review 4, no. 4 (July/Aug. 1958): 5; Good Above, p. 51)
June 20 — USAF Maj. Joseph E. Boland and Maj. Lawrence J. Tacker brief Rep. John E. Henderson (R-Ohio) for one hour on the status of Air Force UFO investigations in the Capitol building in Columbus, Ohio. Also in attendance are Rep. William C. Cramer (R-Fla.), and Rep. Donald H. Magnuson (D-Wash.). Afterward, the legislators express confidence in the investigation and agree that publicity is unwise, “particularly in an open or closed formal congressional hearing.” (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1958 May–July, The Author, 1999, pp. 48–50; Swords 276–277)
June 25 — 8:05 p.m. Rádio Renascença in Lisbon, Portugal, broadcasts a Portuguese-language version of The War of the Worlds with only the names of characters and places changed. The Martians are supposedly landing in Caracavelos, Portugal. A certain amount of confusion results. (John Gosling, Waging the War of the Worlds, McFarland, 2009, pp. 120–129)
June 26 — The New York sector becomes the first operational component of the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment, a system of large computers that coordinates data from many radar sites and processes it to produce a single unified image of airspace over a wide area. SAGE directs and controls the NORAD response to a Soviet air attack,
operating in this role from the late 1950s into the 1980s. Its enormous computers and huge displays remain a part of Cold War lore. (Wikipedia, “Semi-Automatic Ground Environment”)
June 28 — Otis T. Carr and Norman Evans Colton appear on the Long John Nebel show on WOR-AM in New York City.
After Carr praises his mentor, Nikola Tesla, another guest asks Carr to enumerate one or two of his discoveries. Carr feigns a memory lapse, then later is unable to recite even one of Newton’s three laws of motion. (Clark III 860)
June 28–29 — Lee Childers Jr., a baker from Detroit, Michigan, speaks at a flying saucer convention near Mountain View, Missouri, in the Ozarks hosted by contactee Buck Nelson. He claims that since April 1955 he has made 21 trips to other planets (and even to “Wolf Star 359 in the Titanian system” that has 2 planets revolving around it) on a saucer piloted by a spaceman named Commander Marcosan. He also went to a space station 2,000 miles in diameter called Trijanon. Other people tell their personal fantastic stories, among them Wayne Aho and Buck Nelson himself. (“Out-of-This-World Ozark Convention,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 6, 1958, p. 71; Clark III 915)
June 29 — Day. Former RAF Flight Engineer Peter Spencer is flying in an Auster aircraft piloted by Dennis Jackson at 800 feet near the docks at Grimsby, Lincolnshire, England. A large black dumbbell appears below them, flying against the wind. Suddenly it rises up to their height and flies along with them for a while at their speed. Then it accelerates in a terrific burst of speed to a position above them. They try to follow it, but it speeds out over the docks at 1,000 feet and 800 mph. Spencer manages to take three photos of it, but the images show a speed blur. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1958, May–July, The Author, 1999, p. 59)
July — President Dwight Eisenhower requests permission from Pakistan to establish a secret US intelligence facility at Badaber (Peshawar Air Station) to fly U-2 reconnaissance missions over the Soviet Union. (Wikipedia, “1960 U-2 incident”)
July — Dusk. Michael D. Swords and his brother Tom are at home in St. Albans, West Virginia, and listening to WCHS- AM radio where someone is calling in a UFO report. They rush to a window and see a domed disc with a revolving top cruise quietly across the landscape. (Michael D. Swords, “We Know Where You Live,” IUR 30, no. 2 (January 2006): 12; Michael D. Swords)
July — Night. A 509th Refueling Mission is returning to an Air Force Base in New Hampshire [Pease AFB in Portsmouth?] from Goose Bay [now CFB Goose Bay], Labrador. The crew is flying a KC-97 at about 17,000– 18,000 feet. A light like a “moving star” appears. It approaches below the cloud cover and seems to be spherical and as bright as Venus. It soon becomes the apparent size of the Moon, lighting up the clouds above it. The light is a brilliant blue-white with two dark spots, possibly indicating a structure. The object angles upwards and speeds out of sight in 5 seconds. (Michael D. Swords, GrassRoots UFOs: Case Reports from the Timmerman Files, Fund for UFO Research, 2005, pp. 24–25)
July–September — A civilian in Washington, D.C., manages to repeatedly photograph “geometrically shaped flying objects as they passed between his telescope and the moon.” The photos are “remarkably clear and certainly indicated a phenomenon for which he had no ready explanation.” The writer of an October 1 memo, a CIA employee, requests advice on “how we might get our hands on these materials to examine them firsthand and to make a more complete analysis of them.” (ClearIntent, pp. 136–137)
July 17 — Keyhoe writes to Ruppelt to say he is puzzled about his current stance on UFOs, but understands that he might be under pressure from the Air Force. (Michael Hall and Wendy Connors, “The Forgotten Correspondence of Edward J. Ruppelt: The Story behind Report on Unidentified Flying Objects,” pp. 15–16)
July 18 — 8:30 p.m. High-school student Chris Kauffman is gazing at the night sky in Albuquerque, New Mexico, when he sees an object shaped like an equilateral triangle pass directly overhead in a north to south direction at 70–100 mph and 1,000 feet altitude for 10 seconds. It is flying with one point of the triangle as a forward edge and has 12 small orange lights along its edges. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1958, May–July, The Author, 1999, pp. 76–77)
July 29 — The National Aeronautics and Space Administration succeeds the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics. The new agency is to have a distinctly civilian orientation, encouraging peaceful applications in space science. (Wikipedia, “NASA”)
July 29 — An Associated Press writer in Alamogordo, New Mexico, sees an abridged version of Carl Jung’s 1954 letters on UFOs in the APRO Bulletin and jumps to the conclusion that the psychologist believes them to be extraterrestrial in origin. (Carl Jung, “On Unconventional Aerial Objects,” APRO Bulletin, July 1958, pp. 1, 5; “Dr. Jung Says ‘Saucers’ Exist: Bars Psychological Explanations,” New York Times, July 30, 1958, p. 13; Clark III 637)
July 30 — Ruppelt writes Keyhoe back, saying he has “always been convinced that UFO’s were nothing more than reports of airplanes, balloons, astronomical phenomena, etc.” He says he is not being intimidated, he is just not interested in UFOs anymore and too busy. (Michael Hall and Wendy Connors, “The Forgotten Correspondence of Edward J. Ruppelt: The Story behind Report on Unidentified Flying Objects,” p. 16)
July 30 — MP George Chetwynd presses further questions in the UK House of Commons by asking the Secretary of State for Air George Ward what action is taken to identify unexplained UFOs. Ward replies that the unidentified reports are “not sufficiently precise.” (“More Questions in House of Commons,” Flying Saucer Review 4, no. 5 (Sept./Oct. 1958): iv; Good Above, pp. 51–52)
August — Polish Air Force pilot Apoloniusz Czernów of the 3rd Fighter Regiment in Warsaw, is returning from an attempted balloon interception in the area around Świdnica, Poland. Flying at 26,000 feet, he sees another possible balloon 9 miles away at a height of 3,200 feet and turns his MiG-17 toward it. But when he approaches it, he sees it is a cigar-shaped object tilted at a 45° angle, silvery-orange in color, and pulsating with a weird light. He gets closer and the object ascends at high speed, heads north, changes to orange-red, and disappears. Base radar has detected nothing. (Poland 63–64)
August 1 — The Teak thermonuclear test, part of Operation Hardtack I, is launched from Johnston Atoll in the North Pacific Ocean and carries a payload of 3.8 megatons. The warhead is carried on a Redstone missile, which has a “program failure,” causing it to go straight up and detonate directly above the island. In a sanitized film record of the event, men in flip-flops and shorts can be seen ducking for cover as a phenomenal fireball consumes the sky overhead. During the Teak test, all crew on and around Johnston Atoll are given protective eyewear to prevent flash blindness from the explosion. Besides the hazard of blindness, thermal radiation is another concern—even at an altitude of 50 miles. A crew member on Johnston at the time is said to have received a slight sunburn from the amount of thermal radiation that had reached the island. While only slight to the crew member, it creates issues for the local fauna. Many birds are seen in distress. Unsure if this is caused by blindness or thermal radiation, the project members decide to take precautions to protect local wildlife during the next test. The explosion can be seen from Hawaii 806 miles away and is said to be visible for almost half an hour. After the explosion, high- frequency, long-distance communication is interrupted across the Pacific. Due to this failure, Johnston Atoll personnel are unable to contact their superiors to advise of the test results until about 8 hours after the detonation. The detonation disturbs Wernher Von Braun so greatly that he leaves the island shortly after comms are restored. The explosion causes the blue sky to turn red, white, and gray, and it creates an aurora 2,100 miles long along the geomagnetic meridian. (Wikipedia, “Operation Hardtack I”; Jacobsen, Area 51, pp. 170–171)
August 3 — 2:25 a.m. A sudden violet-orange brightness illuminates the sky over Rome, Italy, for about 3 seconds. Lights in the city dim, failing completely in some areas. Physician Angelo Corsi witnesses it 37 miles southeast of Rome in Sgurgola. After his car radio fails, and the house and streetlights go out, he sees a long whitish trail like a fan in the sky. At 2:22 a.m., in Rieti a sergeant and some guards see a yellow-green cigar-shaped object moving rapidly toward the southeast. It leaves a luminous trail that lights up roads, mountains, and houses for several seconds. A similar sight is seen in Naples. (Schopick, pp. 142–143; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1958 August–September, The Author, 1999, pp. 1, 3)
August 8 — An informal two-hour hearing on UFOs is held by the House Subcommittee on Atmospheric Phenomena, chaired by Rep. William Natcher (D-Ky.), which is part of the Select Committee on Astronautics and Space Exploration, chaired by Rep. John W. McCormack (D-Mass.). Although McCormack wants an extended hearing in closed secret session, unrecorded, ATIC Capt. George T. Gregory persuades him to allow the Air Force to give a briefing, while allowing people like Menzel, Ruppelt, and Keyhoe to offer their opinions later. NICAP as a whole should be excluded, he emphasizes. The main witnesses turn out to be Gregory and Maj. Tacker. The subcommittee, which also includes Kenneth Keating (R-N.Y.) and Lee Metcalf (D-Mont.), commends Gregory for his presentation on Project Blue Book’s “improved” methods. The hearings were to have been extended to the following week, but they decide to call no more witnesses at the suggestion of scientific consultant Dr. Charles S. Sheldon II, who thus maneuvers Keyhoe out of appearing. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1958 August–September, The Author, 1999, pp. 5–27; Swords 277–279)
August 9 — Carl Jung issues a denial to the Associated Press about his “extraterrestrial” statement, saying that witnesses are “in need of fantasy.” He thinks “something is being seen,” but his interest is more in what they think they are seeing. (“Dr. Jung Says Flying Saucers Are a New ‘Savior Myth,’” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 9, 1958, p. 5)
August 11 — The Orange thermonuclear test is launched by Redstone missile from Johnston Atoll with a yield of 3.8 megatons. Although Orange is visible from Hawaii, it is not the great spectacle Teak had been. The light from the 28-mile-high blast is visible for about 5 minutes, but does not cause a large communication interruption; however,
some commercial flights to Hawaii are said to have lost contact with air traffic controllers for a short period of time. (Wikipedia, “Operation Hardtack I”)
August 11 — Betty Jane Williamson dies in Lima, Peru, when her husband George Hunt Williamson is on a lecture tour in Europe. Her death is caused by malnutrition generated by an alternative diet regimen. James W. Moseley later circulates an outrageously false accusation that Williamson killed Betty by pushing her off a cliff, but the charge is a complete fabrication. (Clark III 1286; James W. Moseley and Karl T. Pflock, Shockingly Close to the Truth! Confessions of a Grave-Robbing Ufologist, Prometheus, 2002, pp. 137–138; Jerome Clark, “The Trivialist,” IUR 27, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 15–19, 29–30; Zirger and Martinelli, The Incredible Life of George Hunt Williamson, Verdechiari, 2016, pp. 117, 123–124)
August 16 — Around 5:00 p.m. Several persons on Lake Geneva, Switzerland, watch a bright light descending. It comes to hover about 45 feet above their boat. It is saucer-shaped, about 39 feet in diameter, and has a cabin on top with several windows. It causes a noticeable current in the water. After several leaps in the air, it flies off at high speed. (Vallée, Magonia, p. 272)
August 18 — 7:05 or 7:10 p.m. Typewriter repairman Alex Donald Chisholm is at home at 21950 Cunningham Avenue in Warren, Michigan, with Walter Moilanion and his wife and possibly a young daughter, when he sees a light much brighter than Venus in the vicinity of a flight of four military aircraft. He watches the object through 8x30 mm Japanese artillery-observer field glasses. It looks to be a Saturn-shaped grayish object like a “fried egg in pan.” Later it flips over, and another more elongated ring can be seen surrounding it. The object is about 60 feet long and is stationary for 5-8 minutes. However, the object is probably a Skyhook balloon launched from the University of Minnesota on August 17. (Clark III 392; NICAP, [case file])
August 27–September 6 — In Operation Argus, three nuclear warheads are launched from X-17 rockets from the deck of the USS Norton Sound in the South Atlantic Ocean off the coast of South Africa. They explode approximately 300 miles into space. The tests are proposed by Nicholas Christofilos in an unpublished paper of the Livermore branch [now the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory] of the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley, California, as a means to verify the Christofilos effect, which argues that high-altitude nuclear detonations will create a radiation belt in the extreme upper regions of the Earth’s atmosphere (they do create artificial electron belts that persist several weeks), or an electronic pulse that could hypothetically damage the arming devices on Soviet ICBM warheads (they do not). (Wikipedia, “Operation Argus”)
September — NICAP fires its office manager, treasurer, and typist Rose Hackett Campbell after she gives membership cards to George Adamski and other contactees. Richard H. Hall begins work at NICAP as associate editor. (“Resignations,” UFO Investigator 1, no. 5 (Aug./Sept. 1958): 2; “Richard Hall Becomes Assoc. Editor,” UFO Investigator 1, no. 5 (Aug./Sept. 1958): 2)
September — Around 9:00 p.m. The USS Franklin D. Roosevelt is on a shakedown cruise in the Caribbean Sea out of Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba, when at least 25 of the 3,000 crew members notice a light following the aircraft carrier. Fireman’s apprentice Chester C. Grusinski watches it as it comes close and sees a cigar-shaped object with portholes and figures inside looking out. Grusinki can feel heat coming from the object, and some of the ship’s power apparently goes out. After a few minutes, the object turns red-orange and takes off. (Chester C. Grusinski, “UFOs Seen by Crew of an American Aircraft Carrier (1952–1958),” Flying Saucer Review 40, no. 3 (Autumn 1995): 1–4; Gordon Creighton, “Confirmation of an Important U.S. Naval Sighting,” Flying Saucer Review 46, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 17–20; Good Need, pp. 234–236)
September 8 — 6:40 p.m. At Offutt AFB, Omaha, Nebraska, SAC Operations Officer Maj. Paul A. Duich, plus several officers from USAF Ballistic Missiles Division, Los Angeles AFB in El Segundo, California; many other air base officers and airmen; and Offutt air traffic control tower personnel see a brilliant-white, elongated, cylindrical object hovering in the west just after sunset. The object is oriented vertically with the blunter end highest. After several minutes, the object turns dull orange-red and becomes sharper in outline. A swarm of about 10 “black specks” appears to “cavort” around the lower end of the object for about one minute before disappearing. Then the cylindrical object begins to rotate counterclockwise and starts drifting slowly to the south from due west and drops in elevation angle over about 5 minutes. During the final 5-minute observation, the object continues angular descent and gradually decreases in angular size, but it begins rotating clockwise until it disappears by fading into the slight atmospheric haze. A USAF colonel takes several color photos with a 35mm camera on a tripod but later claims nothing came out. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1958 August–September, The Author, 1999, pp. 59–63; UFOEv, pp. 25, 27; Herbert S. Taylor, “Satellite Objects and Cloud Cigars,” IUR 29, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 5–6; Sparks, p. 265; Swords 280)
September 12 — The Operation Hardtack II series of 37 nuclear tests takes place at the Nevada Test Site through October 30, all within 18 miles of Area 51. (Wikipedia, “Operation Hardtack II”)
September 21 — 3:00 a.m. Mrs. William H. Fitzgerald of Sheffield Lake, Ohio, sees through her east-facing bedroom window a metallic domed disc, 12–22 feet in diameter and 6 feet thick. It sweeps in over the front lawn heading north and descending in a falling-leaf oscillating motion to about 6 feet altitude, then crosses over her driveway, and stops for several seconds about 40 feet away. It then reverses course heading south and hovers 5 feet above the lawn about 25 feet away, making a jetlike sound. The object wobbles and emits gray smoke, makes two tight clockwise turns, then rises and takes off straight up over the house towards the east. Her 10-year-old son also observes the event from another room. (NICAP, “12ʹ Diameter 6ʹ Thick Disc within 40ʹ”; UFO Ev, p. 113; Loren
E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1958 August–September, The Author, 1999,
pp. 68–72)
September 25 — The Project Moonwatch team in Portland, Oregon, is looking at the Moon when they see objects crossing the lunar disc. Occasionally they recognize the transit as a bird, but there are “tiny dark objects” that behave differently. All the object pass in the same direction and in the same location for about one second.
Supervisor Alex Geddes, who was not present, sends a supportive letter to the observers, thanking them for the data. (Michael D. Swords, “Gazing at the Moons,” IUR 32, no. 4 (October 2009): 15)
September 29 — 5:30 a.m. Pvt. Jerome A. Scanlon, stationed at Nike missile base W-93 in Derwood, Maryland, is walking from his sentry post to the barracks to sound reveille when he hears a humming sound above him. He looks up and sees a teardrop-shaped object 300 feet up and coming in for a landing at 30 mph. It moves over trees, breaking branches, and lands about 1.5 miles away. Exhaust flames issue from its rear, and its luminous green skin illuminates the terrain. It rises again and disappears. Scanlon runs to inform Riney Farris, the sergeant of the guard, who has also seen the object. They go to the landing site and find broken branches and a scorched strip of earth and vegetation about half a mile long. After the story appears in newspapers, the Air Force explains it as repair trucks doing welding jobs. (“Brass to Hear GI’s Account of Fiery ‘Saucer,’” New York Journal- American, October 7, 1958; “‘Saucer’ Landed, Say Two Soldiers,” Goldsboro (N.C.) Record, October 9, 1958; Lorenzen, UFOs: The Whole Story, Signet, 1969, pp. 90–91; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1958 August–September, The Author, 1999, p. 79)
October — Maj. Robert J. Friend takes over as head of Project Blue Book, relieving Capt. George T. Gregory. About this time, a new USAF fact sheet states that investigative improvements have reduced unsolved sightings to 1.8%. The “refinement” comes from lumping “probable” and “possible” identifications into “identified.” At the same time, a secret staff study by USAF intelligence officers addresses the public relations problems caused by Keyhoe, who is characterized as a “political adventurer” allied with Ruppelt, both of whom are in the UFO “business” strictly for the money. Yet together “they represent a formidable team from which plenty of trouble can be expected.” The study recommends that 18–20 personnel be assigned to temporary UFO investigation duty. They would solve reports that have not been sent directly to Blue Book. Though ATIC urges implementation of the plan, Air Force Headquarters kills it. (Jacobs, UFO Controversy in America, Signet ed., 1976, pp. 146–151; Clark III 920; Hynek UFO Report, pp. 25–27; Sparks, p. 14)
October 1 — NASA begins operations. It includes three major labs: Langley Aeronautical Laboratory [now Langley Research Center] in Hampton, Virginia; Ames Aeronautical Laboratory [now Ames Research Center] in Mountain View, California; and Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory [now Glenn Research Center] in Brook Park, Ohio. It incorporates elements of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency and the US Naval Research Laboratory. (Wikipedia, “NASA”)
October 2 — Shortly after 5:00 p.m. Naturalist Ivan T. Sanderson sees a dull-gray object, shaped like a pickle with a flat bottom, fly erratically in loops over the Delaware Water Gap near Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. (NICAP, “Nickel- Shaped Object Flies Loops (Sanderson Case)”; UFOEv, p. 52; Sparks, p. 266)
October 3 — 3:10 a.m. A Monon Railroad freight train is traveling between Owasco and Kirklin, Indiana, when a formation of four odd white lights crosses ahead of the train. The entire crew watch the UFOs turn and traverse the full length of the train, front to back (about a half mile). After passing the rear of the train, the objects swing east, turn back, and follow the train. The bright glow conceals their exact shape, but they appear flattened and sometimes fly on edge. The objects follow the train until the conductor shines a bright light on them. Immediately the objects speed away, but return quickly and continue to pace the train. Total time of observation is about 1 hour 10 minutes. Finally the UFOs move away to the northeast and disappear. (NICAP, “The Monon RR UFO Incident”; “They’re Back Again—in Indiana,” APRO Bulletin, November 1958, 1, 3; Frank Edwards, “UFO Buzzes Train,” Fate 12, no. 2 (February 1959): 25–30)
October 7 — 2:55 p.m. Joseph Gwooz, master of the SS Nantucket, sees a gray, oval object in the sky at an altitude of 8,000–10,000 feet at the entrance to the Nantucket Channel, Massachusetts. It remains stationary for more than one minute, then shoots up and away to the northeast. (UFOEv, p. 71)
October 7 — 6:02 p.m. Chemist John R. Townsend, special assistant for research and engineering to the Assistant Secretary of Defense, sees a large, stationary, sharply outlined Saturn-shaped silvery object (with a “gossamer” surface appearance and a rim or girdle around its equator) in a clear sky in Alexandria, Virginia. It rapidly rises at an estimated speed of 1,000 mph and disappears to the south after 40 seconds. At one point a passing Capitol Airlines Flight 407 flies directly between his line of sight and the UFO at 2 miles distance, allowing him to estimate the UFO’s size as about 500 feet. Townsend reenacts the timing by walking the half block down Lee Street to get a better feeling for its distance and size. (NICAP, “Saturn-Shaped Object Observed, Object Confirmed by Pilot”; Swords 282; Sparks, p. 267)
October 26 — 10:30 p.m. Alvin Cohen and Phillip Small are rounding a curve on Maryland Route 146 some 600–900 feet south of the bridge at Loch Raven Reservoir, Maryland. They see a large (100 feet long) egg-shaped object hanging 100–150 feet above the bridge. When they drive to within 75 feet of it their car stalls and the dash lights turn off. They get out of the car and watch the UFO from behind it for 30–45 seconds. The UFO flashes a beam of white light and they feel heat on their faces. They also hear a dull explosion. The UFO rises vertically and disappears in 5–10 seconds. They are able to start the car and drive into Towson, Maryland, to make a phone call to the Ground Observer Corps and the police. Police Cpl. Kenneth Hartmann and Patrolman Richard Fink drive up and they tell them the story, then they go to St. Joseph’s Hospital in Baltimore and are given a cursory examination for burns. Other people in the neighborhood either see an object at the time or hear the boom. (“Baltimore’s Flying Saucer,” Baltimore (Md.) Evening Sun, December 15, 1958, p. 21; NICAP, “Egg-Shaped Object & E-M Effects over Bridge”; Schopick, pp. 62–63; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1958 October, The Author, 1999, pp, 73–86; J. Allen Hynek, The UFO Experience, Ballantine ed., 1974, pp. 132, 139–140; Sparks, p. 268; Clark III 686)
November — Skandinavisk UFO Information in Denmark begins publishing UFO-Nyt. (UFO-Nyt, November 1958) November 3 — 2:01 p.m. At Minot, North Dakota, M/Sgt. William R. Butler, a medic, sees one bright-green object,
shaped like a 10-cent piece, and one smaller, silver round object. The first object explodes, then the second object moves toward the location of the first at high speed. Sighting lasts 1 minute. (Sparks, p. 268)
November 4 — 9:03 p.m. The pilot of a KB-50 USAF tanker is in the downwind leg of the traffic pattern during a ground- controlled approach to Pope AFB [now Pope Field] in Fayetteville, North Carolina, when he notices an object on a collision course. He and his flight crew also notice that “strange lights were observed in his cockpit while he was on the final approach...” He executes a go-around maneuver and climbs in altitude to await the disappearance of the object. Air Force tower personnel also see the UFO hovering above the airport, watching it through their binoculars for 20 minutes. They are convinced it is not an atmospheric phenomenon. They say that “the UFO presented a hazard to aircraft operating in the area.” (NICAP, “Object on Collision Course with KB-50 Tanker, Circles”; Richard F. Haines, “Aviation Safety in America: A Previously Neglected Factor,” NARCAP, October 15, 2000, pp. 53–54; Sparks, p. 268)
November 5 — MP Roy Mason asks the Air Minister in the UK House of Commons to what extent official records are kept of UFO sightings and what departments are involved. Air Minister George Ward replies in writing that reports involving national security are investigated but “nothing suggests that they are other than mundane.” (“Come Off It, Mr. Ward! ‘Nothing Suggests That They Are Other Than Mundane,’” Flying Saucer Review 5, no. 1 (Jan./Feb. 1959): 2; Good Above, p. 52)
November 9 — Residents of Trinidad, Rio Dell, and other towns in northern California report showers of cobweblike material, some in strands 5–6 feet long. Two fishermen at sea, George Korkan and Jack Curry, say the substance settles on their boat in such quantity that it makes the boat appear “a million years old.” A sample obtained at McKinleyville is examined by biologist Erwin Bielfuss at Humboldt State College. He rules out mold or an animal product and suggests it is plant material or plastic. (“Cobweb Like Substance in Area Mystifies Zoologist,” Eureka (Calif.) Humboldt Standard, November 10, 1958, p. 5; UFOEv, p. 99)
November 9 — 10:00 p.m. Two carpenters, Stig Ekberg and Harry Sjöberg, are returning from Stockholm, Sweden, to their cabin on Väddö island, about 20 miles to the northeast. About 6 miles north of Älmstä their car engine begins to sputter and fail, and the headlights go out. They see a huge, shining object descending toward them and making a turn above Väddö Bay to the left of the road. It lands in the middle of the road about 300 feet in front of their car, its neon glow illuminating the landscape. They estimate it is 53 feet long and 20 feet high, with a bright glow underneath the object and a dazzling mist surrounding it. They watch the object for about 10 minutes, then it rises from the road and shoots into the sky to their right. Afterward, the air is stifling and hot, but the engine starts up right away. A few minutes later they return to the landing site and find flattened grass and a still-hot, smooth, triangular piece of metal the size of a matchbox, which they retrieve. They submit the metal to several labs over the next few years, apparently without ambiguous results, but in the process it is split into three pieces. Finally, an
engineer in Linköping named Schalin finds the metal has the hardness of sapphire and a specific weight of 15.2. It can take several thousand degrees C. heat without getting red hot. One of the pieces is submitted to the US Air Force and not returned. In the early 1970s, another piece is examined by James Harder at the University of California, Berkeley, who establishes it is composed of tungsten carbide, cobalt, and traces of titanium, and that it has been manufactured. (Christer Nordin, “The Väddö Case,” Nordic UFO Newsletter, no. 1 (1981): 2–6)
November 11 — 1:35 a.m. A Mrs. Kinney, who is a Lt. Col. in the Civil Air Patrol in Topeka, Kansas, wakes up when her bedroom floods with an amber-colored light and her three dogs begin barking. The source is a 25-foot diameter sphere that is sitting on the walkway in the yard about 30 feet away. Kinney opens a door to go out on a porch, but the light zooms straight up and out of sight. She goes back to bed and the phone rings; it is a neighbor who has seen the light going toward her house. At 7:30 a.m., the phone rings again; this time it is the controllers at the Philip Billard Municipal Airport, who know her well and tell her about the light they saw. In the evening, she finds there is an electrical failure on the east side of the house. Lights, radios, and refrigerators are not working.
Kinney replaces some fuses, but not everything turns on again. An electrician comes and replaces some wiring on November 12, but Kinney’s eyes develop subconjunctival hemorrhages and sensitivity to bright light. She begins to wear sunglasses regularly. Both of her male dogs develop cataracts. (Swords 287–288)
November 17 —10:03 p.m. Somewhere in Russia a luminous object hovers and lands. It is seen for 2 minutes. (Vallée,
Magonia, p. 273)
November 30 — Tom Gerber of the Boston Herald features interviews with unnamed Air Force officers who proclaim an “undeclared war on phony organizations that capitalize on the ‘mystery’ of flying saucers.” Supposedly, the Air Force has evidence that “perhaps as many as 100,000 persons belong to these UFO organizations” and are “making a wad of money.” As many as 16% of the UFO sightings investigated by USAF are “hoaxes originated by members or officials of these organizations”—an obvious swipe at NICAP. (Swords 282–283)
December — The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, is transferred to NASA from the Army, becoming the agency’s primary planetary spacecraft center. (Wikipedia, “Jet Propulsion Laboratory”)
December — Some 450 airline pilots have signed a petition protesting the official policy of debunking UFO sightings.
One pilot describes the policy as a “lesson in lying, intrigue, and the ‘Big Brother’ attitude carried to the ultimate extreme.” Of the signatories, more than 50 personally have reported UFO sightings but are told by the Air Force that they are mistaken. USAF warns them that they face up to 10 years in prison under JANAP 146 if they reveal details of their sighting to the media. Because of situations like this, Maj. Friend unsuccessfully requests that Blue Book be transferred from ATIC to Air Research and Development Command on the grounds that UFOs are a scientific, not a military problem. His staff complains that the work is time-consuming and unproductive, and ARDC could speak to the public with authority and persuasiveness. ARDC briefly considers, then declines, the offer. (Good Above, p. 284; Clark III 922)
Early December — Contactee Lee Childers visits a New York City group called the Bureau of UFO Research and Analysis to present a lecture. By now he is calling himself Prince Neosom of Tythan, which is 8.5 light years from Earth. He also answers to the name Dana. (Clark III 915)
December 6 — Between 6:38 and 6:40 p.m. Along the border of Russia and India, an observer sees a bright UFO cross his field of vision through his telescope from north to south as he is observing Mars. He thinks it might be Sputnik 3, but the location and direction of the object do not bear that out. (ClearIntent, pp. 137–138)
December 6 — 5:44 a.m. The first launch of a Juno II, carrying Pioneer 3, at LC-5 at Cape Canaveral, Florida, suffers a premature first-stage cutoff, preventing the upper stages from achieving sufficient velocity. Pioneer 3 cannot escape Earth orbit but transmits data for some 40 hours before reentering the atmosphere. A malfunction in a propellant depletion circuit is found to be the cause of the failure, although the exact nature of it cannot be determined. The circuit is redesigned afterwards. (Wikipedia, “Juno II”)
December 19 —John Lester, a writer for the Newark (N.J.) Star-Ledger, has polled 1,000 US government radar operators over the past month and found that 80% have observed UFOs traveling at fantastic speeds, executing perfect 90° turns, steep vertical climbs, and hovering stops. They fly in formation and manage to stay just ahead of USAF jets scrambled to intercept them. Tacker responds immediately that the UFOs are natural phenomena (“lightning, meteors, and meteorites”). (Newark (N.J.) Star-Ledger, December 19, 21, 1958)
December 20 — 2:55 a.m. Hans Gustafsson, a 24-year-old truck driver, and Stig Rydberg, a 30-year-old student, claim that while driving home to Helsingborg, Sweden, from a dance they see a strange light in a glade on their right near Domsten. They leave the car and walk up to the object, which turns out to be a disc-shaped vehicle 16 feet in diameter resting on 3 legs. The two are suddenly attacked by four gray creatures about 4 feet tall who try to drag them to the UFO. In January 1959, a medical doctor, Lars-Erik Essén, hypnotizes the men in what is perhaps the first use of hypnosis of a UFO witness, but the two manage to fool Essén. In the late 1980s, Gustafsson’s brother
Artur reveals to ufologist Clas Svahn that before he died his brother had told him the story was a hoax. (Clark III 413–414; Rob Morphy, “Terrible Flying Jelly Bags aka Domsten Blobs (Sweden),” Cryptopia, May 6, 2018; Swords 366–367; Clas Svahn and Anders Liljegren, Domstensfallet: En svensk närkontakt 1958, AFU, 1989)
December 21 — A group of more than 50 commercial airline pilots, all of whom have had at least one UFO sighting, tell reporter John Lester with the Newark (N.J.) Star-Ledger that the Air Force policy of censorship and denial regarding reports is the “Big Brother attitude carried to the ultimate extreme.” Most express disgust with the USAF methods of interrogating civilian pilots and complain about the gag order about publicly talking about their sightings under penalty of 10 years in prison or $10,000 in fines (JANAP 146). “Nuts to that. Who needs it?” (Newark (N.J.) Star-Ledger, December 22, 1958; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1958 November–December, The Author, 1999, p. 55)
December 22 — 3:00 p.m. Stanislaw Kowalczewski, a physician, takes a photograph of a dark, disc-shaped object over Muszyna, Poland. (Hobana and Weverbergh 67–68; Wiki Meteoritica, “Muszyna 1958”; Poland 21–23)
December 30 — 3:30 p.m. Joseph Bennett, a farmer in Portglenone, County Antrim, Northern Ireland, is out walking and hears a noise like a rush of wind. A black object 7 feet across comes hurtling through the air about 20 feet above the ground. Moving from south to northwest, it crashes into an oak tree, splitting it in two at a height of 10 feet, then ascends and disappears in seconds. The tree has no burn or scorch marks. (“UAOs Collide with Tree, Roof,” APRO Bulletin, March 1959, p. 2; “We’re Not Roswell, We’re Portglenone,” Fortean Ireland, March 17, 2019)
1959
1959? — According to weapons specialist David Middleton, sometime in the late 1950s a few hours prior to a nuclear weapons test at the Nevada Test Site, he and several other technicians watch two silver discs race across then swoop down and maneuver near the detonation tower where the atomic weapon is mounted. The two objects fly a tight circle around the tower before zooming off at high velocity. The test is immediately postponed by senior AEC personnel. Middleton is debriefed and sworn to secrecy. (Nukes 58–59)
1959 — The original US Navy Space Surveillance System goes into operation. From 1960 until the early 1990s the system is used in conjunction with a network of Baker-Nunn cameras that can see an object the size of a basketball at 25,000 miles. The system is operated by the US Navy for NORAD from 1961 to October 2004. Initially independent, it is run by Naval Space Command from 1993 to 2002, and then by Naval Network and Space Operations Command from 2002 to 2004, when it is taken over by the Air Force. (Wikipedia, “Air Force Space Surveillance System”)
1959 —The US Army and CIA at Edgewood Arsenal at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, show significant interest in deploying a new drug, 3-quinuclidinyl benzilate (BZ), as a chemical warfare agent. The drug’s effects last for three days, perhaps as long as six. Between 1959 and 1975, some 2,800 soldiers are given BZ at Edgewood. (Reid Kirby, “Paradise Lost: The Psycho Agents,” The CBW Conventions Bulletin, no. 71 (May 2006): 1–5)
1959 — Psychologist Carl Jung publishes Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies in the UK, a translation of Ein moderner Mythus von Dingen, die am Himmel gesehen werden, published in Zürich, Switzerland, in 1958, in which he compares the discs to archetypes, dreams, visions, paintings, and the metaphysical symbol of a mandala: “the rounded wholeness of the mandala becomes a space ship controlled by an intelligent being.” However, he remains puzzled by the physical evidence. (Carl Jung, Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1959; Clark III 637–638)
1959 — Author Hugo Correa founds UFO Chile in Santiago, Chile. Its newsletter appears from August 1967 to May 1969. (Hugo Correa, “¿Que es ‘UFO Chile’?” UFO Chile, no. 1 (August 1967): 1)
1959 — The Soviet KGB has created its own disinformation Department D (Dezinformatsiya) in the First Chief Directorate, which under Yuri Andropov is later renamed Department A (for “active measures”). It specializes in the fabrication and dissemination of forged documents, tapes, letters, manuscripts, photos, rumors, and false intelligence. (Wikipedia, “Active measures”; John Barron, KGB: The Secret Work of Soviet Secret Agents, Bantam, 1974; Richard H. Shultz and Roy Godson, Dezinformatsia: Active Measures in Soviet Strategy, Pergamon-Brassey’s, 1984)
1959 — Contactee Howard Menger publishes From Outer Space to You, an account of his meetings with space people. (Howard Menger, From Outer Space to You, Saucerian, 1959; Clark III 739)
1959 — George Van Tassel claims the space people have taught him a method of rejuvenating the human body. Using his new-found knowledge and funds provided by Howard Hughes, he completes the outer structure of the Integraton at Giant Rock, California, a four-story domed structure, 55 feet in diameter, built mostly of wood without nails, screws, iron, or steel. Van Tassel claims it will harness the EMF energy required for recharging the cells in our
bodies. In the course of its construction, Van Tassel discovers that the Integraton functions as a time machine. (Wikipedia, “Integraton”; Clark III 1219; Douglas Curran, In Advance of the Landing: Folk Concepts of Outer Space, Abbeville, 1985, pp. 79–81; David Clarke and Tom Clark, “Going ‘Out There’ in SoCal,” Fortean Times 388 (January 2020): 75–76)
January — Leonard Hewins sees a fiery, round object come down near Stratford-on-Avon, England, from the east and land 300 feet away. A blue haze forms and three figures emerge and sit down with clumsy movements. Hewins is unable to move until the UFO takes off. (John D. Llewellyn, “Stratford-on-Avon Landing with Occupants: January 1959,” Flying Saucer Review 13, no. 5 (Sept./Oct. 1967): 15; Patrick Gross, URECAT, March 9, 2008)
January 1 — Rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, on holiday in Germany, makes a cryptic statement about the failed launch of Pioneer 3 by a Juno II rocket on December 6, 1958: “We find ourselves faced by powers which are far stronger than we had hitherto assumed, and whose base is at present unknown to us. More I cannot say at present. We are now engaged in entering into closer contact with those powers, and in six or nine months’ time it may be possible to speak with more precision on the matter.” (Good Above, p. 370)
January 1 — 4:55 p.m. Deputy Fred Gunzelman of the Harbor Department in Corona del Mar, California, spots a bright object outside department headquarters. He summons Deputy Elmer Sandling and Sgt. Bruce Young and the three watch the object through binoculars, where it appears to be a disc-shaped object with a rotating tail. They notify the lifeguard headquarters at Newport Beach, where Lt. Mike Henry, Guard Jack Bell, and Lt. Jim Richards also see the UFO. The planet Venus is clearly visible in the same section of sky. During the 15 minutes it is visible, it starts moving to the southeast and then splits into four parts. Two rise vertically at high speed, another heads southeast, and the last remains stationary. (UFOEv, p. 137; Lorenzen, UFOs: The Whole Story, Signet, 1969, p.
January 11 — Wilbert Smith speaks on UFOs at the Illuminating Engineering Society’s Canadian Regional Conference in Ottawa, Ontario. He claims that “Various items of ‘hardware’ are known to exist, but are usually clapped into security and are not available to the general public.” (Frank Edwards, FS Serious Business, Bantam ed., 1966, p. 48)
January 13 — 7:00 a.m. Robert Collins is driving a pickup truck south on Hartstown Road across Pymatuning Lake, Pennsylvania, when he sees a bright light approaching from the east and illuminating the ground. It stops above his truck, hovering 200 feet above it for several minutes. The truck’s electrical system fails, the engine dies, and the headlights and radio go out. The object’s light illuminates an area about 300 feet in front of him. It takes off and disappears in seconds, and the truck begins working again. (“Area Man’s Encounter with Unidentified Flying Object Called Weirdest Experience,” Greenville (Pa.) Record-Argus, January 31, 1959, pp. 1–2)
January 17 — George Adamski arrives in Auckland, New Zealand, on the first stop on his world lecture tour where he is received by North Island Adamski Correspondence Group leaders Henk and Brenda Hinfelaar for a 6-week engagement starting with a talk in Kaikohe on January 20. (“World Lecture Tour,” The Adamski Case, October 5, 2019; Marc Hallet, A Critical Appraisal of George Adamski: The Man Who Spoke to the Space Brothers, The Author, 2016)
January 18? — Eight people see a UFO over Stigsjö, Sweden. The round object, 18–24 feet in diameter, approaches slowly from the south over Lake Länsjön at a height of 900 feet. It is surrounded by a luminous ring 6 feet wide. It is visible for 3 minutes. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1959 January–March, The Author, 1999, p. 25)
January 21 — 6:00 a.m. A flying object is seen crashing into the waters of the harbor at Gdynia, Poland. Rumors later claim that a rust-free fragment is retrieved by divers and, after being examined by the Polish navy, sent to Gdynia Polytechnic University [possibly the Polish Naval Academy]. A few days later, an injured occupant of the craft is allegedly found wandering in the area. He speaks no known language, wears an odd uniform, and apparently has burns on the face. He is taken to a hospital, but he dies when doctors attempt to remove an armband. His remains are said to have been shipped to the Soviet Union. (Hobana and Weverbergh 1–2; Poland 25–28, 115)
January 21 — MP Roy Mason asks the Air Minister another question in the UK House of Commons: What instructions have been sent to RAF stations about collecting military UFO reports, and what collaboration is there with Canada and the US? Air Minister George Ward replies that RAF units have standing instructions for handling reports, and there is no special collaboration with those countries. (“Roy Mason Asks Another,” Flying Saucer Review 5, no. 2 (March/April 1959): 2; Good Above, p. 52)
January 28 — At a Symposium on Aerospace Technology by the Institute of the Aeronautical Sciences at the Astor Hotel in New York City, USAF Maj. Gen. Donald J. Keirn, assistant deputy chief of staff on development for nuclear systems, talks about nuclear aircraft propulsion. He mentions that if intelligent extraterrestrials do exist, “it is entirely possible that some of them may have passed through our stage of evolution, and may have already
achieved a higher level of social and technological culture than our own.” He suggests using electromagnetic emissions to detect them, as they may be doing with us. (US Congress, Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Hearings, Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion Program, July 23, 1959, p. 153)
January 31 — The US Ground Observer Corps is deactivated with the advent of automated Army (Missile Master) and Air Force (SAGE) radar systems. (Wikipedia, “Ground Observer Corps”)
February — 9:30 p.m. The people of Digeliotika, Greece, hear a humming noise coming from the direction of the sea. Running out of their homes, many people see a luminous disc circling the village for about 10 minutes. Radios fail to operate and the electrical current in one house fails completely. When the disc flies low over the house of the priest, Papa Costas, there is a loud noise and the whole house shakes. The object moves off to the west.
Inspection of the house the next day reveals that many of the roof tiles have been displaced, and others are on the ground. (“UAOs Collide with Tree, Roof,” APRO Bulletin, March 1959, p. 2)
February 1 — JANAP 146(D) integrates Canada into the CIRVIS reporting instructions. The Canadian Department of National Defence launches a series of Communications Instructions for Reporting Vital Intelligence Sightings in line with the JANAP procedures. (Gregory M. Kanon, “UFOs and the Canadian Government,” Canadian UFO Report 3, no. 7 (Spring 1976): 17–18; Antonio F. Rullán, “Blue Book UFO Reports at Sea by Ships,” December 10, 2002)
February 17 — Hynek wants to start bringing together ATIC and Blue Book personnel for monthly meetings where scientific and PR problems are reviewed. To get it going, he meets with Air Force Intelligence, Secretary of the Air Force officials, and Blue Book staffers in the Pentagon. This meeting includes, besides Hynek, Maj. Robert J. Friend, Col. Leonard T. Glaser, Alex Francis Arcier, Maj. James F. Byrne, Maj. Joseph E. Boland, Maj. Lawrence
J. Tacker, and Burgoyne Lee Griffing. The group agrees that eventually the term “UFOs” should be jettisoned and older unsolved cases reexamined in the light of “greater scientific knowledge” that will move them from unknowns to knowns. (Jacobs, UFO Controversy in America, Signet ed., 1976, pp. 148–149; Clark III 919; Swords 286; “Saucer Reading Fest,” Saturday Night Uforia, January 25, 2019)
February 20 — Pfc. Bernard G. “Gerry” Irwin, on leave from Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, is driving near Cedar City, Utah, when he stops to investigate what seems to be a crashing plane. He is later found unconscious in the snow and treated at the Cedar City hospital. He suffers from amnesia, continues to have fainting spells, and returns more than once to the site in some kind of fugue. He soon deserts and perhaps disappears, but not forever, as he is living in Idaho in 2013, where David Booher interviews him about his PTSD-like symptoms. (Coral Lorenzen, “Soldier Sees Flash; Unconscious 24 Hours,” APRO Bulletin, March 1959, pp. 1, 10; Lorenzen, UFOs: The Whole Story, Signet, 1969, pp. 97–99; Lorenzen, Encounters with UFO Occupants, Berkley Medallion, 1976, pp. 347+; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1961 July–December, The Author, 2003, pp. 56–60; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1962 July– December, The Author, 2005, pp. 68–70; Kevin D. Randle, The UFO Dossier, Visible Ink, 2015, pp. 134–141; David Booher, No Return: The Gerry Irwin Story, UFO Abduction or Covert Operation?, Anomalist, 2017; Clark III 2)
February 20 — Just as the first working models of the Army’s VZ-9 Avrocar are being manufactured, the Canadian government cancels the Avro CF-105 Arrow program. Almost all Avro Canada employees are laid off, including those with the Special Projects Group. However, three days later, many of the Special Projects employees are rehired, but it isn’t quite business as usual. The USAF Project Office devoted to the Avro projects recommends that the WS-606A and all related work (including the Avrocar) be cancelled. However, in May the USAF authorizes Avro to continue its “flying saucer” programs. (Wikipedia, “Avro Canada VZ-9 Avrocar”)
February 24 — 8:20 p.m. Capt. Peter W. Killian is flying an American Airlines flight from Newark to Detroit when he encounters three bright lights flying in a precise line. The initial detection takes place when the aircraft is flying at 8,500 feet and 50 mph about 13 miles west of Williamsport, Pennsylvania. At first Killian thinks he is seeing Orion’s sword, but he can see those stars elsewhere. One of the objects abruptly leaves formation and approaches the plane, slows down before Killian takes evasive action, then rejoins the other two. Killian alerts copilot James John Dee and then announces on the intercom for the passengers to take a look. He also puts out a call to nearby aircraft, and five other commercial airline pilots indicate that they can see the objects. The lights remain at about the 9 o’clock position for 40 minutes, providing an opportunity for many of the 35 passengers to observe them.
They are also seen by the crews of two other planes flying much farther to the south, as well as by the tower operators in Pittsburgh. The Air Force quickly identifies the objects as the three Orion stars, changes that to an aerial refueling operation, then accuses Killian of being drunk. But an independent sighting of the UFOs by an Air Force transport plane 150 miles further south confirms Killian’s observation, and no refueling routes exist in central Pennsylvania. Brad Sparks uncovers new evidence in 2016 that supports the witnesses’ story. (NICAP,
“The Killian Case”; UFOEv, pp. 116–117; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1959 January–March, The Author, 1999, pp. 58–60; Clark III 385–387; Sparks, p. 270; Willy Smith,
“Over Pennsylvania,” IUR 23, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 13–14, 29–30; Swords 285; Patrick Gross, “The Killian– Orion Belt Sightings, 1958”)
February 24 — 10:00 p.m. A 17-year-old male is home babysitting the family pets and his younger brother in Victorville, California, when he sees a bright light shining in his bedroom window. The dogs begin to howl and run around. He goes outside and sees a luminous object like an “elongated egg,” dull red with purple waves inside it, flying in a descending path toward his house. It passes over the front yard at a height of only 8–10 feet. As the object returns, he goes inside to get a gun, but as he goes outside the object is making a third pass and he goes back inside. When the parents return home, they find the dogs in a terrified state. (Hynek UFO Report, pp. 167–170; Swords 286–287)
Late February–April 15 — George Adamski continues his world lecture tour in Sydney, Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, and Brisbane, Australia. (“World Lecture Tour,” The Adamski Case, October 5, 2019)
February 25 — 8:30 a.m. Jim Dobbs Jr. is driving south on State Highway 18 south of Hobbs, New Mexico, when he sees an egg-shaped object glowing like radium on a watch dial. He estimates it is 10° above the southern horizon and traveling fast. His radio fades out and produces only a steady succession of two dots and a dash. The object disappears in the east after 30 seconds. (“Hobbs Man Sees Glowing UFO, Hears Signals,” APRO Bulletin, March 1959, p. 1)
February 25 — Lt. Col. Lee B. James, chief of the Liaison Branch of the Army Ballistic Agency in Huntsville, Alabama, gives a talk at the Detroit Chapter of the Michigan Society of Professional Engineers on space flight. Because of the recent Killian incident, he is asked about UFOs. Referring to the witness on that aircraft, he says: “If they (35 passengers and several crew members) saw what they really saw, it would have to come from outer space—a civilization decades before ours.” (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1959 January–March, The Author, 1999, p. 68)
February 25 — 7:25 p.m. A pale-yellow light is seen by officials above one of the runways at London Airport [now Heathrow], England. Airport and air defense radars do not pick up any target. RAF Fighter Command Headquarters says the light fluctuates in intensity and is about 200 feet from the ground. It stays in one position for 20 minutes then climbs away at high speed. (Charles H. Gibbs-Smith, “Venus and the Nose-Cone Light: A Study in the Lunacy of Explainistics,” Flying Saucer Review 5, no. 3 (May/June 1959): 10–11, 31; Good Above,
February 28 — The US Air Force launches Discoverer 1, the first of a series of satellites that are part of the Corona spy program. The mission is a failure due to problems with the Agena upper stage. (Wikipedia, “Discoverer 1”)
March — On the Baltic Sea coast near Kołobrzeg, Poland, soldiers watch the sea become turbulent as a triangular object, 12 feet in diameter, emerges, circles the barracks, and flies away at high speed. (Vallée, Magonia, p. 275)
March 11 — Rear Admiral George J. Dufek, on his way back from commanding Operation Deepfreeze in Antarctica, tells reporters in Wellington, New Zealand, that he does not think the existence of UFOs can be discounted: “I think it is very stupid for human beings to think no one else in the universe is as intelligent as we are.” Asked years later why he said this, he explains that it was because of sightings related to him by people who worked with him at the South Pole. (Swords 290)
March 12 —Several witnesses at Bergen, Norway, see a bright object passing north to south, taking two minutes to move from horizon to horizon. Several minutes later another appears, following the same course. This is soon followed by three more in succession. (ClearIntent, p. 138)
March 13 — 2:00 a.m. Percy Briggs is driving from Purnong to Mannum, South Australia, with a load of vegetables and Claypans Postmaster C. Towill as passenger. They have just climbed Cournamont Hill near the Purnong Ferry over the Murray River. They see to the left of the road a huge dome-shaped object with 8–9 red and blue lights about 20 feet apart. The UFO soon rises from the ground at a 15° angle and moves away to the southwest. The separate lights merge into one big light. They watch it recede for about 10 minutes. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1959 January–March, The Author, 1999, pp. 79–80)
March 18 — 8:50 p.m. Jesse Wilson of Denville, New Jersey, is taking photos of the Moon through a telescope and captures an image of two groups of multiple objects. (Center for UFO Studies, [case documents])
March 19 — USAF spokesman Maj. Lawrence J. Tacker retracts the dubious Orion explanation for the Killian case and says instead that the pilots saw B-47 bombers refueling in flight from a KC-97 tanker. Killian tells the papers, “I don’t care what the air force says,” he knows what refueling looks like and the UFOs were “at least three times the size of any tanker or bomber we have. They could travel at 2,000 mph. And they were not conventional
aircraft.” (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1959 January–March, The Author, 1999, pp. 82–84)
March 20 — 5:30 p.m. Witold Sambrowski, an electronics engineer, sees two noiseless cigar-shaped, reddish-pink objects flying over Ostroleka, Poland. They are traveling horizontally at a speed greater than a jet. When the two vanish, a third appears and follows the path the others have taken. (Hobana and Weverbergh 211–212)
March 22 — 1:30 a.m. Mr. and Mrs. Gary Bond are driving near Ann Arbor, Michigan, when they see an intensely lighted object hovering about 2 miles to the southeast. It is about 200 feet in the air and just south of a main road. Intense shafts of light are shining from two oval ports at the bottom. As they drive closer, they can hear no sound and find it is about 50–75 feet from the road. The UFO parallels their car at first, then the light shafts go out, and a circle of 8–10 red lights appear on the bottom. Then it rises rapidly and disappears in seconds. A local radio astronomer, Allen Barrot, claims the couple saw the lights of his telescope. But the Air Force finds that the couple were never looking in the direction of Barrot’s observatory. (Swords 288–289; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1959 January–March, The Author, 1999, pp. 87–90)
March 27 — Lou Corbin has told Keyhoe that Rep. Samuel Friedel (D-Md.) is “all set to hop on this Killian business” and begins to plan for Killian to meet with him. But Killian’s wife now tells Keyhoe that he is under strict orders from the Air Force not to talk to anyone about the sighting or risk losing his job. Soon afterwards, the Air Force releases a statement from Killian that says, “Having never seen night refueling of jets by a tanker, I suppose that could be what we saw.” (Keyhoe, FSTS, pp. 27–36; UFOEv, pp. 116–117)
March 31 — 11:30 p.m. Barry Neale, operator of the Port Elliot movie theater, is driving home to Goolwa, South Australia, and sees a dome-shaped, reddish-orange object with a row of evenly spaced portholes around it. He estimates it to be about 15 feet wide, and it is on the ground about 900 feet from the road. He sees it disappear to the east. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1959 January–March, The Author, 1999, pp. 99–100)
Spring — Keyhoe meets with Hillenkoetter at the New York Yacht Club to discuss NICAP strategy. USAF Public Information Officer Lawrence J. Tacker has sent the organization a letter asking it to stop writing to Air Force personnel about UFOs. Keyhoe tells Hillenkoetter that three scientists have contacted a certain congressman to report UFO sightings. Hillenkoetter advises, “we’ll have to do something to speed things up.” (Keyhoe, FSTS, pp. 15, 247–248)
Spring — Soviet radar and Air Defense personnel observe UFOs circling and hovering for more than 24 hours above the headquarters of the Tactical Missile Command at Sverdlovsk, Russia. Fighter aircraft sent to intercept them report that the UFOs easily outmaneuver them and zigzag to avoid machine gun fire. (Flying Saucers, no. 47, May 1966, pp. 6–10; Good Above, p. 227)
Spring — Early evening. A weather officer with the US Fifth Air Force in Tokyo, Japan, is in the operations center when the staff tracks a UFO near Misawa Air Base on the north end of Honshu. One of the officers says this happens frequently, that the objects travel at 2,000 mph, and they often stop in one position and hover for 30 minutes to several hours before taking off westward along the Tsugaru Strait and disappearing in a burst of speed. The center commander orders the pilots of two specially equipped F-106s based at Misawa to intercept the target. One of the planes is having instrumentation problems, but the other goes up. After 10 minutes he is being guided toward the target through Misawa. The pilot says the object is circular and metallic with a cockpit on top. The commander calls the Pentagon for authorization for the pilot to fire on the UFO, and he gets permission for the pilot to make a firing pass. The pilot fires two missiles, but they detonate just at the edge of the object, as if it is protected. The UFO then turns toward the terrified pilot, and the command center watches as the two blips merge into one. The blip disappears. Crews search for wreckage for 4 days but find none. (Bruce Maccabee, “Hiding the Hardware,” IUR 16, no. 5 (Sept./Oct. 1991): 8–9)
April 1 — An Air Force C-118 plane with four on board crashes between Sumner and Orting, Washington, about an hour after taking off from McChord AFB [now Joint Base Lewis-McChord] in Tacoma. Their last radio message indicates that they hit something or that something hit them. Bob Gribble and other UFO investigators find witnesses who claim to have seen two orange or yellow objects closing in on the plane. Best guess is that the plane hit a tree and the UFO observations are unrelated. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1959 April–June, The Author, 1999, pp. 2–4)
April 7 — 8:00 p.m. Control tower operators at CFB St. Hubert [now Montreal/Saint-Hubert Airport], Quebec, spot a red, glowing light hanging in the sky for a few minutes at 3,000–7,000 feet altitude. It suddenly darts to the north at supersonic speed. (Lorenzen, UFOs: The Whole Story, Signet, 1969, p. 100)
April 11 — Two businessmen at Woodlands, New Zealand, watch a glowing 40-foot-long object with a balloon-like attachment on the underside hovering just above the trees. As they approach it in their car, it speeds off to the north. (Lorenzen, UFOs: The Whole Story, Signet, 1969, p. 100)
April 12 — 8:00 p.m. Control tower personnel and airport officials at St. Hubert Air Defence Command Base [now CFB St. Hubert], Quebec, as well as local residents watch a red ball of light hovering above the airfield at 3,000–7,000 feet. Descriptions vary from a black ball with a red light to a long red cigar. Radar does not pick it up. Suddenly it takes off toward Montreal to the north. (Yurko Bondarchuk, UFO Sightings, Landings, and Abductions, Methuen, 1979, pp. 94–96)
April 17 — George Adamski meets with Sisir Kumar Maitra, head of the Department of Philosophy and dean of the Faculty of Arts of Banaras Hindu University in Varanasi during a stopover in Kolkata, India. (“World Lecture Tour,” The Adamski Case, October 5, 2019)
April 18–May 14 — Adamski arrives in London, England, and appears on the TV show In Town Tonight on April 18 and on the BBC program Panorama on April 20 where he debates with astronomer Patrick Moore, a show that is seen by 9 million viewers. Both Gen. Frederick Browning and RAF Commander Peter Horsley meet with Adamski and Desmond Leslie during their visit to a private address in London. Adamski gives further lectures in Tunbridge Wells, Weston-super-Mare, Bournemouth, at Caxton Hall in London (on April 28), Birmingham University (April 29), Manchester (May 1), and several more around the British Isles. (“World Lecture Tour,” The Adamski Case, October 5, 2019; David Clarke, “The Prince and the Saucers,” Fortean Times 406 (June 2021): 19)
April 19 — 3:00 p.m. Otis T. Carr and Norman Colton, who have been in Oklahoma since February, pretend to attempt the launch of their OTC-X1 spacecraft in a gravel pit 6 miles east of the Frontier City amusement park northeast of Oklahoma City. Frontier City obligingly erects a model of the spacecraft as a ride. However, Carr comes down with a mysterious throat ailment and goes to Mercy Hospital on April 17. He invites Long John Nebel to have a brief glimpse of the model, but Nebel thinks it looks like a jumble of unconnected parts. As it turns out, the OTC- X1 develops a “mercury leak” and the launch is delayed then canceled. Those who have come for the April 19 launch hear contactee Dana Howard talk about her trip to Venus, and Margaret Storm (Carr’s “publications editor” in Baltimore) declares that Carr is inspired by the “Divine Master St. Germain.” (“Difficulties Put Off Flying Saucer Test,” Oklahoma City Daily Oklahoman, April 20, 1959, pp. 1–2, 13; Clark III 860–861)
April 20 — Ufologist Morris K. Jessup commits suicide in a Dade County park, Florida, from carbon monoxide poisoning. Some theorists connect his involvement with the Allende letters and the Philadelphia experiment to his death, but friends say Jessup has been discussing suicide with them for several months. (Clark III 635; “Jessup and the Allende Case,” Pursuit 1, no. 4 (September 30, 1968): 8–10)
May — The first Avrocar, #58-7055, rolls out of the Avro Malton factory in Mississauga, Ontario. From June 9 to October 7 it is tested in a static hover rig. A second Avrocar is completed in August. (Wikipedia, “Avro Canada VZ-9 Avrocar”)
May 4 — Otis T. Carr and his attorney are summoned to the county courthouse in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, to answer questions about stock sales by OTC Enterprises, including a block of 21,000 shares to Frontier City promoter Jimmy Burge, oilman Frank Buttram, and publisher Edward K. Gaylord. Carr pleads the Fifth Amendment. (Clark III 861)
May 5 — Hynek’s newly formed UFO Advisory Panel holds its first meeting at Wright-Patterson AFB in Dayton, Ohio.
The panel consists of Hynek, Lt. Col. Richard M. Graham (chaplain), Lt. Col. Theodore J. Hieatt (PR), Maj. Leroy D. Pigg (psychologist), V. J. Handmacher (physicist), and L. V. Robinson (astronomer). (“Saucer Reading Fest,” Saturday Night Uforia, January 25, 2019; Jacobs, UFO Controversy in America, Signet ed., 1976, pp. 148– 149)
May 18 — George Adamski has an audience with Queen Juliana and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands at Soestdijk Palace in Baarn on his world lecture tour, amid fiercely critical media coverage. The royal audience, scheduled to last 45 minutes, goes on for two hours, making Adamski 20 minutes late for his lecture in The Hague. The royal couple claim that the British royal family, especially Prince Philip, are also keen to meet Adamski. After the audience, Dutch Aeronautical Association president Cornelis Kolff says “The Queen showed an extraordinary interest in the whole subject.” Royal Netherlands Air Force Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Haye Schaper says, “The man’s a pathological case.” (“World Lecture Tour,” The Adamski Case, October 5, 2019; David Clarke, “The Prince and the Saucers,” Fortean Times 406 (June 2021): 19)
May 20 — 5:30 p.m. Antonio Sanchez and Ernesto Fogliani are hunting rabbits about 7 miles from Pehuelches station, Buenos Aires, Argentina. They see a saucer-shaped, silvery machine resting on the ground about 980 feet away. They approach to about 490 feet when the object rises into the sky and disappears. At the spot where it was, they
find the grass flattened in the shape of a large oval. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1959 April–June, The Author, 1999, p. 32)
May 22 — The UFO Advisory Panel meets to “determine the type of information which should be used for correlation in bringing Special Report #14 up to date.” (“Saucer Reading Fest,” Saturday Night Uforia, January 25, 2019)
Late May — Ruppelt tells Keyhoe he is revising his book to bring it more up to date and requests NICAP’s most recent information. He says the Air Force is giving its full cooperation and he is “middle of the road” on the UFO question. (Keyhoe, FSTS, pp. 258–260)
May 26, 29 — Adamski gives two lectures in Zürich, Switzerland. At the second talk, he meets with organized resistance by a group of 300 students (in an audience of 700) who have been led to believe he will discredit Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky. When a reporter afterwards asks if he will accept an apology, Adamski replies that it should not be given to him, but to the Swiss public. Due to recurring heart problems, Adamski cancels his remaining lectures in Switzerland, Italy, Austria, and Denmark. (“World Lecture Tour,” The Adamski Case, October 5, 2019)
May 28 — Otis T. Carr and two OTC Enterprises employees (Lari Kendrick and Charles O. Rhoades) are barred by a federal court order from selling any further stock in the company. The SEC contends that they have been selling unregistered securities fraudulently since November 18, 1955, using the US mail to do so. Contactee associate Wayne Aho escapes arraignment, while Norman Colton has fled the state and cannot be located. (Clark III 861)
May 28 — Night. Two observers on a Project Moonwatch team in San Antonio, Texas, see two silvery objects through their telescopes that shoot across the sky in less than one second, one curving away in a parabolic path, the other executing a more gradual hyperbolic curve. (Michael D. Swords, “Gazing at the Moons,” IUR 32, no. 4 (October 2009): 13–14; Center for UFO Studies, “Moonwatch Mystery Satellites, 1958–1962”)
June — The Argentine Navy bottles up a fast, submarine-like object in the Buenos Aires harbor, Argentina. It is shaped like a huge fish, is silver in color, and sports a tail like the stabilizer on a B-17. (Lorenzen, UFOs over the Americas, Signet, 1968, pp. 52–53)
June — The radiation effects reactor at Lockheed’s Georgia Nuclear Aircraft Laboratory [now closed] in the Dawson Forest outside Dawsonville, Georgia, is brought up to full power and unsheathed for the first time. It is a water- cooled 10-megawatt nuclear reactor in a shielded underground shaft with the purpose of irradiating military aircraft as well as the forest itself to determine the effects of nuclear war on wildlife. The experiment exposes everything within a 1,000-foot radius to a lethal dose of radiation. Bugs fall from the air, and small animals and the bacteria living in and on them are exterminated, in a phenomenon the technicians call “instant taxidermy.” Oak trees turn brown, yet crabgrass is seemingly unaffected. Pine trees are the hardest hit of all. Clear Coca-Cola bottles turn brown, hydraulic fluid coagulates into chewing gum, transistorized equipment stops working, and rubber tires become rock hard. Documents about the reactor remain highly classified, and the entrance to the underground portion of the facility has been buried. The area is closed in 1971, and only objects left above ground were the concrete foundations on which the buildings and reactors were placed. (Wikipedia, “Georgia Nuclear Aircraft Laboratory”; Adam Higginbotham, Midnight at Chernobyl, Simon & Schuster, 2019, p. 30)
June 12 — Keyhoe writes an open letter to Ruppelt that lists his past statements on UFOs and urges him not to let the Air Force intimidate him into retracting. (Donald E. Keyhoe, “Capt. Ruppelt Revising His UFO Book: Air Force Rumored to Be Pressuring Former Project Chief,” UFO Investigator 1, no. 8 (June 1959): 5–6)
June 13 — Charles S. Sheldon II, technical director of the House Science and Astronautics Committee, writes to Richard
H. Hall at NICAP to say that while he thinks UFOs are “extremely interesting,” they do not pose a national security threat.” (Swords 290)
June 13 — Adamski, along with follower Lou Zinsstag, meets with diplomat Alberto Perego and Mario Maioli at Ristorante La Cisterna in the Trastevere area of Rome, Italy, then go on an all-night taxi ride around the city. He returns to the United States via Copenhagen, Denmark, on June 17. (“World Lecture Tour,” The Adamski Case, October 5, 2019; 1Pinotti 106)
June 22 — 8:00 p.m. A large, luminous UFO passes over Salta, Argentina, and blacks out all electrical power for several minutes. (Bernardo Passíon, “Report from Argentina,” APRO Bulletin, November 1959, p. 9; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1959 April–June, The Author, 1999, p. 56)
June 26–28 — 6:45 p.m. At Boianai Mission, Papua New Guinea, Rev. William Booth Gill and 38 others watch a platform-shaped object with legs that appears in the sky above Venus. It has an electric blue spotlight and is hovering about 500 feet away at a height of 300–400 feet. On top of the object, four humanlike figures, their bodies surrounded by illumination, are busy with some unknown task. The men and spotlight disappear at 7:20
p.m. and the object vanishes into the clouds. It reappears at 8:28 without the men or spotlight but now joined by second, third and fourth objects at 8:29, 8:35, and 8:35–8:50 p.m., coming and going through the clouds. The
main UFO, “large, clear, stationary,” gives off a red light and disappears overhead into clouds at 9:10 p.m., reappears at 9:20, moves across the sea to Giwa appearing white-red-blue, then disappears at 9:30. An overhead object reappears at 9:46, hovering, disappears behind a cloud at 10:10, reappears in a gap between clouds at 10:30, then is gone at 10:50. The next day, the object returns at 6:00–6:30 p.m. with two others, one to the west and one overhead. “Two of the figures seemed to be doing something near the center of the deck. They were occasionally bending over and raising their arms as though adjusting or setting up something (not visible). One figure seemed to be standing, looking down at us.” Father Gill and another teacher wave their arms, and two of the figures on the main object wave back. Gill waves a flashlight and the object moves back and forth laterally. Gill goes in for dinner and a church service; when he returns at 7:45 p.m., the UFO is gone. The next evening at 6:45 p.m., some eight objects align themselves across a section of the sky. No occupants are visible. Martin Kottmeyer suggests that Gill was watching a lighted squid-fishing boat close to shore, but Gill has confirmed the object was over his head. (“Saucer Men Seen in Flight: Amazing Sighting from Papua,” Flying Saucer Review 5, no. 6 (Nov./Dec.
1959): 7–8; Norman E. G. Cruttwell, “Flying Saucers over Papua: A Report on Papuan Unidentified Flying Objects,” March 1960; Norman E. G. Cruttwell, “What Happened in Papua in 1959?” Flying Saucer Review 6, no. 6 (Nov./Dec. 1960): 3–7; “Father Gill and the Rev. Lionel Browning,” Flying Saucer Review 7, no. 5 (Sept./Oct.
1961): 23–25; Norman E. G. Cruttwell, “Flying Saucers over Papua,” in Charles Bowen, ed., UFOs in Two Worlds, special issue of FSR, August 1971, pp. 3–38; Gordon Creighton, “The New Guinea Sightings; A Note on Some Anthropological Aspects,” in Charles Bowen, ed., UFOs in Two Worlds, special issue of FSR, August 1971, p. 39; J. Allen Hynek, The UFO Experience, Ballantine ed., 1974, pp. 167– 172, 271–273; Hynek UFO Report, pp. 216–223; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1959 April–June, The Author, 1999,
pp. 59–68, 69–71; “Papua/Father Gill Revisited,” IUR 2, no. 11 (November 1977): 4–7; “Papua/Father Gill
Revisited, Part Two,” IUR 2, no. 12 (December 1977): 4–8; Kim Hansen, “UFO Casebook,” UFOs 1947–1987, Fortean Tomes, 1987, pp. 59–62; Martin Kottmeyer, “Gill Again: The Father Gill Case Reconsidered,” Magonia, no. 54 (November 1995): 11–14; Bill Chalker, “The Boianai Visitants of 1959,” The Black Vault, May 16, 2016; Thomas E. Bullard, “Defending UFOs,” IUR 34, no. 2 (Mar. 2012): 31–32; Swords 383–385; Clark III 533–536)
July — The Air Force reassigns UFO investigative duties to the 1127th Field Activities Group stationed at Fort Belvoir, Fairfax County, Virginia, replacing the 1006th AISS. The unit will also be responsible for Project Moon Dust and Operation Blue Fly. (Jacobs, UFO Controversy in America, Signet ed., 1976, p. 134; Kevin D. Randle and Donald
R. Schmitt, “Secret Projects and Open Eyes: A Response,” IUR 19, no. 3 (May/June 1994): 16–17)
July — Contactee Gabriel Green rebrands his group as the Amalgamated Flying Saucer Clubs of America and publishes the AFSCA World Report from 1959 to 1961, UFO International from 1962 to 1965, and Flying Saucers International from 1966 to 1969. (AFSCA Information Sheet, no. 1 (1959); AFSCA UFO International, no. 17
(Sept./Oct. 1962); Flying Saucers International, no. 24 (July 1966); Clark III 99)
July 5–6 — US Navy Cmdr. Julius Larsen, an ONI liaison officer to the CIA’s Photographic Intelligence Center in Washington, D.C., rediscovers the Swan-Knowles-Affa correspondence from 1954 in a file and decides to follow up on it. He goes to Eliot, Maine, to visit Adm. Knowles and interview Frances Swan. Larsen tries his hand at automatic writing and channels a message from Affa. Back in Washington on July 6, Larsen goes to director of the Photographic Intelligence Office, Arthur C. Lundahl, and tells the story to him and his assistant Lt. Robert S. Neasham. They urge Larsen to try to contact the extraterrestrials. Larsen goes into a trance, asks Affa questions, and writes the answers down. When Neasham challenges Affa to appear in person or let them see his spaceship, Larsen stops writing and tells Neasham to go to the window. Lundahl sees nothing unusual, but Neasham insists a spaceship is hiding behind some fluffy clouds. He also insists that he later contacted Washington National Airport and heard from the radar tower that the sector where the UFO appeared had been “blocked out.” Neasham urges Project Blue Book’s Maj. Robert Friend to come over for a briefing. He shows up on July 9 and hears Neasham’s version of the story, and Larsen even channels some messages. Friend goes back to Dayton, Ohio, and prepares a memo for his boss. (Jacobs, UFO Controversy in America, Signet ed., 1976, pp. 153–154; Clark III 1118–1119; Robert Emenegger, UFOs: Past, Present, and Future, Ballantine, 1974)
July 8 — Night. Mrs. Napau Abednego and other indigenous people on Prince of Wales Island in the Torres Strait off Queensland, Australia, see a huge, glowing red object land on top of a hill at Port Lihou. The same night, residents of nearby Thursday Island see a green UFO flying low, and a strange object is also reported at Mapoon Mission on the west coast of Cape York. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1959 July–September, The Author, 2000, p. 13)
July 11 — 6:02 a.m. A Pan American Boeing Stratocruiser piloted by Capt. George Wilson flying over the Pacific Ocean about 1,035 miles northeast of Honolulu, Hawaii, encounters a large bright light with 3–4 satellite lights in a line below, behind, and to the left of the main object. It makes a sharp right turn and disappears to the south. Copilot
Richard Lorenzen and Flight Engineer Bob Scott also see the UFOs. Another Pan Am flight sees essentially the same phenomenon, as well as an Air Force bomber crew, a Slick Airways plane, and a Canadian Pacific airliner. (UFOEv, p. 125)
July 13 — 5:30 a.m. Eileen Moreland, a farmwoman in Blenheim, New Zealand, goes to the barn to milk her cows and sees a huge object, about 20–30 feet in diameter, with two intense green lights on its underside descend towards her and hover at rooftop height. It bathes her in green light. Two rows of jets around the middle shoot out orange flames. She can see two men inside, dressed in close-fitting suits of shiny material and opaque helmets. The jets turn on again, the object tilts, and it shoots up vertically at great speed, making a high-pitched sound. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1959 July–September, The Author, 2000, pp.
25–28; Richard H. Hall, “Dyad ‘Scout Craft,’” IUR 25, no. 4 (Winter 2000–2001): 23; Patrick Gross, URECAT, November 2, 2006)
July 14 — 8:22 p.m. TV sets in Salisbury, North Carolina, mysteriously go dead as residents see a flash of light and hear a loud vibrato noise. (Schopick, pp. 111–113)
July 20 — A shuttlecock-shaped UFO is seen over the RAAF Woomera Range Complex in South Australia. (Lorenzen,
UFOs: The Whole Story, Signet, 1969, p. 100)
July 27 — The UFO Advisory Panel meets at Wright-Patterson AFB in Ohio to discuss trends and statistics and recent sightings. (“Saucer Reading Fest,” Saturday Night Uforia, January 25, 2019)
July 28 — 2:10 p.m. Ray Stanford and a friend simultaneously take 8mm and 16mm film footage of three cigar-shaped objects maneuvering in the sky above his parents’ home at 2629 Lynch Street, Corpus Christi, Texas. A fourth UFO appears about 5 minutes later. At one point a jet aircraft appears to alter its course to fly closer to one of the objects. (Ray Stanford, “The July 28 Movies,” Saucers 7, no. 3/4 (Fall/Winter 1959/1960): 20–23; “Out of the Past,” CUFOS Associate Newsletter 5, no. 4 (Aug./Sept. 1984): 5–7; “Out of the Past,” CUFOS Associate Newsletter 5, no. 5 (Oct./Nov. 1984): 7–8)
August — Stan Seers, president of the Queensland Flying Saucer Research Bureau [now UFO Research Queensland], is contacted by a man who requests a meeting with him in a Brisbane car park and offers him important information on UFOs. At the meeting he finds out that the man is an agent of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, who indicates he knows quite a bit about the group and its officers. By suggesting that ASIO could offer them significant information, the agent subsequently infiltrates the group and causes dissension and confusion. Some QFSRB members are pacifists, apparently, and are seeking to contact Russian scientists about the UFO phenomenon through the Soviet cultural organization VOKS. (Good Above, pp. 164–166; Kremlin 137– 144)
August — 2:00 p.m. A son and his father are driving near Skiatook, Oklahoma. Upon nearing a bridge, the car engine dies. Another car is stopped on the other side of the bridge with its hood up. They see a metallic, domed disc with a flexible hose hovering less than a foot above the water of a creek. They watch it for 5 minutes, then the hose draws in and the disk rises to 10 feet, disturbing the water’s surface into a foot-deep trench. It flies upward and the cars start again. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1959 July–September, The Author, 2000, pp. 59–61; Michael D. Swords, “Messing Around with the Force,” IUR 31, no. 4 (March 2008): 16–17)
August — Kathleen O’Rourke is asleep with her two children in her bedroom in New Matamoras, Ohio, when her son yells her awake. There are a dozen globes of yellow light circling about a foot above his bed. They are about 3 inches in diameter. Then a second group enters the room, passing through the screen. They split, half joining the first and half sailing over Kathleen. They all then move to her bed and circle above her. Not one of the lights goes to her daughter’s bed. She presses the light switch, and the lights turn into straight-edged streaks of light and disappear. There are no holes in the screens. (Michael D. Swords, “A Trick of the Light,” IUR 31, no. 2 (June 2007): 10)
August 9 — 7:30 p.m. Petroleum engineer Armando Uribe is returning home from Cerro Sombrero, Tierra del Fuego, Chile, with his wife and an 11-year-old housemaid when their pickup runs out of fuel. As they are waiting for another vehicle, the girl spots a bright blue light around 7:54 p.m. that is swinging in the air with a pendulum-like motion. As it approaches, they see it is an object like a metallic egg standing on end with two shafts of white light projecting from the bottom. A rose-colored, rotating device is on top. The object makes a quick movement when Uribe gets out of the truck, but then moves closer. Uribe points a rifle at it, and it quickly recedes and disappears. (Lorenzen, UFOs over the Americas, Signet, 1968, pp. 14–16; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1959 July–September, The Author, 2000, pp. 53–54)
August 13 — 4:00 p.m. Pilot Jack H. Goldsberry, flying a Cessna 170 from Hobbs to Albuquerque, New Mexico, at 8,000 feet, notices halfway between Roswell and Corona, that his Magnesyn electric compass has suddenly moved
around a slow 360° rotation in about 4–5 seconds. His other standard magnetic compass is spinning wildly. About this time, he sees three small, gray, and slightly fuzzy elliptical objects in close echelon formation passing in front from left to right and around his plane at a distance about 450–600 feet at a speed of about 200 mph. The Magnesyn compass follows the objects’ position as they circle the plane, and after one full circle they disappear to the rear. Then both compasses settle back to normal. The controller at Albuquerque cancels his flight plan and orders him to land at Kirtland AFB, where he is interrogated by a USAF major, who tells him that he might become ill from the experience. (NICAP, “Former Navy PBY Pilot Encounter / EME”; Clark III 950; Sparks, p.
278; Swords 287; “AF Secretly Warns Pilot of Danger,” UFO Investigator 3, no. 1 (March/April 1965): 5;
August 13 — Around 9:45 p.m. Orville Shanks is driving with three passengers on Highway 332 north of Freeport, Texas, when they see a bright object with two satellite lights approach at low altitude. The car motor stalls and the headlights go out. The two lights appear to land, the main object follows them, continually changing colors and varying the intensity of its light. The motor and lights come back on when the UFOs cross the road, and Shanks drives on. About midnight they return, and the object is still there. Shanks gets out and approaches, but the UFO starts glowing brightly and making a noise, and they drive off again. (“Object Lands in Texas, U.S.,” APRO Bulletin, September 1959, p. 3; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1959 July–September, The Author, 2000, pp. 55–60)
August 17 — The automatic keys at the power station in Uberlândia, Minas Gerais, Brazil, suddenly disconnect power to all four trunk lines. A technician at a substation 45 miles away reports that all the keys disconnected as a UFO passes overhead, traveling toward the main station along the power lines. The chief engineer resets all the keys but they turn off again. Outside he sees a bright object approaching at high speed. As soon as it passes, the entire system returns to normal. (Lorenzen, FSHoax, pp. 179–180; Schopick, pp. 143–145; Lorenzen, UFOs: The Whole Story, Signet, 1969, pp. 152–153; McCampbell, Ufology, 1976, pp. 66–67; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1959 July–September, The Author, 2000, pp. 66–67)
August 25 — 11:00 a.m. At Eveking, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, Lutz Holtman walks towards a bright object in a forest and faints after he gets close to it. When he regains consciousness, he sees the UFO take off silently and vertically. The object is circular, has a tripod landing gear and two rows of bright openings, and is about 90 feet in diameter. (Vallée, Magonia, p. 277)
September — Employees of Lockheed’s Skunk Works are the first to return to Area 51 in Nevada to develop an aircraft that will replace the U-2. The Archangel-12 (A-12) spy plane will be designed to reduce its radar cross section by 50%. Following tests with wooden models at Burbank, California, proof-of-concept tests are to be carried out at Area 51 with full-scale mockups elevated onto 50-foot pylons. The CIA program to develop the follow-on aircraft to the U-2 is code-named Project Oxcart. EG&G agrees to move its radar test facility here. (Jacobsen, Area 51, p. 131; Peter W. Merlin, “Groom Lake Timeline: The First Fifty Years,” Secret Heroes, November 10, 2021)
September — Waveney Girvan takes over the editorship of Flying Saucer Review from Brinsley Le Poer Trench. (“Trench Resigns,” Flying Saucer Review 5, no. 5 (Sept./Oct. 1959): 2; Clark III 498)
September — Harvard University psychologist Henry Murray begins what are widely considered unethical experiments, in which he uses 22 Harvard undergraduates as research subjects in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Among other purposes, experiments focus on measuring people’s reactions under extreme stress. The unwitting undergraduates are submitted to what Murray calls “vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive” attacks. Specific, tailored assaults on their egos, cherished ideas, and beliefs are used to cause high levels of stress and distress. The subjects then repeatedly view recorded footage of their reactions to this verbal abuse. Among them is 17-year-old Ted Kaczynski, a mathematician who goes on to become the Unabomber, a domestic terrorist targeting academics and technologists for 18 years. Alston Chase’s book Harvard and the Unabomber connects Kaczynski’s abusive experiences under Murray to his later criminal career. His participation in these experiments and his service in the OSS have led many to believe that Murray was a part of the MK Ultra program. His experiments are not so much for observing stress reactions, but for a study of brainwashing and enhanced interrogation techniques. (Wikipedia, “Henry Murray”; Alston Chase, Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist, Norton, 2003)
September 7 — 2:00 a.m. Rural mail carrier Walter E. Ogden sees a glowing, pumpkin-shaped object about 40 feet above the trees in his pasture at Wallingford, Kentucky. After a minute, a bluish blaze of fire comes from the bottom and it rises about 500 feet, leaving a circular smoke ring. It then zooms away horizontally. Six days later, a 12-foot depressed ring of scorched earth is discovered on the spot, along with a kerosene smell. Air Force investigators show up and declare it a hoax. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1959 July–September, The Author, 2000, pp. 74–75, 77–80)
September 9 — The first Atlas-D ICBM is successfully launched at Vandenberg AFB [now Vandenberg Space Force Base] near Lompoc, California, and Gen. Thomas S. Power, CINCSAC, declares the first ICBM to be operational. Shortly afterward, the first operational Atlas-D ICBM squadron goes on alert at Francis E. Warren AFB, west of Cheyenne, Wyoming. It is equipped with six SM-65D Atlas missiles based in above-ground launchers. (Wikipedia, “Vandenberg Space Force Base”; Wikipedia, “SM-65 Atlas”)
September 13 — 9:58 p.m. A radar target is tracked at Kirtland AFB in Albuquerque, New Mexico, moving at 2,300 mph at an altitude of 60,000 feet and heading northwest. A total of four radar stations track the object. (Lorenzen, UFOs: The Whole Story, Signet, 1969, p. 103)
September 14 — Air Force Regulation 200-2 is revised, with additional emphasis on reducing the number of unknowns. This version devotes five full paragraphs to public release of information, which is now restricted to the Secretary of the Air Force’s Office of Information Services at the Pentagon. Local base commanders can release information only if an object is positively identified. Air Force personnel are not to contact private individuals on UFO cases or discuss their operations unless ordered to. (“USAF UFO Program,” September 28, 1959; Clark III 920–921)
September 14 — The CIA emphasizes antiradar study, aerodynamic structural tests, and engineering designs, selecting the Lockheed A-12 over rival Convair’s Kingfish. Edward Lovick’s suggestion for adding cesium to the A-12’s fuel in order to ionize the exhaust and mask it from radar is also persuasive. Lockheed has also added twin canted fins instead of a single right-angle one. Project Oxcart is officially established. The A-12 design, a combination of their A-7 and A-11 submissions, emphasizes low radar cross section, extremely high altitude, and high-speed performance. (Wikipedia, “Lockheed A-12”)
September 17 —The first powered X-15 flight is piloted by Albert Scott Crossfield out of the Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards AFB, California. (Wikipedia, “North American X-15”)
September 21 — The Air Technical Intelligence Center is renamed the Aerospace Technical Intelligence Center. (NASIC, “National Air and Space Intelligence Center Heritage”)
September 24 — About 4:55 a.m. In Redmond, Oregon, police officer Robert Dickerson sees a bright white light rapidly descending north of the airport. It stops abruptly and hovers about 200 feet above ground for several minutes, lighting up the juniper trees below. Dickerson drives toward it on the Prineville Highway, then turns toward the airport. The object turns reddish-orange and moves rapidly to about 10 miles northeast of the airport to hover again. Dickerson arrives at the airport to report his sighting in person to the FAA Air Traffic Communication Station. Flight Service Specialist Laverne Wertz, Dickerson, and others view the object through binoculars as flat and round with occasional flames extending from its edge. The FAA reports the UFO to Seattle Air Route Control Center in Washington at 5:10 a.m., which in turn reports it to Hamilton AFB [now closed], Novato, California, which scrambles six F-102 jets from Portland to intercept the object. FAA station observers see the object hover and emit long tongues of red, yellow, and green light that extend and retract at irregular intervals. As the jets approach the object from the southeast, it turns into a mushroom shape, emits red and yellow flames from the lower side, and ascends rapidly, disappearing above scattered clouds at about 14,000 feet. The object’s departure forces one F-102 to swerve to avoid collision. Another nearly loses control from the UFO’s turbulent wake. The UFO is tracked on one F-102 gunsight radar, but the jets cannot intercept. The UFO reappears about 20 miles south of Redmond at about 25,000 feet. The Seattle Center reports at 6:20 a.m. radar contact with the object about 25 miles south. The USAF Air Defense Center radar site at Klamath Falls, Oregon, tracks a large target abruptly changing course and vectors B-47 and F-89 aircraft to identify it. Redmond FAA controllers lose sight of the object. Seattle FAA reports at 7:11 a.m. that Klamath Falls radar still is tracking it at 25 miles south of Redmond but varies in altitude from 6,000 to 52,000 feet. The Air Force claims the UFOs are caused by false radar returns, with excitable witnesses imagining the glow. But locals notice the FAA is checking for abnormal radioactivity, so the Air Force changes its explanation to weather balloon. And NICAP obtains FAA logs showing all the details. The Air Force again changes its explanation to Venus. (NICAP, “Huge Disc Sparks Scramble”; UFOEv,
pp. 44, 48, 113–114, 138; Keyhoe, Aliens from Space, Signet ed., 1974, pp. 33–36; WFAA, Dallas, Texas, “Archive 1959: Fighter Jets Sent to Intercept Redmond UFO,” May 12, 2016; Patrick Gross, “The Redmond UFO Incident, USA, September 24, 1959”)
September 28 — ATIC issues a staff study by Col. Richard R. Shoop reassessing its UFO investigating role. It recommends that the UFO program be transferred to the Air Research and Development Command, which has better scientific capabilities, and then implement an effective public relations campaign with the goal of “the eventual elimination of the program as a special project.” (“USAF UFO Program,” September 28, 1959; “Saucer Reading Fest,” Saturday Night Uforia, January 25, 2019; Jacobs, UFO Controversy in America, Signet ed., p.
151)
September 29 — Maj. R. O. Braswell, flying an Air Force C-47 at 6,500 feet over Texas, sees a “large red fire” that looks like a mushroom cloud. It is 5° above his plane, with its base at 12,000–15,000 feet and its top at 16,000 feet. (Keyhoe, Aliens from Space, Signet ed., 1974, pp. 160–161)
September 29 — The first attempt to hover a tethered Avrocar is made. After the vehicle becomes airborne, an uncontrollable roll and pitch-coupled oscillation starts that forces each of the three wheels into the ground in turn. The pilot, W. D. “Spud” Potocki, immediately shuts down all engines. Changes are made to the stability system to provide more control authority, while new tethers are investigated to improve the ability to control the problem. (Wikipedia, “Avro Canada VZ-9 Avrocar”)
September 30 — Night. During a training flight with a student over Poznań, Poland, a pilot named Leszczyński sees two large circles of light with another pair some 12 miles away. He makes a close approach, but one of the objects shoots off while the other grows dimmer. After a short while, the dark object moves away. (Poland 63)
October — NICAP continues collecting statements in preparation for potential congressional hearings. It gets statements from USAF pilot and UFO witness Lt. Col. Richard T. Headrick, Sgt. James H. Sawyer, and Sgt. Oliver Dean. (Keyhoe, FSTS, pp. 252–254; UFOEv, p. 25)
October — 10:00 a.m. Fr. Raimundo Nascimento Teixeira, a professor at Don Bosco College, is walking in the Núcleo Bandeirante region in Brasília, Federal District, Brazil, when he sees a crowd watching a strange object moving and stopping in the blue sky. He sees a student of his with a box camera, and he takes six photos of what he calls a flying saucer. A few days later, Teixeira meets with another witness, Israel Pinheiro, president of the New Building Company, who takes the negatives of his three best photos to forward to the Brazilian Navy for analysis. A few months later, the Navy returns different photos and offers no technical report. (Clark III 197; Roberto Affonso Beck, “Um Fenômeno Desafiador,” September 2005, pp. 35–36)
October 1 — 9:20 a.m. A radar target moving at 719 mph on a northwest course is tracked at Kirtland AFB in Albuquerque, New Mexico. At 10:29 a.m., another radar target is detected moving at 1,000 mph to the northwest. Its altitude is 41,000 feet. Two F-89J Scorpion fighters are scrambled to intercept it but they can see nothing. (Lorenzen, UFOs: The Whole Story, Signet, 1969, pp. 103–104)
October 2 — 12:20 a.m. For three hours, a Hercules radar site (#13) at McChord AFB [now Joint Base Lewis-McChord] near Tacoma, Washington, tracks a total of five objects that usually appear in pairs. The radar returns are said to be “weak.” Visually, at least one soundless, round. “quarter sized,” blue-white light is seen in the sky. ARTC reports no air traffic in the area of the radar site during the time of contact. The first object on radar is seen at 10° elevation. The last object seen on radar was at 20° elevation. The visual object is at 10° degrees elevation. When last observed, the visual object is 20° elevation. Flight patterns are erratic. Range changes from 12,000 feet to 24,000 feet, and azimuth from 190° to 170°. Objects seem to fade from the scope and visual contact when finally lost. Visual contact is disrupted by intermittent fog. (NICAP, “Hercules Site Tracks Objects for Three Hours”; Condon, pp. 145–148; Swords 287)
October 8 — Night. Two amateur astronomers in Mobile, Alabama, observe an unknown object traverse the Moon’s disk from west to east directly over the crater Copernicus. They watch the fast-moving shape “every night the weather permitted for a period of 33 days.” They write to Project Moonwatch about the observations, but they reply that no other lunar observers have seen the phenomenon, so it must be closer to the Mobile observers. (Michael D. Swords, “Gazing at the Moons,” IUR 32, no. 4 (October 2009): 15)
October 12 — 1:00 p.m. Multiple witnesses at Washington, Sharon, and Crawfordville, Georgia, watch “brown or black footballs” traveling southeast to west, followed by angel hair covering a vast area. The substance consists of “threads from 10ʹ to 50ʹ long connected at ¾ʺ intervals by minute particles resembling snowflakes.” The material falls for about 2 hours. Five samples are collected and sent to the Chemicals and Materials Laboratory at Robins AFB, Georgia. No unusual elements are discovered except for high amounts of silver in one and some silver in three others. The conjecture is that “cloud seeding with a silver salt could have caused the phenomenon.” (Brian Boldman, “Angel Hair Physical Analyses: A Review,” JUFOS 9 (2006): 103–104)
October 13 — In his syndicated column, Joseph Alsop goes so far as to describe “classified intelligence” as placing the Soviet missile count as high as 1,500 by 1963, and the US will have only 130 at that time. (Joseph Alsop, “True Missile Gap Picture Belies Pentagon Response,” Eugene (Oreg.) Register-Guard, October 13, 1959, p. 10)
October 22 — Night. Three witnesses are driving through Cumberland, Maryland, when they see a metallic disc emitting a bluish-green light around its edge. The driver abruptly stops, but leaves the car running. Suddenly the object drops down to 50 feet altitude and hovers 100 feet away in front of the car, making a humming vibration. As two of the witnesses open the door to get out, the car engine, lights, and radio fail. Shortly afterward, the disc shoots straight up, then forward, makes a 90° angle, then disappears in clouds. The car begins functioning normally
again. (Newark (Md.) Evening News, November 5, 1959; Schopick, pp. 67–68; Lorenzen, UFOs: The Whole Story, Signet, 1969, pp. 104–105)
Late October — 6:55 p.m. Electrician Gideon Johansson is at home in Mariannelund, Småland, Sweden, when there is a power failure. He goes outside to look at the power lines when he bumps into his son Rolf, who points out a brilliant white object hovering above a three-story building. The object descends slowly and appears to be heading toward Johansson’s garden. The machine oscillates three times and smashes into the top of a maple tree, descends through the branches and hovers about 18 inches above the ground. Only about 10 feet away, Johansson can see the object has a large window, through which two entities are visible. Their heads have high crown and they have big, friendly eyes. They have mall mouths and pointed chins and are wearing white uniforms with broad black belts. One seems to be working at an instrument panel. They are only the size of a 14-year-old. Soon the object moves up and shoots away in a flash. Glassy deposits are found on some power lines in addition to the damaged tree, and Johansson gets prickly pains in his lower body. (Anders Liljegren, “Mariannelund UFO and Occupants,” Flying Saucer Review 16, no. 6 (Nov./Dec. 1970): 14–17)
October 31 — Soviet Col. Georgy Mosolov reaches an airspeed record of 1,484 mph in a Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-21 over the Soviet Union. (Wikipedia, “Georgy Mosolov”)
November — A full-scale mockup of the A-12 is shipped to Area 51 in Nevada for radar signature testing by EG&G. (Peter W. Merlin, “Groom Lake Timeline: The First Fifty Years,” Secret Heroes, November 10, 2021)
November 2 — 12:00 noon. A substance described as angel hair falls from two UFOs seen in Evora, Portugal, and is collected and analyzed under a microscope by a school director, Dr. Amaral, and later by armed forces technicians and scientists at the University of Lisbon. The scientists conclude that the substance is produced by a small insect or some strange kind of single-celled organism about 4 millimeters in length. (Hayley Price, “Evora Angel Hair,” UFO Weekly News; Nicole Guardiola, “An Extraterrestrial Living Being, Captured and Studied Eighteen Years Ago,” translated from El País, October 13, 1978)
November 8 — A large, luminous object is seen moving at great speed over Kandahar, Afghanistan, to the northwest. Shortly afterward it explodes with a loud roar in nearby mountains, causing some slight earth tremors. Possible Russian missile test. (Good Above, p. 308)
November 10 — Requests to transfer responsibility for UFO investigations from ATIC to ARDC are sent to Maj. Gen.
Charles B. Dougher (ATIC commander), Col. Philip G. Evans (ATIC Deputy for Sciences and Components), and Maj. Gen. James H. Walsh (AF Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence). (“Saucer Reading Fest,” Saturday Night Uforia, January 25, 2019)
November 12 — The first completely free flight of an Avrocar takes place. This test proves the nozzle control system unacceptable. (Wikipedia, “Avro Canada VZ-9 Avrocar”)
November 16 — 8:00 p.m. Czech Air Force officer Commander Duchoň is driving with another officer named Bezák to a Czechoslovakian airfield [now in the Czech Republic] to supervise night-flying exercises. At about 6 miles from the airfield, the car engine begins to stall. Suddenly they see a light sapphire-colored band moving at high speed at an altitude of 1,600–2,600 feet. It is completely silent. Some minutes later they are able to start the car again.
Personnel at the airfield tell them they had seen a flaming ball that rotated, made a 90° turn, and passed over the airfield again. The tower tracks the object on radar at an altitude of 3,000 feet during its second pass. The object is about 500 feet in diameter with a glowing ring around it. (“Saucers and the Iron Curtain: A Report from Czechoslovakia,” Flying Saucer Review 6, no. 4 (July/Aug. 1960): 31–32)
November 19 — Otis T. Carr is convicted in federal court of selling unregistered securities to Gurney G. Warnberg, a pilot and railroad man in Yukon, Oklahoma, and fined $5,000. Unable to pay, Carr works off his fine in jail at a dollar a day. (Clark III 861)
December — The new edition of Ruppelt’s The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects is published with three new UFO debunking chapters, the last of which is completely different in tone from the rest of the book. He claims there is no Air Force secrecy on UFOs and NICAP is just a bunch of grandstanding nuts. (Clark III 1024; Michael Hall and Wendy Connors, “The Forgotten Letters of Edward J. Ruppelt,” IUR 24, no. 4 (Winter 1999): 20–26, 30, 32;
Swords 301)
December — The London UFO Research Organisation is founded by Paul Teugells, Nigel Stephenson, Susanne Stebbing, and Roy Stemman, and begins publishing a monthly magazine, LUFORO Bulletin. (LUFORO Newsletter, no. 1 (December 1959))
December — Project Space Track moves to a new building in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the National Space Surveillance Control Center (NSSCC), which is formally dedicated on February 9, 1960. The NSSCC is part of the Air Force
Command and Control Development Division, Air Research and Development Command. Harold O. Curtis of Lincoln Laboratory is the director of the NSSCC. (Wikipedia, “Project Space Track”)
December — 5:45 a.m. Larry Jensen is driving to work on US Highway 99 near Proberta, California, when his radio begins making “snapping” noises, and his lights dim. He pulls over to the side of the road and gets out to check his headlights, which he finds are shining feebly. He notices a huge, bright, bluish-green, crescent-shaped object hovering about 60 feet above the road a quarter of a mile behind him. It appears to be 80–90 feet across and 15– 20 feet thick. Suddenly and inexplicably, he finds his clothes are soaked and he feels an alarming feeling as if he is getting crushed inside. He also feels as if he is being sucked up into the object. He grabs for a car door, then collides with a side mirror and staggers backward, but manages to get inside. Looking out the right-door window, he sees the UFO a few miles away, heading northeast and climbing at a shallow angle over the Sierra foothills. It vanishes within 10 seconds. Jensen’s car lights come back on. He resumes driving, but 600 feet away is forced to stop because he smells burning rubber. The battery caps are blown out, and the battery is swollen out of shape, the generator is not working, and the armature and field wires have melted together. Later, he finds it odd that he has not encountered another single car during or after the episode. (Clark III 866; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1959 October–December, The Author, 2000, pp. 56–59)
December 1 — At a NASA news conference in Washington, D.C., Cal Tech geochemist Harrison Brown suggests that boneless animals similar to jellyfish abound in oceans on Venus. The speculation comes in the wake of the discovery that the planet’s atmosphere contains water vapor. (“Scientist Says Jellyfish May Live on Venus,” Wilmington (Del.) News Journal, December 2, 1959, p. 29)
December 2 — A bright, circular object is seen in the sky heading southwest over Ghazni, Afghanistan. It disappears after 2 minutes. (Good Above, p. 308)
December 5 — After five flights, testing of the Avrocar is temporarily halted, by which time it has logged 18.5 hours of test time in total. (Wikipedia, “Avro Canada VZ-9 Avrocar”)
December 7 — Maj. Gen. James H. Walsh writes to Lt. Gen. Bernard A. Schriever, commander of ARDC, regarding transfer of UFO duties. (“Saucer Reading Fest,” Saturday Night Uforia, January 25, 2019)
December 11 — A memo reaches CIA head Allen Dulles’s desk recommending the removal of Fidel Castro. He sets the wheels in motion. ()
December 13 — Karl Lars Dersson is walking on the deck of the Danish tanker Dorthe Mærsk just north of La Orchila Island, Venezuela. He sees a brilliant cone-shaped object descending from the sky and alerts the crew. It gets brighter as it nears the surface of the Caribbean, and the crew hear a loud concussion as it enters the water. The surface becomes turbulent and brilliant with many colors. (Lorenzen, UFOs over the Americas, Signet, 1968, pp. 50–51)
December 13 — Early evening. A rocket project officer at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, is out looking at the Moon with binoculars when a lighted object approaches the Moon very slowly in the six o’clock position. Once nearly in line with the lunar edge, it begins a precision journey, skirting the edge until it reaches three o’clock. It then leaves on a straight track directly away. During the observation, the man calls his wife and two neighbors to watch the performance. (Michael D. Swords, “Gazing at the Moons,” IUR 32, no. 4 (October 2009): 14–15)
December 15 — USAF Maj. Joseph Rogers attains an airspeed of 1,526 mph in a Convair F-106 Delta Dart at Edwards AFB, California. (Wikipedia, “Convair F-106 Delta Dart”)
Late December — 10:00 p.m. Lorentz Johnsen sees a dark, silent object with a row of windows fly slowly by at an altitude of 500 feet, headed in the direction of Namsenfjorden, Trøndelag, Norway. It descends to about 160 feet, grows fiery red, then explodes with a crash and falls into the water. He says that it looks like a cover is torn off in one piece like a “curved sheet of metal.” (Ole Jonny Brænne, “Observations of Unidentified Submarine Objects in Norway,” IUR 20, no. 1 (Jan./Feb. 1995): 13)
December 24 — Maj. Gen. Richard E. O’Keefe, acting inspector general of the Air Force, issues instructions pertaining to “UFO business” to every air base commander in the US. The document is not intended for public distribution, but NICAP obtains a copy. Across the top are the words “UFOs Serious Business.” It says that UFOs “must be rapidly and accurately identified as serious USAF business in the ZI [Zone of Interior]” and specifies that UFO investigators “should be equipped with binoculars, camera, Geiger counter, magnifying glass and have a source for containers in which to store samples.” O’Keefe asks that UFO explanations be “reasonable and knowledgeable.” (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: 1959 October– December, The Author, 2000, pp. 61, 65–66; Swords 286; Good Need, pp. 226, 229)
1960
Early 1960 — Night. Vice Chief of Air Staff Gen. Curtis LeMay is conducting an exercise to test his bombers’ capability to penetrate US air space. An F-89J Scorpion jet instructor pilot and his radar observer, 1Lt. Joe Meyer, have just successfully intercepted a B-47 and are descending to land at James Connally AFB [now TSTC Waco Airport] near Waco, Texas. They notice a pinpoint of light at their level 12 miles away over Waco and decide to approach and attack it as if they are armed. As they approach on a collision course, they see the object has four bright blue- white lights on it and it is stationary. They estimate it is 25–30 feet in diameter. But the object shoots straight up at incredible speed before they reach it. They look up and see the object is bright blue white on its underside. It disappears at about 90,000 feet altitude. (“Pilot Finally Reveals UFO Encounter,” MUFON UFO Journal, no. 375 (July 1999): 17)
1960 — Jim Lorenzen is hired as senior technical associate with the Kitt Peak National Observatory, so he and Coral move to Tucson, Arizona, from Alamogordo, New Mexico. On their third day in Tucson, an “exterminator” visits them, offering to inspect their rented premises for free. He fails to mention the name of his company, nor does he seem interested in his occupation. He talks with Coral about their reason for moving, where Jim is employed, and UFOs. (Clark III 50; Lorenzen, Encounters with UFO Occupants, Berkley Medallion, 1976, pp. 3, 251)
1960 — Brinsley Le Poer Trench, 8th Earl of Clancarty, publishes The Sky People, in which he claims that Adam and Eve, Noah, and many other characters in the Bible originally lived on Mars. Trench believes that Adam and
Eve were experimental creations of extraterrestrials. The biblical description of the Garden of Eden is inconsistent with what Earth is like, and because Mars contains canals, the Garden of Eden must have been located on Mars.
He further claims that the north polar ice cap melted on Mars, causing the descendants of Adam and Eve to move to Earth. The Book of Genesis is a symbolic version of what actually happened to groups of people on Mars, he writes, with the Great Deluge referring to the flooding of Atlantis and Lemuria, which were populated with Adamic migrants. (Brinsley Le Poer Trench, The Sky People, Spearman, 1960; Jerome Clark, “Vimanas Have Landed: Ancient Astronautics in Ufology,” IUR 22, no. 3 (Fall 1997): 26–27)
1960 — Contactee George Hunt Williamson legally changes his name to Michel d’Obrenovic, said to reflect an ancestral connection to the throne of Serbia. However, John Griffin says the real reason is that Williamson’s sensational claims have rendered his anthropological work (such as it is) completely unacceptable. (Clark III 1287; Zirger and Martinelli, The Incredible Life of George Hunt Williamson, Verdechiari, 2016, pp. 119–124)
1960 — Night. During a pause in army maneuvers near Brno [now in the Czech Republic], soldiers see a peculiarly colored light above the city. After hovering a while, it vanishes but reappears in another part of the sky. Their commanding officer tells them to look at it with binoculars and check the radar. Headquarters sends up interceptors to chase the object, but every time one of them gets near, the light disappears from the radar screen, only to turn up elsewhere. The incident goes on for an hour before the light disappears for good. (Hobana and Weverbergh 90)
1960 — The invention of transponders that transmit an electronic identification signal from aircraft to ground control helps to further reduce clutter on air traffic control radars. This means that “aerial phenomena” appear on radar only if they intrude on flight paths and create a near miss of the type investigated by the Civil Aviation Authority. (David Clarke, “Gremlins and Black Projects,” Fortean Times 291 (August 2012): 26–27; National Air Traffic Controllers Association, A History of Air Traffic Control, 2019)
January — The first issue of the Australian Flying Saucer Review is published jointly by the Victorian Flying Saucer Research Society and UFOIC, edited by Peter E. Norris and Andrew P. Tomas. It will continue until December 1972, various issues confusingly sponsored by each group, plus the Queensland Flying Saucer Research Bureau and the renamed Victorian UFO Research Society. (Australian Flying Saucer Review 1, no. 1 (January 1960))
January — Tests continue with a slightly modified Avrocar. (Wikipedia, “Avro Canada VZ-9 Avrocar”)
January 18 — 10:45 p.m. Leo Haley and Bert C. Baker are driving on US Highway 2, some 9 miles west of Lakota, North Dakota, when the headlights dim just as a brilliant green flash lights up the sky. In a field to the north about 1 mile away they can see a 5–6 foot crescent-shaped object with a 9-foot exhaust tail. (Schopick, p. 69)
January 26 — Richard Bissell notifies Kelly Johnson that the CIA is authorizing the delivery of 12 A-12 aircraft that will be five times faster than the U-2 and fly three miles higher. Skunk Works will move into production at Area 51 in Nevada to work on Project Oxcart. (Wikipedia, “Lockheed A-12”; Jacobsen, Area 51, pp. 134–135) ()
February — The US Navy reportedly detects a “dark satellite” thought to be a Soviet spy satellite in orbit. However, a follow-up article alleges that the object was “the remains of an Air Force Discoverer VIII satellite that had gone
astray.” (“Trackers Spot Mystery Object Orbiting Earth,” Washington (D.C.) Evening Star, February 11, 1960; Wikipedia, “Corona (satellite)”)
February 5 — The office of the AF Chief of Intelligence is informed of ARDC’s rejection (by Maj. Gen. James Ferguson) of the ATIC proposal. (“Saucer Reading Fest,” Saturday Night Uforia, January 25, 2019)
February 5 — 11:15 p.m. Many people see a distinctly round UFO hover and maneuver slowly over or near the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and La Brea Avenue in Hollywood, California. Cars are stopped bumper-to- bumper, according to employees of several businesses around the intersection, with people gaping at the object overhead. Persons on hotel and apartment rooftops go out to see a bright “cherry-red, circular light.” Two service- station attendants at the intersection, Jerry Darr and Charles Walker, say that “hundreds of people saw it— everybody was looking” as the light hovers for at least 5 minutes over a busy drive-in. Pen Meyer, another service station attendant a third of a mile to the north, watches it hovering for about 10 minutes. Harold Sherman, his wife, and two others watch it as it resumes motion very slowly eastward. After proceeding east for a distance of a block or two, it veers southeastward and passes out of sight. No sound is heard over street-noise background. (Los Angeles NICAP Subcommittee case files; James E. McDonald, “Statement on Unidentified Flying Objects,” in Symposium on Unidentified Flying Objects, Hearings, US House Committee on Science and Astronautics, 90th Cong., 2nd Sess., July 29, 1968, pp. 54–57)
February 6 — 11:15 p.m. The red object reappears over Hollywood, California, this time about one block further east, above Sunset Boulevard and Sycamore Avenue. A number of witnesses observe it hovering for about 10 minutes at an altitude of 500–600 feet. Then with a loud explosion it emits a brilliant bluish-white flash that extends downward and to the west, lighting up the ground all around La Brea Avenue. A mushroom-shaped cloud appears and dissipates. As the red light is extinguished, an object described by most witnesses as long, tubular, and about 70 feet long shoots upwards. A few seconds later, the red light appears about 1,000 feet above Sunset and La Brea for about 8 minutes. It then begins drifting slowly eastward, turns sharply toward the north-northeast, accelerates and climbs steeply, not stopping again until it is at a very high altitude well to the north. (Los Angeles NICAP Subcommittee case file; James E. McDonald, “Statement on Unidentified Flying Objects,” in Symposium on Unidentified Flying Objects, Hearings, US House Committee on Science and Astronautics, 90th Cong., 2nd Sess., July 29, 1968, pp. 54–57)
February 17 — Hynek writes to Brig. Gen. Benjamin G. Holzman at ARDC in the hopes of interesting him in assessing UFO reports. (“Saucer Reading Fest,” Saturday Night Uforia, January 25, 2019)
February 27 —NICAP sends photocopies of O’Keefe’s 1959 “UFOs Serious Business” memo to the media and to committees in the House and Senate, calling for congressional hearings. NICAP Board member Rear Adm. Roscoe Hillenkoetter adds a statement: “Behind the scenes, high-ranking AF officers are soberly concerned about the UFOs. But through official secrecy [AFR 200-2] and ridicule, many citizens are led to believe the unknown flying objects are nonsense.” NICAP board member Albert Baller writes: “If the UFOs are believed a threat, it would seem incumbent on the armed forces to waste no time in alerting the people. Any sudden, hostile act against a nation left in relative ignorance could have serious consequences.” (“UFO Warning Issued: Flying Objects ‘Now Serious Business,’” Lincoln (Neb.) Journal Star, February 27, 1960, p. 1; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: January–June 1960, The Author, 2003, p. 37)
March — The Ottawa Flying Saucer Club begins publishing Topside, edited by Wilbert B. Smith until 1962. It continues until winter 1971. (Topside, no. 1 (March 1960))
March 6 — 5:15–5:27 a.m. Photographer Esse Jansson of Norrtälje, Sweden, goes out early in the morning to try to take a photo of an unidentified satellite, termed 1960 Alpha [however, the designation of 1960 Alpha 1 is reserved for the Pioneer 5 space probe, which isn’t launched until March 11], “which was expected to pass the Stockholm latitude in a southerly direction about 0525 hours.” He sees two objects that come from the north and move in a southeasterly direction. They are similar to phenomena he has seen before, but these objects reverse direction completely. One of his plates shows a third object. The CIA takes note of this and another mystery satellite viewed by a Swedish airplane and reported in Dagens Nyheter, March 8. (Central Intelligence Agency, “UFO’s Sighted, Photographed in Sweden; Unidentified Satellite Seen,” FDD Note 1107, March 17, 1960)
March 8 — Holzman forwards Hynek’s letter up the chain of command. (“Saucer Reading Fest,” Saturday Night Uforia, January 25, 2019)
March 17 — President Eisenhower signs off on a CIA paper titled “A Program of Covert Action against the Castro Regime.” The order gives the agency authorization to create an organization of exiled Cubans to manage opposition programs, begin a propaganda offensive to draw support for the movement, create an intelligence gathering network inside Cuba, and develop a paramilitary force to be introduced into Cuba to organize, train, and lead resistance groups against the Castro regime. Its budget is $4.4 million. Under the Cuban Project and under
the direction of CIA Directorate for Plans Richard M. Bissell, MKUltra’s Sidney Gottlieb proposes spraying Fidel Castro’s television studio with LSD and saturating his shoes with thallium to make his beard fall out. Gottlieb also hatches schemes to assassinate Castro, including the use of a poisoned cigar, a poisoned wetsuit, an exploding conch shell, and a poisonous fountain pen. (Wikipedia, “Sidney Gottlieb”; Kris Hollington, Wolves, Jackals, and Foxes: The Assassins Who Changed History, St. Martin’s, 2008; Wikipedia, “Operation Mongoose”)
March 24 — Two policemen are in the vicinity of Lambert–St. Louis International Airport in Missouri, one on the north side, the other on the south side. A bright light illuminates the entire area. Three objects in a V-formation whisk overhead. They are round, white, and 9 feet in diameter. (Swords 293)
April 8 — Project Ozma, set up only a few days earlier by Frank Drake at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory at Green Bank, West Virginia, seems to hit paydirt. As he slews his antenna off Tau Ceti and onto Epsilon Eridani, Drake is greeted with a strong, periodic, pulsed signal on 1420 MHz, the hyperfine transition emission line of interstellar hydrogen atoms proposed for SETI by Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison, and still favored as a promising hailing frequency for interstellar communications. Drake is ready with a second, low-gain antenna. The pulses are there as well, sadly disproving their extraterrestrial origin. But they are not exactly terrestrial interference, either. The rate at which the phantom signal traverses the sky suggests that it is emanating from an aircraft cruising at unprecedented altitude—perhaps 80,000 feet. At the time, no known aircraft can reach the stratosphere. Such an aircraft, as it happens, doesn’t “come into existence” until the following month, when Francis Gary Powers is shot down over the Soviet Union. (Drake wisely decides to withhold publication of this positive result, so he never does receive proper credit for “discovering” the U-2.) The project only lasts through July. (Wikipedia, “Project Ozma”; H. Paul Shuch, “Project Ozma: The Birth of Observational SETI,” in Searching for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Springer, 2011, pp. 13–18; Seth Shostak, “Project Ozma,” SETI Institute, July 2021)
April 9 — The U-2 spy plane piloted by Francis Gary Powers crosses into the Soviet Union from Pakistan and flies over the Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kazakhstan; the Dolon Air Base in Semey, Kazakhstan; a SAM test site near Saryshagan, Kazakhstan; and the Baikonur Cosmodrome near Tyuratam, Kazakhstan. The plane is detected by Soviet Air Defense Forces but avoids intercepts by a MiG-19 and a Su-9. Powers lands at an Iranian airstrip at Zahedan. A 1994 CIA monograph by Gerald K. Haines, “CIA’s Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947–90,” claims that “According to later estimates from CIA officials who worked on the U-2 project and the Oxcart (SR-71, or Blackbird) project, over half of all UFO reports from the late 1950s through the 1960s were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights (namely the U-2) over the United States.” (Wikipedia, “1960 U-2 incident”; Gerald K. Haines, “CIA’s Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947–90,” Studies in Intelligence 40, no. 5 (1997): 67–84)
April 30 — George Adamski appears on Long John Nebel’s late-night TV show on WOR. (“Long John Nebel, The Flying Saucer Story (George Adamski interview),” ThriftStoreVinyl YouTube channel, September 4, 2018; “Final Years,” The Adamski Case, June 11, 2009)
May — The CIA begins to recruit anti-Castro Cuban exiles in the Miami, Florida, area. Infantry training is carried out at a CIA-run base that is code-named JM Trax near Retalhuleu in the Sierra Madre mountains of Guatemala. (Wikipedia, “Brigade 2506”)
May 1 — 6:26 a.m. A US U-2 spy plane, flown by CIA pilot Francis Gary Powers, takes off from Peshawar, Pakistan, and performs photographic aerial reconnaissance over Baikonur, Kazakhstan, and Chelyabinsk, Russia. Powers has orders to continue across Siberia to get a look at the new Plesetsk Cosmodrome, but at 8:53 a.m. local time he is hit by an S-75 Dvina (SA-2 Guideline) surface-to-air missile fired by a defense battalion near Kyshtym, Russia.
The U-2 crashes near Sverdlovsk [now Yekaterinburg]. The Soviet Air Defense Forces have anticipated the flight and give orders to “attack the violator.” Powers parachutes safely and is captured. This is the first time in five years of overflights that the US is caught. (Wikipedia, “1960 U-2 incident”)
May 5 — NASA issues a press release saying a weather research aircraft has “gone missing” north of Turkey and speculates that the pilot has fallen unconscious and the plane has crashed. Under the impression that the pilot has died and that the plane has been destroyed, a U-2 plane is quickly painted in NASA colors and a photo is shown to the media at NASA Flight Research Center [now the Armstrong Flight Research Center] at Edwards Air Force Base in California. Premier Nikita Khrushchev announces the shoot-down to the Soviet parliament but does not reveal yet that the pilot has survived. (NASA, “U-2,” September 4, 1997)
May 7 — Khrushchev now reveals to the Soviet parliament that Powers is alive and much of the U-2 technologies have survived the crash. ()
May 9 — Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles tells Congress that all U-2 flights are used for aerial espionage and are flown pursuant to “presidential directives.” ()
May 10 — House Appropriations Chair Clarence Cannon (D-Mo.) reveals to the press that the U-2 is a CIA plane engaged in aerial espionage over the Soviet Union “under the aegis” of the president. The press begins to suggest that Eisenhower has lost control of the intelligence agencies. (Wikipedia, “1960 U-2 incident”)
May 13 — 7:00 p.m. More than 100 people at Paracuru, Ceará, Brazil, watch a disc-shaped UFO. Flying about 600 feet in the air at low speed, the silent object maneuvers over the downtown area or a long time. About 60 feet in diameter, it hovers at an angle by a church. A strong bluish light is on top of it. The same day, 20 cities and towns in Céara state, four in Rio Grande do Norte, three in Pernambuco, two in Paraíba, two in Bahia, and one each in the states of Piauí and Maranhão report UFO sightings. (Lorenzen, UFOs: The Whole Story, Signet, 1969, pp.
220–221; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: January–June 1960, The Author, 2003, pp. 92–93)
May 14 — 4:00 a.m. Fisherman Raimundo Ursulino dos Santos sees two metallic discs landed on a sandy hill by the beach at Paracuru, Ceará, Brazil. As he approaches, he sees two humanlike beings outside, talking to each other. They are small and pallid. One is dressed in a blue suit with a helmet. Dos Santos turns and runs away. Marks in the sand are found later. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: January–June 1960, The Author, 2003, p. 93; Patrick Gross, URECAT, September 29, 2007)
May 19 — A silver-colored round object, 20–25 feet wide with hanging appendages, hovers 50–100 feet away from Indigenous observers in the village of Ekuk, Alaska, south of Dillingham. It barely clears electric wires 12 feet above the ground. It sucks up two empty five-gallon trashcans and drags them swirling along the ground. It flies between two houses and crosses to the other side of a ridge for 100 yards, drops the trashcans and sucks up some swirling grass, makes a loud sucking sound, then ascends rapidly. Thomas M. Conrow, chief of intelligence at a nearby Air Force Base, interviews the witnesses and concludes that “there still appears to be no logical explanation of the sighting.” At Wright Patterson AFB, Blue Book analysts classify it as a “weather balloon with a radar reflector,” even though it is traveling against the wind. (Hynek UFO Report, pp. 146–149; Sparks, p. 284; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: January–June 1960, The Author, 2003,
pp. 99–101)
May 22 — 9:33 a.m. An observatory on Majorca, Balearic Islands, Spain, sees a white, triangular object one-quarter the size of the moon spinning on its own axis and maintaining a steady course. It cables a report to NASA in Washington, D.C. (UFOEv, p. 123)
May 28 — Engineer Ronald N. Bracewell, suggests that extraterrestrials may already be in our neighborhood through an autonomous interstellar space probe (now called a “Bracewell probe”) sent for the express purpose of communicating with alien civilizations. (Ronald N. Bracewell, “Communications from Superior Galactic Communities,” Nature 186 (1960): 670–671)
Summer — 2:00 a.m. Two brothers are alerted by their journalist brother about an elusive UFO that local police in Walkerton, Ontario, have been pursuing for about an hour. They drive out along country roads until they get within 300 feet of the object, which is hovering around a large tree. The object is circular and apparently about 3 feet in diameter. It is very bright and changes color repeated. It then circles the tree purposefully for several minutes. The brothers climb a fence and approach it, but the UFO suddenly accelerates and disappears to the south. (J. Allen Hynek, The UFO Experience, Ballantine ed., 1974, pp. 54–56)
June 1 — Bulkley Griffin, chief of the Worcester (Mass.) Evening Gazette’s Washington, D.C., Bureau, writes a well- reasoned story about the Air Force’s unilateral control of UFO information and its national security implications. He quotes Adm. Hillenkoetter’s opinion that UFOs are intelligently controlled and are neither US nor USSR devices, which is why he is pushing for a Congressional investigation. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: January–June 1960, The Author, 2003, pp. 111–112)
June 12 — 3:00 or 4:00 p.m. Following a sonic boom above Quebec, a fiery object falls from the sky from an altitude of 1,000–2,000 feet and splits into two pieces that fall into the St. Lawrence River near Les Écureuils, about 20 miles upriver from Quebec City, Quebec. A beachcomber runs across the pieces, one closer to the shore and visible at low tide, the other one further out and mostly submerged. He retrieves a smaller piece (800 pounds) and sells it to a scrap-metal dealer, who fails to recognize it as ferrous and possibly ships it to Japan. The other piece is picked up by the Canadian Armament Research and Development Establishment [now DRDC Valcartier] near Quebec City. Wilbert Smith’s Ottawa Flying Saucer Club [later the Ottawa New Sciences Club] tells its members that the material is high-strength metal that is 6 feet in diameter and 2 feet thick at the center with an embedded tube, an “electronic potting can,” and a transistor. CARDE’s analysis is said to have revealed an alloy with a high manganese content, although it was identified as the “normal product of a foundry, consisting of slag with semi- molten scrap embedded in it,” likely coming from Sorel Iron Foundries in Sorel, Quebec. Smith rejects those findings and and conducts his own tests (although he is an electrical engineer and not a metallurgist) on a chunk
the club retrieves from the river around July 1, supposedly engaging in a “tremendous amount of detective work on this metal.” In November 1961, Smith tells Ohio UFO researchers C. W. Fitch and George Popovitch: “We are speculating that what we have is a portion of a very large device which came into this solar system…we don’t know when…but it had been in space a long time before it came to Earth; we can tell by the micrometeorites embedded in the surface. But we don’t know whether it was a few years ago—or a few hundred years ago.” In June 1968, the Colorado project’s Roy Craig is in Ottawa and offers to examine the club’s chunk of metal because they had offered it to Condon a year earlier. Craig obligingly takes a piece with him but does not analyze it since there is no connection to a UFO and it looks like foundry slag anyway. Later, the Montreal UFO Society’s Ronald Anstee has a piece of it analyzed by an independent metallurgist, who finds that the composition “does not correspond to any known commercial manganese steel.” In September 1967, Eric Smith of the Canada Department of Energy, Mines, and Resources visits the Ottawa club and examines their large artifact, but fails to report back. In 1969, the National Research Council’s Peter Millman takes a look and is convinced that it is ordinary manganese steel from the Sorel plant. (“The Mysterious Chunk of Hardware at Ottawa,” Topside, no. 20 (Spring 1966): 4–6; Frank Edwards, FS Serious Business, Bantam ed., 1966, pp. 48–49; “The Mystery of UFO Hardware,” Topside, no. 24/25 (Spring/Summer 1967): 10–11; “Unidentified Hardware Mystery Deepens,” Topside, no. 27 (Winter 1968): 4–9; “Latest Report on the Mystery Metal,” Topside, no. 29 (Summer 1968): 11–
12; Condon, pp. 133–135; “Canada’s Mysterious Chunk of Metal,” Spacelink 6, no. 2 (January 1970): 6–9; “More Mystery Added to Ottawa’s Mysterious Chunk of Hardware,” Topside, no. 33 (Winter/Spring 1970): 13–17; “Latest Report on Ottawa’s Mystery Metal,” Topside, no. 34 (Summer/Fall 1970): 22–23; “New Deveopments on Ottawa’s Mystery Metal,” Topside, no. 35 (Winter 1971): 29–33; Story, pp. 208–209; John Robert Colombo, UFOs over Canada, Hounslow, 1991, pp. 53–56; Roy Craig, UFOs: An Insiders’ View of the Official Quest for Evidence, University of North Texas, 1995, pp. 121–132; Good Above, pp. 188–189; Chris Rutkowski, Canada’s UFOs: Declassified, August Night, 2022, pp. 166, 229–249)
June 21 — NICAP sends a confidential report to the US Congress on “Dangers of Secrecy on UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects) and Digest of Documented Evidence” urging legislators to go on the record about the reality of UFOs. (Donald E. Keyhoe, “Confidential NICAP Report to Congress: Dangers of Secrecy on UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects) and Digest of Documented Evidence,” June 21, 1960)
June 22 — 6:20 p.m. John Person is setting up camp at Clan Lake, Northwest Territories, on a prospecting expedition and is waiting for his partner. He hears a noise like an aircraft approaching and something bounces and hits the surface of the lake about 1,700 feet behind him. Person sees an object 4–6 feet wide with arms or spokes is rotating rapidly in the water, but gradually slows down and stops spinning. When his partner arrives, they get into a canoe and travel to the impact area. They find an area of burned grass and another area where grass it cut up in small pieces. They use a pole to probe the lake bottom and find a channel that is one foot deeper at one end and three feet deeper at the other, RCMP Cpl. Matheson flies to the lake in a seaplane on July 19 and August 15 and finds the impact area as Person has described but no submerged object. (Royal Canadian Mounted Police, “Report of Strange Object Striking Clan Lake, Clan Lake Dist., N.W.T.,” July 19, July 25, and August 25, 1960; Chris Rutkowski, Canada’s UFOs: Declassified, August Night, 2022, pp. 98–102)
July — Members of the US Senate Preparedness Committee and the House Science and Astronautics Committee, as well as the CIA, ask for hearings on USAF’s handling of UFOs. (Clark III 922)
July 1 — 10:30 a.m. Four witnesses at the Leefe Mine in Lincoln County, Wyoming, see a shiny disc move in from the south and hover above a slag heap. It has a diameter of at least 185 feet and is 14 feet thick. Five transparent bubbles are visible on the bottom as it rocks gently before moving off to the south at high speed. (Lorenzen, UFOs: The Whole Story, Signet, 1969, p. 221)
July 2 — Early morning. A couple driving in the vicinity of Kankakee, Illinois, see the landscape light up with a bright blue light as a ball of fire approaches out of the south. It passes above their car dragging a trail of bluish light behind it. The inside of the car heats up uncomfortably, waking up their daughter and her husband who are asleep in the back. The light gradually fades and disappears in the north. (Lorenzen, UFOs: The Whole Story, Signet, 1969, pp. 221–223)
July 3 — 4:30 p.m. Argentine Air Force Capt. Hugo F. Niotti is driving north near Villa General Belgrano, Córdoba, Argentina, when he notices a dark object hovering to the right of the road. He stops his car, grabs his camera, and takes a photo of the object, which is moving slowly over a field. As he is winding the film to take another shot, the object accelerates and disappears into the clouds. The photo shows a conical object low above the ground, as well as a horse whose attention is attracted to the object. Analysis shows that the object is about 23 feet high, 20 feet in diameter, and 56 feet above the ground. (Guillermo C. Roncoroni and Gustavo J. Alvarez, “Foto de OVNI Avalada por la Fuerza Aerea Argentina,” UFO Press 1, no. 3 (April 1977): 32–38; “Cone-Shaped UFO
Photographed in Argentina,” CUFOS Associate Newsletter 1, no. 8 (December 1980): 1; Johannes Koch, “Correspondence,” CUFOS Associate Newsletter 2, no. 2 (February 1981): 2; Willy Smith, “The Yacanto, Cordoba, Argentina, Photograph, 07-03-1960,” UFO Casebook; Willy Smith, “UFOs in Latin America,” UFOs 1947–1987, Fortean Tomes, 1987, pp. 104–106)
July 6 — Responding to NICAP’s “Dangers of Secrecy on UFOs” report, Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson (D-Tex.) states that he has ordered the staff of the Senate Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee to keep a close watch on UFO developments. (“NICAP UFO Report: Extension of Remarks of Hon. Leonard G. Wolf of Iowa in the House of Representatives, Wednesday, August 31, 1960,” Congressional Record, Proceedings and Debates of the 86th Congress, Second Session, vol. 106, Part 14, pp. 18955–18956)
July 13 — The Air Force gives a preliminary briefing to associate counsel Stuart French, staff member of the Senate Preparedness Committee, who wants to know about USAF explanations for the Washington National Airport and Levelland cases. (Jacobs, UFO Controversy in America, Signet ed., 1976, p. 156)
July 15 — The Air Force gives a major briefing on UFOs for congressional staffers: Chief Counsel Robert Smart (House Committee on Armed Services); Spencer Beresford, Richard Hines, and Frank Hammill (House Science and Astronautics Committee). Charles S. Sheldon II, technical director of the House Science and Astronautics Committee, is also present. The USAF reps are Robert Friend, Lawrence J. Tacker, Hynek, and Maj. Gen. Arno
H. Luehman. CIA officers Richard Payne and John S. Warner are possibly there as well. The staffers are skeptical; Smart accuses the Air Force of withholding information and wants to be kept informed of sightings and investigations. (Jacobs, UFO Controversy in America, Signet ed., 1976, pp. 156–159; Marcia S. Smith, The UFO Enigma, Congressional Research Service Report No. 83-205, June 20, 1983, pp. 65–66; Swords 291–292; “Saucer Reading Fest,” Saturday Night Uforia, January 25, 2019)
July 26 — Lt. Col. Lawrence J. Tacker writes to Stringfield that “There is absolutely no truth in the charge that the Air Force or any other governmental agency is withholding information on the subject of UFOs from the general public.” (Stringfield, Situation Red, Fawcett Crest, 1977, p. 167)
August — The US severs diplomatic relations with the Dominican Republic. The CIA’s Special Group decides to arm Dominicans in hopes of an assassination of generalissimo Rafael Trujillo. The CIA disperses three rifles and three
.38 revolvers, but things pause in 1961 as John F. Kennedy assumes office. ()
August 9 — Contactee Gabriel Green announces his candidacy for the presidency of the United States at a press conference at the Los Angeles Biltmore Hotel. He publishes his Space Age Platform at the second meeting of his Amalgamated Flying Saucer Clubs of America convention in the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, California, on August 13–14, but soon drops out and lends his support to John F. Kennedy. (Wikipedia, “Gabriel Green”; “Space Age Platform of Gabriel Green: Candidate for the Office of President of the United States,” AFSCA World Report, no. 16 (July/Aug. 1960): 4–7; Clark III 99; S. D. Tucker, False Economies: The Strangest, Least Successful, and Most Audacious Financial Follies, Plans, and Crazes of All Times, Amberly, 2018, chapter 3, excerpted in “Taxing Credulity,” Fortean Times 367 (June 2018): 52–55)
August 10 — The Discoverer 13 Corona KH-1 photoreconnaissance satellite is launched from Vandenberg AFB [now Vandenberg Space Force Base], California. The primary goal of this series of satellites is to replace the U-2 spy plane in surveilling the Sino-Soviet Bloc, determining the disposition and speed of production of Soviet missiles and long-range bombers assess. The Corona program is also used to produce maps and charts for the Department of Defense and other US government mapping programs. On August 11, after 17 orbits, the satellite splashes down in the North Pacific and its payload is recovered. It represents the first-ever successful recovery of an object from orbit. (Wikipedia, “Discoverer 13”)
August 11 — 3:10 p.m. Ray Hawks is operating a farm tractor at Left Hand Canyon near Altona, Colorado, when he hears a muffled explosion. Looking up, he watches a disc dropping vertically out of the cloud cover. It stops in midair about 650 feet away from him and 200 feet above the ground, wobbling a bit. When it stabilizes, he sees it looks like two concave discs joined together at the rim and dull aluminum in color. Bluish smoke is issuing from an apparent gap in its surface. An electric hum seems to come from inside the object. The section where the smoke is issuing is withdrawn inside, and a new section appears to replace it, settling in with a click. The hum increases in intensity, and the object appears to be surrounded by a heat haze. It then shoots up into the clouds and vanishes. (Lorenzen, UFOs: The Whole Story, Signet, 1969, pp. 223–225)
August 12 — NASA’s Echo 1 balloon satellite is launched by a Thor-Delta rocket and becomes the first passive communications satellite. Microwave signals are bounced off the satellite from one point on earth to another. (Wikipedia, “Project Echo”)
August 13–14 — 11:50 p.m.–2:05 a.m. Highway Patrol officers Charles A. Carson and Stanley E. Scott, plus three others at Red Bluff, California, are on patrol when see what they think at first is an airliner about to crash. It turns out to
be a maneuvering, silent red light with five white lights, descending to 100–200 feet altitude. It suddenly reverses course, climbs to 500 feet, hovers, sweeps the ground with a red beam, performs aerial gymnastics, then heads east, chased by the police car. It is joined by a similar object from the south, then it disappears in the east. A local radar operator confirms the UFO at the time but denies it the next day. Tehama County sheriff’s officers also see the UFO and another similar one the same night. (NICAP, “Red Bluff Incident”; “False AF Answer in Red Bluff Case,” NICAP Special Bulletin, October 1960, pp. 1, 4; Schopick, pp. 96–100; Lorenzen, FSHoax, pp. 180–182; Lorenzen, UFOs: The Whole Story, Signet, 1969, pp. 153–156, 225; Hynek UFO Report, pp. 92–94; Clark III 1002–1006; Sparks, p. 284; UFOEv, pp. 61–62, 112; Swords 295–297; “Red Bluff: 1960,” Saturday Night Uforia,
February 16, 2017)
August 15 — Air Force Information Policy Letter for Commanders, vol. 14, no. 12, is issued by Office of the Secretary of Air Force. In “AF Keeping Watchful Eye on Aerospace,” it states, “There is a relationship between the Air Force’s interest in space surveillance and its continuous surveillance of the atmosphere near Earth for unidentified flying objects—’UFOs.’” (UFOEv, p. 108)
August 16 — Night. A woman in Charleston, South Carolina, takes a photo of a mystery satellite that is in the same part of the sky as Echo I, which is also in the photo. (Michael D. Swords, “Gazing at the Moons,” IUR 32, no. 4 (October 2009): 13)
August 17 — The trial for downed U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers begins in Moscow. ()
August 18 — The Discoverer 14 Corona KH-1 spy satellite is launched. It is the first completely successful mission and returns images of the Mys Schmidta airfield in Siberia. (Wikipedia, “Discoverer 14”)
August 25 — The “dark satellite” is seen and photographed five times by Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation at Bethpage, Long Island, New York. It is supposed to be three times faster than the Echo 1 satellite and travels east to west in a retrograde orbit, rather than west to east. Its inclination to the equator is about 135°. The color of the object varies from “carrot to straw.” The Grumman observers estimate that the object is in an eccentric orbit with an apogee of as much as 4,200 miles and a perigee of about 300 miles. They immediately produce a proposal to the US Air Force to share data in the hopes of plotting a firm orbit for the mystery satellite. (NICAP, “Grumman Mystery Satellite”; Gordon W. Creighton, “Unidentified Satellites,” Flying Saucer Review 7, no. 1 (Jan./Feb.
1961): 3–6; “The Unidentified Satellite: Grumman Aircraft Writes to One of Our Readers,” Flying Saucer Review 7, no. 2 (March/April 1961): 29; Blue Book files, “Grumman Proposal for Optical Surveillance of the Retrograde Satellite,” 1961; UFOEv, p. 138; Michael D. Swords, “Gazing at the Moons,” IUR 32, no. 4 (October 2009): 13; Center for UFO Studies, “Moonwatch Mystery Satellites, 1958–1962”)
August 25 — The National Security Council recommends to President Eisenhower the establishment of a top secret National Reconnaissance Office to coordinate USAF and CIA reconnaissance satellite activities because of management problems with the USAF satellite program. (Wikipedia, “National Reconnaissance Office”)
August 26 — 9:00 p.m. Director Robert I. Johnson and other staff at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, Illinois, observe a faint reddish object in the sky moving from east to west, apparently the same mystery satellite seen and photographed by the Grumman observers. (Michael D. Swords, “Gazing at the Moons,” IUR 32, no. 4 (October 2009): 13; Swords 294; Center for UFO Studies, “Moonwatch Mystery Satellites, 1958–1962”)
August 31 — Rep. Leonard G. Wolf (D-Iowa) makes a statement in the House on NICAP’s “Dangers of Secrecy on UFOs” report, saying that it is “imperative to end the risk of accidental war from defense forces’ confusion over UFOs.” He mentions NICAP board member Adm. Roscoe Hillenkoetter’s request that “Congress inform the public as to the facts.” Based on a there-year NICAP study, Wolf states that all defense personnel “should be told that the UFOs are real and should be trained to distinguish them—by their characteristic speeds and maneuvers— from conventional planes and missiles…. The American people must be convinced, by documented facts, that the UFOs could not be Soviet machines.” (“NICAP UFO Report: Extension of Remarks of Hon. Leonard G. Wolf of Iowa in the House of Representatives, Wednesday, August 31, 1960,” Congressional Record, Proceedings and Debates of the 86th Congress, Second Session, vol. 106, Part 14, pp. 18955–18956; Good Need, p. 261)
Late August — Two men in a car near Butte Falls, Oregon, see a pale-white light hovering 300 feet ahead of them. They watch it for 15 minutes, then decide to drive closer. The light then rises to 100 feet and recedes, then changes to orange. No sound is heard. The light performs geometrical maneuvers, creating rectangle paths and other zig- zags. It then accelerates, changes back to white, and zooms off. (Swords 294)
Late August or early September — Evening. Rhodes McCarroll and his grandfather, sitting on the upstairs back porch of their home in Memphis, Tennessee, notice a glowing basketball-sized globe in the soil by the hedge. They watch it for 5 minutes, then see a figure standing behind the ball. It is a glowing nude, generally humanlike figure, about 6 feet tall, holding a light at chest level. The figure is square-shouldered and has disproportionately long legs that are narrow and pointed between the knees and ankles. The witnesses watch another 5 minutes, at which point the globe and the entity begin to fade and are gone from sight in another 5 minutes. (Clark III 279–280)
September — Groom Lake in Nevada receives the name “Area 51” when A-12 test facility construction begins, including a new 8,500-foot runway (Runway 14/32) to replace the existing one built for the U-2. (Wikipedia, “Area 51”)
September — CIA officer Richard M. Bissell Jr. and DCI Allen W. Dulles initiate talks with two leading figures of the Mafia, Johnny Roselli and Sam Giancana. Later, other crime bosses such as Carlos Marcello, Santo Trafficante Jr., and Meyer Lansky become involved in the first plot against Fidel Castro. The strategy is managed by Sheffield Edwards. Robert Maheu, a veteran of CIA counterespionage activities, is instructed to hire the Mafia to kill Castro. The advantage of employing the Mafia for this work is that it provides the CIA with a credible cover story. The Mafia are known to be angry with Castro for closing their profitable brothels and casinos in Cuba. On September 14, Maheu meets with Roselli in a New York City hotel and offers him $150,000 for the “removal” of Castro. James O’Connell, who identifies himself as Maheu’s associate but is really the chief of the CIA’s operational support division, is present during the meeting. Declassified documents do not reveal if Roselli, Giancana, or Trafficante accept a down payment for the job. According to CIA files, it is Giancana who suggests poison pills to add to Castro’s food or drinks. Such pills, manufactured by the CIA’s Technical Services Division, are given to Giancana’s nominee named Juan Orta. Giancana recommends him as being an official in the Cuban government with access to Castro. Allegedly, after several unsuccessful attempts to introduce the poison into Castro’s food, Orta abruptly demands to be let out of the mission, handing over the job to another unnamed participant. Later, a second attempt is mounted through Giancana and Trafficante using Tony Varona, the leader of the Cuban Exile Junta, who has, according to Trafficante, become “disaffected with the apparent ineffectual progress of the Junta.” Varona requests $10,000 in expenses and $1,000 worth of communications equipment.
However, it is unknown how far the second attempt goes, as it is canceled due to the launching of the Bay of Pigs Invasion. (Wikipedia, “Sam Giancana”; Wikipedia, “Assassination attempts on Fidel Castro”)
September — MKUltra chief Sidney Gottlieb brings a vial of poison concealed in toothpaste to the Democratic Republic of the Congo with plans to place it on Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba’s toothbrush. The plot is abandoned, allegedly because CIA station chief Larry Devlin refuses permission. (Wikipedia, “Patrice Lumumba”)
September — The USAF Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence turns down ATIC’s request for one additional staffer for Project Blue Book (raising it to 3) and additional funding. (Clark III 922)
September 2 — 11:30 p.m. Richard Ireton and his wife are driving on US Highway 1 in Westbrook, Connecticut, when they notice what seems to be an aircraft about to crash. It veers close to the shore and the Iretons drive to the beach to look for it. They see a triangular-shaped object flying silently at the speed of a Piper Cub airplane, alternately hovering and moving horizontally and vertically. When it reaches the public beach, it takes off at great speed toward Long Island, New York. They see a similar object the next evening around 9:30 p.m. at Chalker Beach in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. (“‘Flying Triangle’ Seen in State,” Hartford (Conn.) Courant, September 17, 1960, pp. 1–2)
September 8 — Night. Witnesses in Consett, South Shields, and Newcastle upon Tyne, England, see a triangular formation of lights with a red light in the center. (London Evening Chronicle, September 9, 1960; Marler 76)
September 10 — A married couple in Scituate, Massachusetts, sees a trio of brilliant discs parked in a triangle formation in the sky. About 12° to the objects’ left is a huge cylinder. One witness watches them through binoculars, and the brilliance hurts his eyes for two hours. Two more discs seem to be attached to the top of the cylinder. Small domes sprinkle their surface. The large object disappears too quickly for the eye to follow. (Swords 294)
September 10 — 9:50 p.m. Mr. and Mrs. M. G. Evans see 2 light-gray glowing objects, saucer or boomerang-shaped, that swish when accelerating, over Ridgecrest, California. (Swords 294; Sparks, p. 285)
September 14 — 2:50 a.m. A dispatcher in Lorain, Ohio, is taking a coffee break when he sees a light that he thinks is the Echo 1 satellite. As he watches it, knowing it is not the right time for Echo 1, he sees four objects traveling in a perfectly spaced line of flight. It makes a surprising right turn, after which the objects move on their way, apparently at a great height. (Michael D. Swords, “I’ve Seen the Light…But What Was It?” IUR 32, no. 3 (July 2009): 3; Swords 294–295)
September 15 — 7:30 a.m. A witness sees a UFO hovering 300–400 feet above the Douglas Aircraft plant in Santa Monica, California, and calls it into the West Los Angeles police station. Desk Officer Don Anderson goes outside and sees a dark triangular object moving slowly to the northeast at 3,000 feet. It disappears in the vicinity of Santa Monica Boulevard and Beverly Glen Street. (“Officer Reports Flying Triangle,” San Pedro (Calif.) News-Pilot, September 15, 1960, p. 1)
September 15 — Ruppelt dies of a heart attack in Long Beach, California, at age 37. (Clark III 1024)
September 29 — 9:25 p.m. Five people are out looking for the Echo 1 satellite in New Westminster, British Columbia.
After they spot it, they remain for a few minutes talking. One of them sees three objects come up from the
southeast, pass overhead, and disappear over the rooftops in 10 seconds. The objects are luminous, round- cornered triangles. (Michael D. Swords, “Timmerman’s Triangles,” IUR 29, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 16)
September 30 — Tiffany Thayer’s widow Tanagra Thayer formally disbands the Fortean Society. (Clark III 516)
October — Reynolds Electrical and Engineering Company begins construction of “Project 51” at the Nellis AFB complex in Nevada with double-shift personal schedules. They mark an Archimedean spiral on Area 51’s dry lake approximately two miles across so that an A-12 pilot approaching the end of the overrun can abort instead of plunging into the sagebrush. Area 51 pilots call it “The Hook.” For crosswind landings, they mark two unpaved airstrips (runways 9/27 and 03/21) on the dry lakebed. (Wikipedia, “Area 51”)
October 4 — 6:10 p.m. Rev. Lionel Browning and his wife are looking at a rainbow outside their rectory in Cressy, Tasmania, when they see a gray, cigar-shaped object emerge from a raincloud. It has 4 or 5 vertical, dark bands around its circumference and an aerial array that projects from the top. Browning estimates it to be 100 feet long and about 4 miles distant. It moves north at about 60–70 mph at about 400 feet altitude. After one minute, it stops and is joined by 5–6 smaller objects that emerge from a cloud. After another minute, all the UFOs abruptly reverse back into the rain squall at the same speed. (“Mysterious Ships in the Sky,” Australian Flying Saucer Review 1, no. 4 (February 1961): 1–2; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: July–December 1960, The Author, 2003, pp. 104–107; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: January–June 1961, The Author, 2003, pp. 35–36; Clark III 350–352; Bill Chalker, “The Australian Government and UFOs,” IUR 22, no. 3 (Fall 1997): 19–20; Swords 385–388)
October 5 — A formation of UFOs is detected by the new Ballistic Missile Early Warning System at Thule Site J in Greenland. The objects appear to be heading directly toward North America from the direction of Russia. Within seconds, Strategic Air Command headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska, scrambles the crews of B-52 bombers armed with nuclear warheads to prepare a retaliatory strike. But at the last moment checks reveal that the objects are spurious radar echoes. Unusual atmospheric conditions create phantoms on the BMEWS that cannot be seen by other radars. (Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of Safety, Penguin, 2013, pp. 253–254, 542)
October 20 — Australian MP Gil Duthie asks Frederick Osborne, Australian Minister for Air, whether he has read the account of the UFO seen at Cressy, Tasmania. Osborne responds that he has, and he admits that the Department of Air receives UFO reports and shares them with the RAF and the US Air Force. However, all of them are “explainable on a perfectly normal basis.” (Clark III 352; Swords 387)
October 31 — Most guerrilla infiltrations and supply drops directed by the CIA into Cuba have failed; these are replaced by a plan to mount an initial amphibious assault with a minimum of 1,500 men. ()
November 3 — 4:30 p.m. Two 8-year-old boys are walking over a small hill in rural Price County, Wisconsin, when they hear an odd high-pitched, humming noise. The air has become unusually warm. They look back and see an aluminum-colored object on the hill behind them. They run back toward it, but it lifts off and shoots away. They find the soil of the hill to be warm to the touch. (“Small Boys See Warm, Landed UAO,” APRO Bulletin, January 1961, pp. 1, 4)
November 4 — House Majority Leader John W. McCormack (D-Mass.) writes to Keyhoe that “it was pretty well established by some, in our minds, that there were some objects flying around in space that were unexplainable.” (“Congressmen Confirm AF Secrecy: Pressure for Investigation Increasing,” UFO Investigator 1, no. 11 (Dec./Jan. 1960/1961): 1; UFOEv, p. 175)
November 15 — 10:40 a.m. A USAF B-57 Canberra reconnaissance aircraft operating out of RAAF Base East Sale, Victoria, Australia, encounters a UFO 15 miles north of Launceston, Tasmania. Capt. Douglas G. Ludlam and Capt. Joseph W. Ivins say it looks like a balloon about 70 feet in diameter and is flying at 35,000 feet, just below the B-57, and traveling at about 920 mph. It is in sight for 5–7 seconds before it disappears under the left wing. (Bill Chalker, “Australian A.F. UFO Report Files,” APRO Bulletin 30, no. 11 (December 1982):4; Clark III 352; Sparks, p. 285)
November 18 — Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles and CIA Deputy Director for Plans Richard Bissell brief President-elect John F. Kennedy on the Cuban invasion. Dulles is confident that the CIA can overthrow the Cuban government. ()
November 29 — Eisenhower meets with the chiefs of the CIA, Defense, State, and Treasury departments to discuss the new concept of a Cuban invasion. No one expresses objections, and Eisenhower approves the plans with the intention of persuading John F. Kennedy of their merit. ()
December 5 — Pentagon UFO spokesman Lt. Col. Lawrence J. Tacker publishes Flying Saucers and the U.S. Air Force, in which he blisteringly attacks critics of Project Blue Book, depicting them all as charlatans and opportunists and gullible believers. (Lawrence J. Tacker, Flying Saucers and the U.S. Air Force, Van Nostrand, 1960; Clark III 922)
December 5 — Keyhoe debates Lt. Col. Lawrence J. Tacker on the Today show, hosted by Dave Garroway. Tacker says he wrote the book Flying Saucers and the US Air Force because “I felt the Air Force was being set upon by Maj. Keyhoe, NICAP, and other hobby groups who believe in spaceships as an act of pure faith.” Keyhoe repeatedly challenges Tacker, whose statements ring hollow, and even Garroway asks Tacker pointed questions and coolly notes Tacker’s apparent ignorance of basic physics. The show generates numerous phone calls and letters to NBC, most of them critical of the Air Force. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: July–December 1960, The Author, 2003, pp. 129–135; “New Debunking Campaign Backfires,” UFO Investigator 1, no. 11 (Dec.–Jan. 1960/1961): 1–2; “Dave Garroway Show NBC-TV UFO Discussion: Tacker vs. Keyhoe, December 5, 1960,” Journal of UFO History 1, no. 4 (Sept./Oct. 2004): 3–6)
December 8 — Richard Bissell presents an outline for the Cuban invasion to the Special Group, while declining to commit details to written records. ()
December 9 —8:30 p.m. Mme. Dhelens in the Château des Mailles (31 miles south of Carignan-de-Bordeaux), Gironde, France, sees a luminous oval object twice the size of an automobile hovering just above the ground in the château’s park. It has two round portholes, behind which she sees indistinct shadows moving. It takes off, leaving a 12-foot circle of yellowed grass, which later dies. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: July–December 1960, The Author, 2003, p. 138)
December 14 — The Brookings Research Institute in Washington, D.C., releases a 186-page report prepared for NASA titled Proposed Studies on the Implications of Peaceful Space Activities for Human Affairs. It is later published as a 272-page Committee Print for the House Committee on Science and Astronautics on March 24, 1961. The report includes a section on “Implications of a Discovery of Extraterrestrial Life.” It is sent to the House Committee on Science and Astronautics for approval by Rep. Overton Brooks (D-La.) and discusses the effects of meeting extraterrestrial life: “It is possible that if the intelligence of these creatures were sufficiently superior to ours, they would choose to have little if any contact with us.” It also speculates on the possibility of finding alien artifacts on earth and the possibility that contact might result in social disintegration. (Wikipedia, “Brookings Report”; Proposed Studies on the Implications of Peaceful Space Activities for Human Affairs, committee print prepared for NASA by the Brookings Institution, Report of the US House Committee on Science and Astronautics, 87th Congress, First Session, March 24, 1961, pp. 215–216, 225–226 (note 34))
December 14 — The first Single Integrated Operational Plan, titled SIOP-62, is completed. It describes a massive strike with the entire US arsenal of 3,200 warheads, totaling 7847 megatons, against Russia, China, and Soviet-aligned states with urban and other targets being hit simultaneously. Nine weapons are to be “laid down” on four targets in Leningrad [now St. Petersburg], 23 weapons on six target complexes in Moscow, and 18 on seven target areas in Kaliningrad. Weapons scientist George W. Rathjens looks through SAC’s atlas of Soviet cities, searching for the town that most closely resembles Hiroshima in size and industrial concentration. When he finds one that roughly matches, he asks how many bombs the SIOP “laid down” on that city. The reply: one 4.5 megaton bomb and three more 1.1 megaton weapons in case the big bomb is a dud. The execution of SIOP-62 is estimated to result in 285 million dead and 40 million casualties in the Soviet Union and China. Presented with all the facts and figures, USAF Gen. Thomas D. White finds the plan “splendid.” Disregarding the human aspect, SIOP-62 represents an outstanding technological achievement. (Wikipedia, “Single Integrated Operational Plan”; Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine, Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 90–103)
December 27 — Blue Book officer Maj. Robert Friend and his boss at ATIC, Philip G. Evans, write a memo to Air Force Intelligence in the Pentagon. Friend complains about civilian UFO organizations supported by people for “financial gain, religious reasons, pure emotional outlet, ignorance, or possibly to use the organization as a ‘cold war’ tool.” He is upset by their accusations that the Air Force is withholding UFO information. (Swords 292)
1961
1961 — The first American to publish on the microwave auditory effect is biophysicist Allan H. Frey. In his experiments, the subjects are able to hear appropriately pulsed microwave radiation from a distance of 328 feet from the transmitter. This is accompanied by side effects such as dizziness, headaches, and a pins-and-needles sensation. (Allen H. Frey, “Human Auditory System Response to Modulated Electromagnetic Energy,” Journal of Applied Physiology 17 (July 1, 1962): 689–692; Wikipedia, “Microwave auditory effect”)
1961 — Ray Palmer begins publishing The Hidden World, a quarterly magazine in trade-paperback format that runs through 1964. It consists of reprints of Richard Shaver stories and readers’ contributions. (Clark III 873)
1961 — George Adamski publishes Flying Saucers Farewell, signaling his intention to refocus his efforts on teaching about life and consciousness. (George Adamski, Flying Saucers Farewell, Abelard-Schuman, 1961; “Final Years,” The Adamski Case, June 11, 2009)
1961 — An Antonov AN-2P mail biplane takes off from an airfield at or near Sverdlovsk, Russia, bound for Kurgan with seven people on board. About 80–100 miles from Sverdlovsk, the aircraft disappears from the radar screen.
Ground control cannot regain contact, so a search is launched with helicopters and troops. The aircraft is found in a small clearing in a dense forest, completely intact. The authorities state that it looks like it was placed there gently from above. All the mail is intact, and there is no sign of anyone on board. No marks or footprints are seen. A 100-foot wide, clearly defined circle of scorched grass and depressed earth is found at a distance of 328 feet from the plane. A report by the Moscow Aviation Institute claims that a UFO was tracked on radar at the control tower and that strange radio signals were hear at the time of the disappearance. (Good Above, pp. 228–229)
1961 — A UFO appears above the iron-ore mine of Catalina Huanca, owned by the Marcona Mining Company, near Apongo, Peru. It hovers for 5–15 minutes, only about 300 feet away from a young mining engineer. It is round and glowing, with windows on the upper part. The engineer gets a look at it through his theodolite, but it still looks fuzzy. The object reappears throughout the day, allowing all the mine workers (about 70) to view it. The following day it follows a supply truck for several hours as it exits the mine heading south over a dirt track. (S. Parker Gay Jr., “Peru, 1961,” IUR 24, no. 3 (Fall 1999): 29)
January — Day. Government topographer Adolfo Paolini Pisani is driving a jeep along the highway between La Victoria and El Vigía, Mérida, Venezuela, when a truck passes him. A few minutes later, a brilliant metallic disc like polished blue steel swoops down and passes dangerously close above the hood of the truck. The truck rises a few feet into the air and overturns in the direction taken by the object, falling in a sandbank with its wheels in the air. The object ascends and is lost to view in a few seconds. Pisani stops his jeep to assist, but fortunately the lone driver has only a few scratches. (Horacio Gonzales, “Disc Upsets Truck,” APRO Bulletin, September 1961, pp. 1, 3)
January 3 — President Eisenhower severs diplomatic relations with Cuba. ()
January 3 — 9:01 p.m. An explosion at the US Army’s SL-1 nuclear power reactor in Idaho Falls, Idaho, causes a meltdown, killing three operators. The direct cause is the improper withdrawal of the central control rod, responsible for absorbing neutrons in the reactor core. The event is the only reactor accident in the US that results in immediate fatalities. (Wikipedia, “SL-1”)
January 4 — The CIA Deputy Director of Plans Richard Bissell plans for a “lodgement” by 750 men at an undisclosed site in Cuba, supported by considerable air power. ()
January 8 — Pravda asserts that “some regions” (including Uzbekistan and Tajikistan) of the USSR are reporting UFOs.
It quotes physicist Lev Artsimovich saying that “it is about time that these tales be stopped no matter how breathtaking they may be.” (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: January– June 1961, The Author, 2003, pp. 5–6)
January 10 — A US Navy A-1 Polaris missile is launched from a ground pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida. A disc, whose diameter is close to the length of the Polaris, alters its tracking, but does not block the missile firing, since the tracking system continues to follow the object and later returns to again to track the Polaris downrange. The diameter of the disc is approximately 20–25 feet and it is about 6–8 feet thick at its center. It is visually lost to ground observers and the primary witness (Clark C. McClelland, with 10x50 binoculars) as it continues downrange. The original investigation is conducted by McClelland and his Florida NICAP subcommittee. (NICAP, “UFO ‘Alters’ Tracking of Navy Polaris Test”; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: January–June 1961, The Author, 2003, pp. 6–7; Sparks, p. 286)
January 12 — In a press conference in Moscow, Russia, Minister of Merchant Marine Viktor Bakaev charges that US military aircraft and ships are systematically conducting “provocative actions” against Soviet vessels around Cuba. He is probably referring to close approaches to Cuban airspace by Fort Bliss–based reconnaissance aircraft that are testing the responses of Soviet electronic countermeasures. (Jacobsen, Area 51, pp. 155–157)
January 17 — DRC Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba is executed by firing squad near Élisabethville [now Lubumbashi], Democratic Republic of the Congo. CIA Station Chief Larry Devlin has helped direct the search to capture Lumumba for his transfer to his enemies in Katanga, he is involved in arranging Lumumba’s transfer there, and he is in direct touch with the killers the night Lumumba is killed. The Congolese leaders who kill Lumumba, including Mobutu Sese Seko and Joseph Kasa-Vubu, receive money and weapons directly from the CIA. John Stockwell writes in 1978 that a CIA agent had the body in the trunk of his car in order to try to get rid of it.
Stockwell, who knows Devlin well, feels Devlin knows more than anyone else about the murder. However, documents released in 2017 reveal that the US role in Lumumba’s murder was only under consideration by the CIA and never carried out. (Wikipedia, “Patrice Lumumba”)
January 17 — Eisenhower delivers a farewell address in a TV broadcast. Perhaps best known for advocating that the nation guard against the potential influence of the military–industrial complex, a term he is credited with coining, the speech also expresses concerns about planning for the future and the dangers of massive spending, especially deficit spending, the prospect of the domination of science through federal funding, and, conversely, the domination of science-based public policy by what he calls a “scientific-technological elite.” (Wikipedia, “Eisenhower’s farewell address”)
January 17 — 6:17 p.m. A former weather officer at Holloman AFB is driving with some companions near Cimarron, New Mexico, when they see three different groups of amber UFOs flying in V-formation about 15 miles away at 30,000 feet. There are six lights in the first group and eight in the second and third. They fly away to the southwest and then return to where they first appeared. (Lorenzen, UFOs: The Whole Story, Signet, 1969, pp.
226–227)
January 19 — A USAF press release proclaims that “not even a minute fragment of a so-called ‘flying saucer’ has ever been found.” (Frank Edwards, FS Serious Business, Bantam ed., 1966, p. 48)
January 22 — 4:45 p.m. An elliptical, metallic-looking UFO approaches Eglin AFB near Valparaiso, Florida, from over the Gulf, makes a U-turn and speeds back over the Gulf. Harry Caslar is filming his son on the beach with 8mm movie film and captures the UFO. (UFOEv, p. 95)
January 28 — President Kennedy is briefed, together with all the major departments, on the latest plan (code-named Operation Pluto) that involves 1,000 men landed in a ship-borne invasion at Trinidad, Cuba, about 170 miles southeast of Havana at the foothills of the Escambray Mountains in Sancti Spiritus province. Kennedy authorizes the active departments to report progress. ()
February — Forester Vasili Brodski finds a mysterious crater 100 feet long, 50 feet wide, and 10 feet deep on the bank of a frozen lake in Karelia, Russia. It had not been there two days earlier. The base is remarkably smooth, and around the edge are lumps of grass and soil but no trace of the excavated dirt. Six investigators from Leningrad [now St. Petersburg] arrive and find odd, crumbling black pellets on the edge of the lake. Divers discover a 330- foot strip where the soil has been displaced along the floor of the lake, as if something slid along the ground and submerged, ploughing up the soil. Geologist Vsevolod Charmov examines ice, water, and soil samples but cannot explain a green discoloration on some of the submerged pieces of broken ice. The pellets seem to be an inorganic substance. (Hobana and Weverbergh 61–63)
February 5–7 — Many people report strange lights flashing around in the sky over Maine. Some blink and move up and down. A Portland Press Herald editorial, February 9, says: “Mysterious objects ‘lit up like a ball of fire and going fast’ zoom over Portland. Unidentified shapes with green, yellow, and red lights hover over Brunswick, then dart away with ‘unbelievable quickness.’ Strange things are happening. . . The military had us just about convinced that no such objects existed. The only trouble was that many people—good, reliable observers— continued to see these things.” (UFOEv, p. 138)
February 28 — 3:20 a.m. Clarence Blackwood and his wife hear a roaring sound in the sky at their home in Lakewood, Massachusetts. They look out the bedroom window and see a fiery cigar-shaped object moving at low altitude to the northeast. It is bright yellow in the middle with a bright red edge and surrounded by thin clouds of black smoke. The object rolls back and forth rapidly and travels slowly to the southwest. It passes directly above their house, illuminating the bedroom. The lights that they have left on in the kitchen dim three times and go out for 4– 5 minutes. The object returns at 3:40 and the kitchen lights repeat their previous actions. (Schopick, pp. 115–117)
March — In an article in Argosy, Maj. Lawrence Tacker says that critics of the Air Force investigation are “absolutely erroneous,” “a hoax,” “sensational theories,” and the work of “amateur hobby groups.” NICAP’s evidence is “drivel,” its claims “ridiculous,” and it is making “senseless accusations.” (Lawrence J. Tacker, “‘Flying Saucers Are Fakes!’ ‘—U.S. Air Force,’” Argosy, March 1961, pp. 58, 125–126; UFOEv, p. 108)
March — House Majority Leader John W. McCormack tells Keyhoe privately that he has urged the Science and Astronautics Committee, headed by Rep. Overton Brooks (D-La.), to investigate Air Force UFO secrecy. (Keyhoe, Aliens from Space, Signet ed., 1974, p. 76)
March 16 — 6:15 p.m. Brazilian meteorologist Rubens J. Villela, on the deck of the USS Glacier, watches a tear-shaped fireball over Admiralty Bay, South Shetland Islands, Antarctica, in slow, level flight. It leaves a long orange trail like a tracer bullet, then abruptly divides in two as if exploding. It disappears after 10 seconds. (UFOEv, pp. 53– 54; James E. McDonald, “Statement on Unidentified Flying Objects,” in Symposium on Unidentified Flying
Objects, Hearings, US House Committee on Science and Astronautics, 90th Cong., 2nd Sess., July 29, 1968, pp. 64–65)
March 16 — 8:45 p.m. Mr. F. Reynolds and his 15-year-old son Lloyd are camped in their trailer 900 feet from the Murray River, at Bowna, New South Wales, when they see what appears to be a huge trailer with four windows and a red light at the end standing by the water. A fire is visible to the right of the object, and they can see four figures moving quickly between the object and the fire. Reynolds watches through binoculars and sees the entire array moving sideways in a jerking manner. After 45 minutes, it is all gone from sight. In the morning they can find no traces on the soft mud flat. (“UFO Landing?” Australian Flying Saucer Review, no. 5 (July 1961): 1–2)
Spring — Late evening. A couple parking in Millville, New Jersey, watch a bright light silently moving northward. It hovers, reverses direction, and maneuvers for 5 minutes. At one point it races directly at a star, abruptly stops, draws a neat, right-angled, half-box around it, and goes racing on. Finally it speeds out of sight in about 5 seconds. (J. Allen Hynek, The UFO Experience, Ballantine ed., 1974, p. 44; Michael D. Swords, “We Know Where You Live,” IUR 30, no. 2 (January 2006): 10)
April — Maj. Tacker is removed from his job as Pentagon UFO spokesman and reassigned to Europe. He is replaced by Maj. William T. Coleman. (“Tacker Replaced As Spokesman,” UFO Investigator 1, no. 12 (April/May 1961): 1– 2; UFOEv, p. 108)
April 4 — President Kennedy approves the Bay of Pigs plan (also known as Operation Zapata) for the invasion of Cuba because it has an airfield that does not need extending to handle bomber operations, it is farther away from large groups of civilians than the Trinidad plan, and it is less noisy militarily, which would make any future denial of direct US involvement more plausible. (Wikipedia, “Bay of Pigs invasion”)
April 12 — Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin becomes the first human to go into outer space when his Vostok spacecraft completes an orbit of the earth. (Wikipedia, “Yuri Gagarin”)
April 17 — The Bay of Pigs invasion takes place in Cuba. A counter-revolutionary military (made up of Cuban exiles), trained and funded by the CIA, Brigade 2506 fronts the armed wing of the Democratic Revolutionary Front (DRF) and intends to overthrow the increasingly communist government of Fidel Castro. Launched from bases in Guatemala and Nicaragua, the invading force is defeated within three days by the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces under the direct command of Castro. (Wikipedia, “Bay of Pigs invasion”)
April 18 — 11:00 a.m. Joe Simonton hears a whining sound on his farm four miles from Eagle River, Wisconsin, and sees a silvery object, 30 feet in diameter and 12 feet high, with exhaust pipes around the periphery, land nearby. A door opens and a man appears, about 5 feet tall and wearing a black, turtle-neck pullover with a white band at the belt, and black trousers with a vertical white band along the side. Two other figures are visible inside. The creature is holding a metallic jug and making gestures suggesting he wants a drink. Simonton takes the jug into his basement, fills it with water, and returns it to the man. Simonton notices one man frying on a flameless grill and motions for some food. Simonton receives four ordinary pancakes or cookies, 3 inches in diameter, perforated with small holes. The object takes off after 5 minutes. Simonton gives one of the pancakes to Judge Frank Wellington Carter, who then passes it on to the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena; another he gives to J. Allen Hynek for Project Blue Book; and the third he keeps for himself. A thorough analysis is performed on one of the pancakes by the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, and the food is found to be made of terrestrial but tasteless ingredients, including hydrogenated oil and buckwheat flour. The Air Force concludes that Simonton is honest but has mistakenly conflated the reality of his breakfast with a dream. (Sparks,
p. 287; Vallée, Magonia, pp. 23–25; Clark III 421–426; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: January–June 1961, The Author, 2003, pp. 32–34; Center for UFO Studies, [Hynek case documents]; Center for UFO Studies, [case photos]; Center for UFO Studies, [Lex Mebane case files]; Center for UFO Studies, [NICAP case documents]; Jerome Clark, “The Pancakes of Eagle River,” IUR 21, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 3–8, 27; Joshua Cutchin, “The Great Alien Bake-Off,” Fortean Times 332 (November 2015): 42–44)
April 19 — 7:40 p.m. Commanding Officer C. J. Peterson of the minesweeper HMS Maxton sees a swiftly moving object as the ship is 33 miles off San Vito Lo Capo, Sicily, Italy. It is green and leaves an orange trail as it moves higher and disappears to the northwest. The ship’s crew sees a similar object on April 20 at 4:50 a.m. when it is 25 miles south of Capo Carbonara, Sardinia, Italy. (1Pinotti 112–113)
April 25 — US Air Force Intelligence Collection Guidance Letter no. 4, originally classified Confidential, describes and provides guidance for Project Moon Dust reporting. Several items of interest appear in the document: classification level of Moon Dust Alerts and reports, focus of Moon Dust on “foreign earth satellite vehicles,” and destination agencies for Moon Dust reports among them. Project Moon Dust is a covert project to exploit the discovery of Soviet hardware when it temporarily lands in American hands. (Department of the Air Force,
“MOON DUST Reporting,” Intelligence Collection Guidance Letter, no. 4, April 25, 1961; Kevin D. Randle, A History of UFO Crashes, Avon, 1995, pp. 157–169)
April 29 — Around 4:00 p.m. Contractor John P. Gallagher is working at a home adjacent to Bailey’s Beach, Newport, Rhode Island. He sees a red spherical object bobbing on the ocean waves about 600 feet from the shore. Suddenly the object rises into the air to 60 feet and moves out to sea at about 100 mph. (“‘Head’ Floats—Flies,” APRO Bulletin, July 1961, p. 4)
May — Rep. Overton Brooks (D-La.) appoints Rep. Joseph Karth (DFL-Minn.) head of a Subcommittee on Space Problems and Life Sciences. Karth and two other members plan for hearings in early 1962. The plan calls for a statement by Roscoe Hillenkoetter. NICAP releases a joint statement by 21 American scientists that calls for an open investigation by UFOs without secrecy. It says the Air Force should have a more straightforward information policy that releases all facts on major UFO sightings. (“Scientists Urge Check on AF Investigation,” UFO Investigator 1, no. 12 (April/May 1961): 7; “UFO Inquiry behind Closed Doors: NICAP Asks Right to Question Air Force,” UFO Investigator 2, no. 1 (July/Aug. 1961): 1)
May 5 — Astronaut Alan Shepard becomes the first American in space (for 15 minutes and 22 seconds) when his Freedom 7 capsule is launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, as the first manned Project Mercury launch. (Wikipedia, “Mercury-Redstone 3”)
May 10 — Late evening. Richard Vogt, driving on a rural road south of Osakis, Minnesota, sees a “ball of fog approximately 3 feet in diameter” swiftly descending toward him at a 45° angle from a clear sky. Unable to take evasive action, Vogt can only stare as the object hits the upper part of his hood and windshield. The noisy impact generates a tremendous amount of heat; the windshield becomes extremely hot to the touch. The object leaves pit marks burned in the windshield, circular tracks on the glass, and burned specks in the finish of the hood. (C. W. Fitch, “Monitoring and Scanning UFOs,” APRO Bulletin, July 1963, p. 5; Clark III 716)
May 15 — An order approved by President Kennedy results in the dispersal of four machine guns to insurgents in the Dominican Republic. President Rafael Trujillo dies from gunshot wounds on May 30. In the aftermath, Robert Kennedy writes that the CIA has succeeded where it has failed many times in the past, but in the face of that success, it is caught flatfooted, having failed to plan what to do next. (Wikipedia, “Rafael Trujillo”)
Summer — Near Rybinsk, Yaroslavl Oblast, Russia, crews are setting up new missile batteries as part of Moscow’s defensive network. A huge disc-shaped object allegedly appears at an estimated altitude of 12.5 miles, surrounded by a number of smaller objects. A nervous battery commander panics and gives unauthorized orders to fire a salvo at the disc. All the missiles explode at an estimated distance of 1.2 miles from the target. A third salvo is not fired, because at that point the smaller objects stall the electrical apparatus of the entire missile base. After the smaller disc rejoin the big UFO, the electrical systems return. (Good Above, pp. 227–228; Flying Saucers, no. 47, May 1966, pp. 6–10)
Summer — Capt. Robert Filler and Lt. Phil Lee, based with the 82d Fighter Interceptor Squadron at Travis AFB in Fairfield, California, are scrambled in their F-102 Delta Dagger jets to intercept a radar target that has been hovering at 50,000 feet for 30 minutes. They get a radar lock-on 20 miles out above the Sacramento Valley. The target is still stationary until they are 5 miles away, then the target moves quickly several times to a higher altitude. Filler estimates it is moving at 36,000 mph. (Good Need, pp. 245–246)
Summer — Day. Glenn E. Bradley watches a group of six metallic discs pass over his farm near Beloit, Ohio, at a low altitude. They are traveling in single file at about 30 mph and are spaced 1–2 miles apart. The objects are each about 60 feet in diameter at the bottom with a 30-foot dome on top. Within a transparent section in the center he can see two figures on each side. The objects begin banking to the left about 200–300 feet away. (“Soup Bowls over Ohio,” CUFOS Associate Newsletter 6, no. 1 (Feb./March 1985): 4, 6)
June 3 — 6:35 a.m. Giacomo Barra, Giuseppe Pordoi, Filippo Marin, and Silvano Guardinfante are in a motorboat off Savona, Italy, when the boat begins to roll badly. More than one-half mile away, they notice the surface of the sea is “bulging like an enormous ball, with long billows going out.” An object emerges from the sea and stops still for a few seconds at a height of 30 feet and rocks slightly. A halo forms around the base and it shoots away quickly across the sea and vanishes towards the northwest. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: January–June 1961, The Author, 2003, p. 50; 1Pinotti 117–118)
June 3 — A civilian weather observer sees an object through a theodolite at Mercury, Nevada. It remains in sight for 2 hours at an altitude of 80,000–120,000 feet. Project Blue Book evaluators correctly identify the object as a probable U-2 aircraft flying out of Nellis AFB. (Mark Rodeghier, “The U-2 Spy Plane and Blue Book: Another Look,” IUR 27, no. 3 (Fall 2002): 21)
June 4 — Mrs. James W. Annis, a librarian, sees a large, narrow, elliptical object hovering low in the sky to the north of Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania. Farther to the east, a cluster of smaller objects is hovering. She then watches the smaller objects streak across the sky to the larger one. All then move out of sight behind trees to the north- northwest. (UFOEv, p. 71; Herbert S. Taylor, “Satellite Objects: A Further Look,” IUR 29, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 25)
June 5 — 2:30 a.m. Patrolman Jaime de Miranda and Astrogildo de Medeiros are called to the scene of a sighting on the Rodovia Anchieta highway 30 miles northwest of Santos, São Paulo, Brazil. When they arrive, they find about 20 cars stopped along the road and people watching a luminous disc-shaped object maneuvering in the area. The patrolmen try to signal the object by shining a spotlight on it, but they get no response. When they focus a red light on it, the object moves toward the cars at high speed. They take cover. Another responder, Marshal José Otavia Leite, is about to shoot at the object but other police prevent him. After 3 hours, the object gets dimmer. At 5:30 a.m., it is still visible through binoculars when it lands on the ground some distance from the highway. By daybreak it is no longer visible. (Lorenzen, UFOs: The Whole Story, Signet, 1969, pp. 227–228)
June 9 — A second USAF/NASA flight evaluation of the Avrocar is conducted on a modified second prototype at the Avro facility in Mississisauga, Ontario. During these tests, the vehicle reaches a maximum speed of 20 knots and shows the ability to traverse a ditch 6 feet across and 18 inches deep. Flight above the critical altitude proves dangerous if not nearly impossible due to inherent instability. The flight test report further identifies a range of control problems. (Wikipedia, “Avro Canada VZ-9 Avrocar”)
June 11 — 11:00 p.m. José-Gregorio Darnaude y Rojas Marcos, 28, is lying in a hammock in the front of his house on the Fuenteluega Estate in Sevilla, Spain, when he feels a peculiar pricking sensation throughout his whole body but particularly in his head. His dogs are cowering, the sheep go completely crazy, and the crickets and cicadas become silent. Suddenly, a luminous disc about 15 feet in diameter appears from behind the house, flying from northeast to southwest. It makes an abrupt 90° turn and moves directly toward him, hovering about 400 feet away from him and 80 feet in the air, changing colors from white to orange to red to purple several times. Darnaude runs inside, but the disc turns bright white and shots away at enormous speed. (Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos, “Twelfh Night: And a UFO,” Flying Saucer Review Case Histories, no. 18 (September 1974): 11)
June 19 — A flying object hovers for more than an hour above an airport at Exeter, Devon, England. Officials say: “We do not know what it is. It was seen on the radar screen and we have had it under observation for some time. We think it is pretty big. It appears to be shining brightly and is about 50,000 feet up.” (UFOEv, pp. 80, 139)
June 30 — 2:00 p.m. Residents of Warsaw, Poland, see a large, luminous, roughly spherical, slowly moving object in the sky. It supposedly remains visible for more than 8 hours. (Poland 29–31)
July or August — Dusk. Florin Gorănescu is staying at a villa in Lacul Roşu, Romania. He and two colleagues notice on top of a nearby high cliff an intensely red light that remains motionless until it begins moving slowly northeast. (Romania 13)
July 1 — ATIC is removed from USAF Intelligence and added to the new Air Force Systems Command. Its name is changed to the Foreign Technology Division. Project Blue Book is included in the reorganization. (Sparks, pp. 12–13; Wikipedia, “National Air and Space Intelligence Center”)
July 1 — A new squadron that will become the 1st Aerospace Surveillance and Control Squadron becomes operational under the USAF Air Defense Command at Ent AFB [now the US Olympic Training Center], Colorado Springs, Colorado, part of NORAD’s Space Detection and Tracking System. The first squadron commander is Col. Robert Miller. The Space Track organization at Hanscom Field, Bedford, Massachusetts, assumes a backup role for squadron operations. (Wikipedia, “1st Space Operations Squadron”)
July 11 — 10:35 p.m. Jacques Vallée and others at the Paris Observatory in Meudon, France, see a mystery satellite as part of Project Moonwatch. The following day the director of the project confiscates all their data and destroys it, apparently in fear of being laughed at by the press, scientific colleagues, and the Americans. (Jacques Vallée, Forbidden Science, North Atlantic, 1992, pp. 41–42; Michael D. Swords, “Gazing at the Moons,” IUR 32, no. 4 (October 2009): 11–12)
July 17 — 2:00 a.m. Two people driving about one mile north of Bonnie Springs Ranch [now the Ranch at Red Rock] in the Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area, Nevada, see in the rear-view mirror a low-flying object that overtakes their car, followed by a rush of cold air. It stops, circles the vehicle, flies off, and is lost to sight behind the mountains, where it might have landed, but an investigation by the military finds no trace. (Vallée, Magonia, p. 282; Sparks, p. 288)
August — Construction of essential facilities is completed at Area 51 in Nevada; three surplus Navy hangars are erected on the base’s north side. The original U-2 hangars are converted to maintenance and machine shops. Facilities in
the main cantonment area include workshops and buildings for storage and administration, a commissary, control tower, fire station, and housing. The Navy also contributes more than 130 surplus Babbitt duplex housing units for long-term occupancy facilities. Older buildings are repaired, and additional facilities are constructed as necessary. A reservoir pond surrounded by trees serves as a recreational area one mile north of the base. Other recreational facilities included a gymnasium, a movie theater, and a baseball diamond. (Wikipedia, “Area 51”)
August 4 — Rep. Thomas N. Downing (D-Va.) advises NICAP that the House Science and Astronautics Committee is considering hearings on UFOs by a three-man subcommittee headed by Rep. Joseph Karth. Meanwhile, Rep. Overton Brooks meets privately with Hillenkoetter and Keyhoe, asking them to prepare the best cases and proof of official censorship for a meeting on August 24. (UFOEv, p. 139; Keyhoe, Aliens from Space, Signet ed., 1974, pp. 77–78)
August 5 — 8:20 a.m. John Lee-Steere sees a “snowy white meshlike substance” float to the ground from 12 white metallic discs traveling in pairs over the Mount Hale shearing station, 50 miles northwest of Meekatharra, Western Australia. Sheep-shearing contractor Edwin C. Payne picks up the material and it fades away in his hands. (“Discs Trail White Fibrous Stuff,” APRO Bulletin, January 1962, p. 1; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: July–December 1961, The Author, 2003, p. 23; Keith Basterfield, “Angel Hair: An Australian Perspective,” IUR 27, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 7; Clark III 324)
August 12 — 9:00 p.m. College seniors J. B. Furkenhoff and Tom Phipps see a large oval object with a fin extending from one edge to the center, like a sled with lighted car running boards, near Old Mission High School on 50th Street in Kansas City, Missouri. It hovers at 50 feet altitude for 3–5 minutes, then flies straight up, disappearing in about 5 seconds. (Patrick Gross, “Kansas City 1961, a Blue Book ‘Unknown’”; Sparks, p. 289)
Mid-August — House Committee staff consultant Richard P. Hines visits ATIC in Dayton, where Col. Robert Friend, Hynek, and other officials give him a tour, tell him that Project Blue Book has the UFO problem at hand, and that Rep. McCormack has been pressured by NICAP to hold hearings. Hines leaves ATIC “favorably impressed.” (Jacobs, UFO Controversy in America, Signet ed., 1976, pp. 160–161; Swords 293)
August 16 — George Hunt Williamson, now going by the name of Michel d’Obrenovic, arrives in Japan at the invitation of the Cosmic Brotherhood Association and its contactee leader Yusuke Matsumara. (Zirger and Martinelli, The Incredible Life of George Hunt Williamson, Verdechiari, 2016, pp. 129–130)
August 22 — Adm. Roscoe Hillenkoetter signs a NICAP letter to Congress urging “immediate congressional action to reduce the dangers from secrecy about UFOs, including accidental war and the Russians falsely claiming UFOs are Soviet weapons. (Keyhoe, Aliens from Space, Signet ed., 1974, p. 85)
August 25? — Five people at Toulouse, France, see a luminous, yellow object, 24 feet in diameter, flying about 30 feet above a road. The object has horizontal and vertical bands of darker tone that give the appearance of “windows.” The UFO flies upwards very quickly when the car reaches town. (Vallée, Magonia, p. 282)
August 28 — Rep. Karth writes a harsh letter to Keyhoe and attacks him for trying to defame and ridicule the Air Force.
He had thought Keyhoe would be proving the existence of spaceships, but he knows now he cannot do this. Therefore, he is no longer interested in holding hearings. He tells a newspaper reporter that he will not be part of Keyhoe’s “cheap scheme to discredit the Air Force.” (Jacobs, UFO Controversy in America, Signet ed., 1976, pp. 161–162)
September — A National Intelligence Estimate concludes that the USSR has no more than 25 ICBMs and will not possess more in the near future, effectively discrediting the missile gap myth. (Wikipedia, “Missile gap”)
September 2 — 4:40–4:50 p.m. A man named Ziegler is reclining outside his home in the northeast section of Albuquerque, New Mexico, when he sees a shiny round white object moving erratically to the west. At two different times it emits several small silvery objects about one-sixth the size of the main object. It fades out of sight to the south. (NICAP, “Silver Object and Smaller Ones Emitted”; Sparks, p. 289; Herbert S. Taylor, “Satellite Objects: A Further Look,” IUR 29, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 25)
September 6 — The National Reconnaissance Office is officially launched with headquarters in Chantilly, Virginia. It designs, builds, launches, and operates the reconnaissance satellites of the federal government, and
provides satellite intelligence to several government agencies, particularly signals intelligence (SIGINT) to the National Security Agency, imagery intelligence (IMINT) to the National Geospace-Intelligence Agency,
and measurement and signature intelligence (MASINT) to the Defense Intelligence Agency. Its existence remains top secret until September 18, 1992. The move creates a protocol that requires the CIA deputy director and the undersecretary of the Air Force to co-manage all space reconnaissance and aerial espionage programs. The public face of the NRO is the Office of Space Systems. (Wikipedia, “National Reconnaissance Office”; Jacobsen, Area 51, pp. 168–169)
September 16 — Rep. Overton Brooks dies of a heart attack; the August 24 meeting about UFO evidence has not taken place. He is replaced on the House Science and Astronautics Committee by Rep. George Paul Miller (D-Calif.) who indicates he will not order UFO hearings. (Keyhoe, Aliens from Space, Signet ed., 1974, p. 78)
September 18 — Fourth Officer G. Gendall of the cargo ship Queensland Star, in the Indian Ocean, sees a white UFO through a cloud formation. It vanishes into the clouds and then reappears, dropping toward the sea. The water in the surrounding area grows intensely bright. Particles of white matter continue to fall into the sea after the object disappears, and the sky and water are illuminated for several minutes. (Sanderson, InvRes, pp. 47–48)
September 19 — 5:22 a.m. The North Concord Air Force Station [now closed] at East Mountain, Vermont, picks up an unidentified radar target at 62,000 feet for 18 minutes. It moves at a slow speed on an erratic course. (NICAP, “Radar Tracks Object before and after Hill Abduction”)
September 19 — Keyhoe has smoothed things over with Rep. Karth, who writes: “Now that we better understand each other, I would hope we could properly proceed with a hearing early next year—providing the new chairman [Miller] authorizes hearings.” (“Majority Leader Support Indicates Early Congressional Action: Chairman Karth Backs Open Hearings,” UFO Investigator 2, no. 2 (October 1961): 1–2)
September 19–20 — 10:30 p.m. Barney and Betty Hill are driving home to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, from a vacation in Quebec, going south on US Highway 3. Near Groveton, New Hampshire, Betty sees a bright light moving upward and erratically, growing larger. Later, Barney stops the car at a scenic picnic area south of Twin Mountain. Through binoculars, Betty sees a solid object against the moon that “appeared to be flashing thin pencils of different colored lights.” Barney thinks it’s a plane, though it might be “playing games” with them.
Barney drives slowly through Franconia Notch, watching the object. At one point it passes near the Old Man of the Mountain. About one mile south of Indian Head (north of Lincoln), the object rapidly descends toward their vehicle, causing Barney to stop in the middle of the highway. The huge, silent craft hovers approximately 80–100 feet above the Hills’ 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air and fills the entire field of view in the windshield. It reminds Barney of a huge pancake. Carrying his pistol in his pocket, he steps away from the vehicle and moves closer to the object. Using the binoculars, Barney claims see about 8–11 humanoid figures who are peering out of the craft’s windows, seeming to look at him. In unison, all but one figure move to what appears to be a panel on the rear wall of the hallway that encircles the front portion of the craft. The one remaining figure continues to look at Barney and communicates a message telling him to “stay where you are and keep looking.” Barney has a recollection of observing the humanoid forms wearing glossy black uniforms and black caps. Red lights on what appears to be bat-wing fins begin to telescope out of the sides of the craft, and a long structure descends from the bottom of the craft. The UFO approaches to within 50–80 feet overhead and 300 feet away from him. Barney tears the binoculars away from his eyes and runs back to his car. In a near hysterical state, he tells Betty, “They’re going to capture us!” He sees the object again shift its location to directly above the vehicle. He drives away at high speed, telling Betty to look for the object. She rolls down the window and looks up. Almost immediately, the Hills hear a rhythmic series of beeping or buzzing sounds which seem to bounce off the trunk of their vehicle. The car vibrates and a tingling sensation passes through them. At this point in time they experience the onset of an altered state of consciousness that leaves their minds dulled. A second series of beeping sounds return them to full consciousness. They find that they have traveled nearly 35 miles south, but have only vague, spotty memories of this section of road. They recall making a sudden, unplanned turn, encountering a roadblock, and observing a fiery orb in the road. At 5:00 a.m., they arrive home, about two hours later than expected. Barney feels compelled to examine his genitals, and they both take long showers. Betty notices a pinkish powder and a tear in her dress.
There are shiny, concentric circles on their car’s trunk that were not there the previous day. Betty and Barney experiment with a compass, noting that when they move it close to the spots, the needle whirls rapidly. But when they move it a few inches away from the shiny spots, it drops down. (Wikipedia, “Betty and Barney Hill”; NICAP, “The Betty and Barney Hill Case”; Clark III 577–581; Sparks, p. 289; John G. Fuller, The Interrupted Journey, Dial, 1966; J. Allen Hynek, The UFO Experience, Ballantine ed., 1974, pp. 178–184; Mark Rodeghier, “Hypnosis and the Hill Abduction Case,” IUR 19, no. 2 (March/April 1994): 4–6, 23–24; Robert H. Coddington, “The Hill Experience,” IUR 19, no. 3 (May/June 1994): 18–19; Michael D. Swords, GrassRoots UFOs: Case Reports from the Timmerman Files, Fund for UFO Research, 2005, p. 143; Greg Sandow, “The Hill Case and the Limits of Ufology,” IUR 31, no. 4 (March 2008): 3–7, 19–28; Stanton Friedman and Kathleen Marden, Captured! The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience, Weiser, 2007; Mark Cashman, “Behavioral Classification System for UFO Occupants,” IUR 24, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 19)
September 20 — 2:14 a.m. Pease AFB [now Pease Air National Guard Base] in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, picks up an unidentified radar blip 4 miles away from the base, with no visual contact. (NICAP, “Radar Tracks Object before and after Hill Abduction”)
September 21–22 — Betty Hill calls Pease AFB and reports her UFO incident (without mentioning the figures). Maj. Paul
W. Henderson of the 100th Bomb Wing calls back with a few questions. ()
September 26 — Betty Hill writes to Donald E. Keyhoe (mentioning the figures Barney remembers seeing) and asks for more information. She mentions that she and Barney are considering hypnosis. (Mark Rodeghier, “Hypnosis and the Hill Abduction Case,” IUR 19, no. 2 (March/April 1994): 4–6, 23–24; Michael D. Swords, “Radio Signals from Space, Alien Probes, and Betty Hill,” IUR 29, no. 4 (July 2005): 15)
September 27 — Allen Dulles resigns as director of central intelligence; John A. McCone replaces him. ()
September 27 — 7:57 a.m. The radar operator on a USAF Airborne Early Warning and Control aircraft off the California coast spots five targets on his scope. Four of the objects are on a heading of 90°, and all of them are moving at a high rate of speed. They soon disappear into sea clutter. Three minutes later, two objects appear heading 70° then also disappear into sea clutter. The speed of one of the objects is measured at about 2,070 mph over a distance of 230 miles. While the two objects are on the scope, a single stationary object also appears. After remaining stationary for about two minutes, it moves on a heading of 265° at 70 mph and is lost in the sea clutter. The objects can only be painted with the IFF on. The radar is an APS-95. (NICAP, “Uncorrelated Targets on APS- 95”; Sparks, p. 290)
September 29–October 3 — Betty Hill has a series of intensely vivid dreams in which she and Barney encounter a strange roadblock and are approached by a group of men. She loses consciousness and awakes on board a craft where they are given a medical examination by “intelligent, humanoid beings.” (Clark III 581–583)
Autumn — Evening. Emanoil Manoliu, son of the prominent novelist Mihail Sadoveanu, is at the Neamț Monastery west of Târgu Neamț, Romania, when he sees a blinding, multicolored light. After a few seconds it rises quickly and he can see it looks like a disc with a concave base about 20–23 feet long and 10 feet broad. It vanishes “like a tornado in the air” and he feels the rush of wind. The next day he goes to the site with a priest and finds an area of singed grass and a light imprint in the soil. (Hobana and Weverbergh 167–168)
October 1 — The Defense Intelligence Agency, created at the request of Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara to integrate all military intelligence operations, begins work with a handful of employees in borrowed office space. Its mission is the continuous task of collecting, processing, evaluating, analyzing, integrating, producing, and disseminating military intelligence for the Department of Defense and related national stakeholders. Other objectives include more efficiently allocating scarce intelligence resources, more effectively managing all DoD intelligence activities, and eliminating redundancies in facilities, organizations, and tasks. (Wikipedia, “Defense Intelligence Agency”)
October 2 — Around 12:00 noon. Waldo J. Harris, private pilot and real-estate broker, is getting ready to take off in a Mooney M20A from Utah Central Airport [now closed] in Granger, Utah, when he sees a bright spot in the sky. After he takes off, he notices that the light is still in the same location. He flies toward the object to get a better look, and sees that the UFO has no wings or tail and is hovering with a slight rocking motion. He later estimates the diameter at 35–50 feet, with a thickness of about 4 feet, and the appearance of sand-blasted aluminum. Harris estimates he has approached within 2 miles of the object before it rises abruptly and zooms away for 10 miles before it resumes a rocking hover. He approaches again, but it departs in about 2–3 seconds. Several other people, including airport controller Jay Galbraith, also see the UFO from the airport. Investigators from Hill AFB near Ogden arrive quickly. Airport attendant Russell M. Woods tells them he thinks the object was at 2,500 feet altitude. On October 9, Douglas M. Crouch forwards the Hill AFB official report, including transcripts of interviews, to Wright-Patterson AFB in Ohio, saying “No unusual meteorological or astronomical conditions were present to account for the sighting.” Nonetheless, Blue Book wanders from Venus to a research balloon to a sundog (an assessment James E. McDonald calls “nonsensical”) as explanations. (Clark III 1025–1028; UFOEv,
pp. 1–2 ; James E. McDonald, “Statement on Unidentified Flying Objects,” in Symposium on Unidentified Flying Objects, Hearings, US House Committee on Science and Astronautics, 90th Cong., 2nd Sess., July 29, 1968, pp. 49–50)
October 4–5 — Two IBM engineers, C. D. Jackson and Robert E. Hohmann, have lunch in Washington, D.C., with Donald Keyhoe, who shows them the letter from Betty Hill. (Michael D. Swords, “Radio Signals from Space, Alien Probes, and Betty Hill,” IUR 29, no. 4 (July 2005): 15)
October 14 — 5:00 p.m. Mrs. Erwin Riley, a summer resident in Two Harbors, Minnesota, sees a large object slide into the water of Lake Superior about one mile from shore and bob about on the surface. She summons a neighbor, Jack Ray, and they both watch through binoculars, but they can’t make out what it is. At dusk, the Lake County Sheriff responds to their call, but he can’t see much due to swells on the lake surface. He calls the Air Force and Coast Guard to make sure it’s not part of a training exercise. Shortly afterward, Riley sees the object rise into the
air and travel southeast at about the speed of a car. A Coast Guard search the next day turns up only a floating log. (“Flying Log?” APRO Bulletin, November 1961, p. 3)
October 14 — 5:30 p.m. Mayor Michael Burson and his wife watch two pairs of UFOs move to the east above Sunset, Utah. The first pair looks like puffy cotton joined together by “stringy stuff,” and the second pair are metallic discs. (“More Discs in Utah,” APRO Bulletin, March 1962, p. 2)
October 15 — 5:00 p.m. Mrs. John P. Vanicky and Norine Gribble are driving from Marquette, Michigan, to Hurley, Wisconsin, when they see a brown cigar-shaped object spouting fire from its rear and moving southeast. They stop the car and watch for 20 minutes until it disappears. (Duluth (Minn.) News-Tribune, October 19, 1961; “Flying Log?” APRO Bulletin, November 1961, p. 3)
October 19 — NICAP secretary Richard H. Hall writes to Walter N. Webb at Hayden Planetarium in Boston, Massachusetts, and asks him to talk to Betty and Barney Hill. (Clark III 578–579)
October 21 — 2:00 a.m. A brilliant fireball flashes in front of Richard and Rhonda DuBois’s car on US Highway 60 as they are driving between Datil and Pie Town, New Mexico. It then veers into the sky. Later, as they approach a canyon they see that the light is traveling along in front of them. It breaks into four lights that move along with the car, even as DuBois drives at 100 mph, until they stop at a roadside motel. The lights then zoom straight up and disappear. (“Woman Says Flying Objects Chase Car,” Garden Grove (Calif.) News, October 23, 1961; Lorenzen, UFOs: The Whole Story, Signet, 1969, p. 231; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: July–December 1961, The Author, 2003, p. 97)
October 21 — Webb, initially skeptical, winds up interviewing the Hills for 6 hours. He finds that their amnesia concerning some parts of the episode has unsettled them, and Betty tells him she had vivid nightmares for six straight nights a couple weeks after the incident. (Clark III 581)
October 26 — Walter Webb’s report to NICAP concludes that the Hills are telling the truth. (Walter N. Webb, “A Dramatic UFO Encounter in the White Mountains, N.H., September 19–20, 1961,” NICAP Massachusetts Subcommittee, October 26, 1961; Clark III 581; Mark Rodeghier, “Hypnosis and the Hill Abduction Case,” IUR 19, no. 2 (March/April 1994): 4–6)
October 30 — The Soviet RDS-202 hydrogen bomb, the 50-megaton Tsar Bomba, is supposedly the most powerful nuclear weapon ever tested. It is detonated at the Sukhoy Nos Cape of Severny Island, Novaya Zemla, Arkhangelsk Oblast, Russia. It flattens entire villages in surrounding areas and breaks windows in Finland 1,000 miles away. (Wikipedia, “Tsar Bomba”)
November 1 — At a small, informal conference on SETI at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s facility in Green Bank, West Virginia, astronomer Frank Drake writes this equation on a chalkboard: N = R fp ne fl fi fc L. The equation, the Green Bank Formula, summarizes the main concepts that scientists must contemplate when considering the question of extraterrestrial life capable of communicating by radio across space. It is more properly thought of as an approximation rather than as a serious attempt to determine a precise number. (Wikipedia, “Drake equation”; Lee Billings, “The Alien-Life Summit,” Slate, September 27, 2013)
November 3 — 4:30 p.m. Mr. E. Adkins observes a brilliant object with an orange center flying south over Eyres Monsell, Leicester, England, at an estimated 600 mph. It is triangular in shape and about 300 feet wide. (“Triangular Object over Eyres Monsell,” Flying Saucer Review 8, no. 2 (March/April 1962): 24)
November 13 — The AFCIN-1E-0 Draft Policy letter (Betz Memo) is prepared by Lt. Col. Norman M. Rosner for Col.
Ward Reid Betz. Among other things, it specifies three peacetime functions of the 4602d Air Intelligence Service Squadron at Ent AFB [now the US Olympic Training Center], Colorado Springs, Colorado: UFO investigations, Project Moon Dust (an exploitation program to locate, recover, and deliver descended foreign space vehicles), and Operation Blue Fly (to facilitate delivery to the Foreign Technological Division of Moon Dust and other items of great technical intelligence interest). These three functions involve “employment of qualified field intelligence personnel on a quick reaction basis to recover or perform field exploitation of unidentified flying objects, or known Soviet/Bloc aerospace vehicles, weapons systems, and/or residual components of such equipment.” (Paul Dean, “The Rejuvenated ‘Betz Memo,’” UFOs: Documenting the Evidence, May 8, 2016)
Late November — Evening. A group of four friends are hunting on a Sunday in the area of Harvey, North Dakota. As they are returning in the car, the two men in the front seat notice a descending glowing object in the sky ahead of them. Assuming they are witnessing a plane crash, they rush to the scene of its landing, where they find at 150 yards distance, a “silo-appearing craft which was sticking in the ground with this glow around it.” The men shine a hand spotlight and shine it on the object, whereupon they see four human-looking individuals standing around it. At this point they seem to hear an explosion and “everything went out.” The principal witness wakes up from dozing in the back seat as the car is negotiating soggy ground looking for the craft and crew. They return to the spot where the landing takes place, and they see the figures again, wearing white coveralls and standing 5 feet
high. They get out of the car and one figure waves them away. Eventually, the men agree to return to a small town, possibly Martin, North Dakota, 11 miles away, where they find a police officer, who listens to the story and agrees to accompany them back to the site. They see red lights moving in the field and both cars go in pursuit of them. The lights go out, the police officer drives away, and the four men resume driving home. Two miles down the highway, the silo-like object reappears, landing gently 150 yards away with two of the figures watching them. Two of the men get out of the car again and shine the spotlight on the craft. One of the men is carrying a rifle; he drops on the ground and shoots, apparently hitting one of the figures in the right shoulder. The figure spins around, goes down on his knees, gets help from the other figure, then yells, “Now what the hell did you do that for?” Weirdly, as soon as the men return to the car, the two who have remained inside insist the rifle had not been removed and no shot was fired. The primary witness (who remains in the car) has no recollection of what happened to the craft and figures. By the time they get home, dawn is breaking, and their wives are waiting for them. They all know it has taken longer than it should have to return. A few hours later, around 12:00 noon, the principal witness is at work when three well-groomed, official-looking men visit him. He presumes they are Air Force intelligence officers who say they have a “report” about the previous night’s event. They ask him what clothes he was wearing and what the object looked like, but they never ask about the shooting. Later, they show up at his house and ask to see his hunting gear and boots. They tell him not to say anything more about the incident. In January 1968, US Border Patrol agent [later BATF agent] Donald E. Flickinger manages to interview the primary witness, who works as a supervisor at Minot AFB hospital, and two of the others, one a small-town high school superintendent and the other an active-duty Air Force sergeant. They all are “extremely reliable and responsible,” Flickinger says. (J. Allen Hynek, The UFO Experience, Ballantine ed., 1974, pp. 164–165; Clark III 825–827)
Late November — 9:30 p.m. Real estate agent Cavalheiro Mendes is walking along the beach in Balneário Pinhal, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, when he sees a huge light 900 feet away. As he walks toward it, he sees it is a huge disc resting on the sand. He feels compelled to approach it and sees two helmeted figures come from behind the object. They seem to be telling him telepathically not to resist. Mendes finds he is completely unable to move. He feels one of them scratching his forearm with an instrument, then he blacks out. When he wakes up, he is nearly back to his beach house and it is 11:30 p.m. After a few weeks he feels anxious and sad for no apparent reason. He refuses to be hypnotized. (Lorenzen, Flying Saucer Occupants, Signet, 1967, pp. 199–200)
November 22 — US Navy pilot Robert G. Robinson reaches an airspeed of 1,606 mph in a McDonnell-Douglas F4H-1F Phantom II over Edwards AFB, California. (Wikipedia, “Robert G. Robinson”)
November 25 — IBM engineers C. D. Jackson and Robert E. Hohmann interview the Hills. One of them expresses surprise at how long the drive took. They are mysteriously interested in whether nitrates or chemicals containing nitrates are in their car. For the first time, Barney and Betty realize that there are two hours they cannot account for. Also present is a friend of the Hills, retired USAF Maj. James McDonald, a former intelligence officer. He suggests that Betty and Barney consult a hypnotist. (Clark III 583; Mark Rodeghier, “Hypnosis and the Hill Abduction Case,” IUR 19, no. 2 (March/April 1994): 6, 23–24; Michael D. Swords, “Radio Signals from Space, Alien Probes, and Betty Hill,” IUR 29, no. 4 (July 2005): 15)
November 28 — President Kennedy presides over the dedication of the new CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. (Wikipedia, “George Bush Center for Intelligence”; CIA History Staff, 50 Years in Langley: Recollections of the Construction of CIA’s Original Headquarters Building, 1961–2011, January 2012)
November 30 — Covert operations against Fidel Castro are officially authorized by President Kennedy after being given the name Operation Mongoose at a White House meeting on November 3. The operation is led by USAF Gen. Edward Lansdale and goes into effect after the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion. A document from the Department of State confirms that the project aims to “help Cuba overthrow the Communist regime,” including Castro, and it aims “for a revolt which can take place in Cuba by October 1962.” One of Lansdale’s ideas is to project a huge image of the Second Coming of Christ above the island, spread the word that Castro is the anti-Christ, shoot starburst shells from a submarine into the air, and hope far an uprising. US policymakers want to see “a new government with which the United States can live in peace.” (Wikipedia, “Operation Mongoose”; Kremlin 131– 133)
December — Funding runs out for the Avrocar and it and related WS-606A supersonic VTOL programs are officially cancelled by the US military. (Wikipedia, “Avro Canada VZ-9 Avrocar”)
1962
1962 — According to a “former Project Blue Book Chief” (probably Maj. Friend) gun-camera films obtained during jet interceptor UFO chases are routinely referred to the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center (established in 1961) for analysis. Richard H. Hall writes, “This cannot be documented at present, but I heard him say so to a UFO researcher colleague. None of the photoanalysis data in these cases has been released, nor has the existence of these films ever been acknowledged.” (Richard H. Hall, Uninvited Guests, Aurora, 1988, p. 179)
1962 — The Air Force tries once again to get rid of the UFO program, but its attempts to get NASA or the National Science Foundation to handle the program prove futile. It finally gives up the entire idea. The program remains at FTD as a special project and without expanded resources. (Jacobs, UFO Controversy in America, Signet ed., 1976, p. 164)
1962 — Day. An Air Force pilot is flying a brand new B-52 with a full crew out of Wichita, Kansas, headed for an air base in the southwest. He notices a bright flash of sunlight in his left side and turns to see a metallic object “like polished chrome.” It is pacing the aircraft near its left wingtip. The object is 4–8 feet in diameter and has no seams or markings. His First Officer is watching an identical object off the right wing, and the crewman in the tail reports that there is a round shiny metal ball following close behind the B-52. The top and bottom gunners also see spheres above and below the plane. The pilot goes into an evasive maneuver, but after 10–15 minutes the objects are maintaining their positions. He returns to his previous assigned altitude and heading. After a few minutes, the five objects leave, one at a time, first the bottom one, then the top, then the tail. The two objects on the wings shoot away at the same time and climb out of sight parallel to each other. After landing, the crew is told not to talk about the sighting at all. (Richard F. Haines, “NARCAP’s Project Sphere: Are Spherical UAP a Threat to Aviation Safety?” IUR 33, no. 2 (July 2010): 5–6)
1962 — 12:00 midnight. Actor Jamie Farr and his wife Joy Ann are driving through the desert near Yuma, Arizona, when they notice a light moving erratically at the top of a mountain. It zig-zags across the sky as it approaches them, moving to within 150 feet, then 60 feet of their vehicle. They can see two lights, red and blue, revolving beneath the silent object. It paces them for a short time then moves away at incredible speed. (“Jamie and Joy Farr Report UFO Sighting,” CUFOS Associate Newsletter 1, no. 8 (December 1980): 3, 5)
1962 — The Argentine Navy creates a permanent commission for the study of UFOs, and the Argentine Air Force establishes a division for the same purpose. (Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos, “Argentina: UFO Declassification,” UAPSG–GEFAI, July 29, 2020)
1962 — René and Françine Fouéré establish the Groupe d’Étude des Phénomènes Aériens in Paris, France, with an initial group of 60 interested members. The following year GEPA launches a magazine, Phénomènes Spatiaux, which is published through 1978. In 1964, Lionel-Max Chassin, now retired from the army, takes over as president. (Wikipedia, “Group d’Étude des Phénomènes Aériens”)
1962 — French composer Paul Misraki writes Les Extraterrestres using the pseudonym Paul Thomas. He links modern UFO sightings with biblical and mythological tales and claims that angels are aliens, that the Bible and other ancient texts are filled with many UFO flying saucer sightings, and that throughout human history extraterrestrial visitors have intervened in human affairs. Misraki is also one of the first authors to suggest that apparitions may be UFO-related phenomena. (Paul Thomas [Paul Misraki], Les Extraterrestres, Plon, 1962; Jerome Clark, “Vimanas Have Landed: Ancient Astronautics in Ufology,” IUR 22, no. 3 (Fall 1997): 28–29)
January — The Federal Aviation Administration expands the restricted airspace in the vicinity of Groom Lake, Nevada, and the lakebed becomes the center of a 600-square-mile addition to restricted area R-4808N. (Wikipedia, “Area 51”)
January — The IBM 7950 Harvest computer, designed to be used for cryptanalysis, is delivered to the National Security Agency. It includes Tractor, a large automated tape cartridge library. An NSA-conducted evaluation finds that Harvest is more powerful than the best commercially available machine by a factor of 50–200, depending on the task. It remains in use until 1976. One purpose of the machine is to search text for keywords from a watchlist.
From a single foreign cipher system, Harvest is able to scan more than 7 million decrypts for any occurrences of some 7,000 key words in under four hours. The computer is also used for codebreaking, and this is enhanced by a system codenamed Rye, which allows remote access to Harvest. (Wikipedia, “IBM 7950 Harvest”; “Timeline of the IBM Stretch/Harvest Era (1956–1961),” computerhistory.org)
January 29 — A Royal Dutch Air Force pilot flying an F-86 Sabrejet sights a UFO over eastern Netherlands. The jet’s radar also picks up the object and control tower radar (somewhere) is also tracking it. He attempts to give the object an urgent warning by radio, but it goes unheeded. He arms a Sidewinder rocket and tries to close in, but the
UFO pulls away swiftly before he can fire. (“New Sightings by Navy, FAA, and Airline Observers: Dutch Jet Pilot Tries to Down UFO,” UFO Investigator 2, no. 5 (Aug./Sept. 1962): 1–2)
February — Richard M. Bissell Jr. leaves the CIA and is replaced as head of the Directorate of Plans by Richard Helms. February — Maj. William T. Coleman is replaced as Pentagon UFO spokesman by Maj. Carl R. Hart. ()
February — Vice-Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter resigns from NICAP, stating that NICAP has gone as far as it can and should no longer criticize USAF investigations. (Keyhoe, Aliens from Space, Signet ed., 1974, pp. 85–86)
February — The Hills begin making numerous trips over several months to try to find their encounter site but are unsuccessful. (Clark III 583)
February — Alec Birch, 14, snaps an out-of-focus photo of five domed discs that he and two friends see hovering 500 feet above his backyard in Mosborough, Sheffield, England. Alec and his father show the photo later to the Air Ministry, which pronounces them “temperature inversions” in October. However, in an interview on BBC-2 television on October 6, 1972, Alec confesses that he had superimposed images painted on glass over the backyard scenery, fooling even his father. (“Schoolboy Snaps Saucer,” Flying Saucer Review 8, no. 5 (Sept./Oct. 1962): 4; Gordon Creighton, “‘No Kidding This Time. My Flying Saucers Photo Is Genuine!’ (–Alec Birch),” Flying Saucer Review 45, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 9–11; Clark III 603)
February 6 — USAF issues the last of its UFO fact sheets (no. 179-62). In the future it will issue press releases. (UFOEv, p. 108)
February 10 — CIA pilot Francis Gary Powers is exchanged for Soviet spy Rudolf Abel on the Glienicke Bridge that connects Potsdam to West Berlin, Germany. ()
February 20 — Astronaut John Glenn pilots the Friendship 7 Project Mercury capsule for three orbits and just short of 5 hours flying time, becoming the first American to orbit the earth. (Wikipedia, “Mercury-Atlas 6”)
February 24 — NORAD Requirement 64-73 states that its radar coverage “would provide warning from all directions, not just northern approaches.” (Clark III 811)
February 28 —The first A-12 test aircraft covertly arrives at Groom Lake, Nevada, from Burbank, California. (Wikipedia, “Area 51”)
March — Chemical engineer Leon Davidson writes a two-part article in Saucer News explaining how he has become convinced that the CIA, especially under the influence of Allen Dulles, has engineered disinformation about UFOs and even manufactured some seemingly legitimate radar sightings as a tool in the Cold War. Its aim is to cause the Soviet Union to waste time and effort in preparing defenses against fictitious aircraft and weapons that the US might be developing. Furthermore, UFOs can be used to capture headlines, diverting attention from unwelcome news coverage of espionage operations. Davidson writes that Dulles has resorted to using contactees and UFO organizations as a propaganda vehicle. Messages supposedly from spacemen calling for a halt in nuclear testing could influence public opinion in a test ban treaty that, in effect, would benefit the US more than the Russians, since the Soviets were seen as overtaking the American lead in weapons development. Davidson attributes CIA involvement in the claims of George Adamski and Daniel Fry. He also points out that electronic countermeasures (ECM) equipment is capable of creating fake radar returns and goes so far as to say that secret working models of saucers, perhaps piloted by “midgets,” are responsible for some sightings. (Leon Davidson, “An Open Letter to Saucer Researchers,” Saucer News, March 1962, April 1962; Leon Davidson, “ECM + CIA = UFO: Or, How to Cause Radar Sightings,” Flying Saucer Review 6, no. 2 (March/April 1960): 9–12; Gerald K. Haines, “CIA’s Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947–90,” Studies in Intelligence 40, no. 5 (1997): 67–84)
March — Betty and Barney Hill meet with Patrick J. Quirke, a psychiatrist at the Baldpate Sanitarium in Georgetown, Massachusetts, but he is unsympathetic and discourages them from undergoing hypnosis. (Clark III 583)
March 25 — The Hills meet with a psychiatrist (Duncan Stephens of the Exeter Clinic, New Hampshire) who rules out simultaneous hallucination. Around this time, Barney develops a series of warts in an almost geometrically perfect circular ring in his groin but does not associate his malaise with the UFO incident. (Clark III 583–584)
March 25 — Evening. Mrs. R. H. Chappell and her sister Janie Kidd watch two triangular objects, one larger than the other, hovering 40–50 feet above the water at Saanich Inlet, British Columbia. They have flashing ruby-red lights. After two minutes, the lights change to orange and they move off silently and gracefully. Mrs. L. Austin Wright sees a stationary flashing yellow light around the same time. (Dan Lloyd, “Are They Really Seeing Things over Canada?” Flying Saucer Review 12, no. 6 (Nov./Dec. 1966): 27)
March 27–30 — George Adamski claims to attend a Twelve Counsellors Meeting on Saturn that addresses the threat of nuclear war on Earth. In the report that he publishes in June, Adamski writes that the “present explosions of atomic energy are going in the wrong direction, and if these experiments do not stop, the only results will be a lost civilization… This is even affecting their planets.” Ridiculed by many, some of Adamski’s descriptions in the
report about his trip clearly show this was a deeply spiritual experience for him, which may have unbalanced him for some time. (George Adamski, George Adamski’s Special Report: My Trip to the Twelve Counsellors Meeting That Took Place on Saturn, Mrach 27–30, 1962, Science of Life, 1962; “Final Years,” The Adamski Case, June 11, 2009)
Spring or summer — All base personnel on flying status attend a briefing in the theater at the Clinton-Sherman AFB [now the Clinton-Sherman Industrial Airpark] near Burns Flat, Oklahoma. The airmen are shown a short 20–30-minute Air Force film showing, spliced together without interpretation, five or six gun-camera clips apparently documenting attempts by aircraft to intercept UFOs. Afterward, the commander of the 4213d Strategic Wing reads a statement (probably JANAP 146(D)) stipulating fines and jail sentences for anyone publicly reporting a UFO sighting and hands out UFO sighting forms in the event of an incident. One technician recalls there is a section on reporting any electronic signature emitted from the UFO picked up by specific ECM devices. (Nukes 123–125)
April 18 — Evening. A red, glowing object is first seen at a great height over Oneida, New York, heading west silently.
There are reports from Kansas and Colorado. NORAD radar picks up the object; ADC alerts several bases, including Nellis AFB near Las Vegas, Nevada. Fighters are scrambled from Luke AFB near Phoenix, Arizona, and the jets are possibly heard over Nephi, Utah, after the object passes overhead. Capt. Herman Gordon Shields, flying a C-119 two miles west of Levan, Utah, sees it as a slender object. A man in Silver City, Utah, claims that the object is a glowing ball of light about the size of a soccer ball. He says it is white with a yellowish tint and a bright yellow jagged flame coming from the rear: “As the object passed over Robinson [in Ogden, Utah?], it slowed down in [the] air, and after, [a] gasping sound was heard, the object spurted ahead again. After this procedure was repeated three or four times, the object arched over and began descending to earth after which the object turned bluish color and then burned out or went dark. After the object began to slow down it began to wobble or fishtail in its path.” Several people see the object over Eureka, Utah, apparently crashing and interrupting electrical service from a power plant close to the landing site. It is described as a “glowing, orange oval which emitted a low, whirring sound.” It takes off a few minutes later, continuing to the west. The object lights up the streets of Reno, Nevada, and then turns to Las Vegas. It blares brightly like a “tremendous, flaming sword” over Nellis AFB and then disappears from their radar scopes at 10,000 feet. Witnesses say the object is traveling almost horizontally northeast of Las Vegas until a final explosion occurs from the direction of Mesquite, Nevada. Sheriff’s deputy Walter Bun, who leads the search and rescue unit, moves the unit into the Spring Mountain area in jeeps to search for wreckage. They search through the night, and when the sun comes up they continue using aircraft. They do not find anything of importance except some ashes that might easily be the remains of a campfire started by a hunter some weeks earlier. When no one reports a downed or missing aircraft, Bun and the other deputies call off the search. The object seems to have changed direction, because at Reno it passes west to east, in Utah it is seem going southeast to northwest, and at Nephi it travels west. The duration of the sighting, from New York to Nevada, is only 32 minutes, giving a speed of 4,500 mph, below the speed of meteors. On May 8, the Air Force sends Hynek and Lt. Col. Robert Friend to Utah with Douglas M. Crouch, chief of criminal investigation at Hill AFB, south of Ogden, Utah. They determine it is a bolide. Blue Book lists it as two sightings: a multiple radar sighting at Nellis on April 18 with no visual (despite hundreds of observers in Las Vegas), and a bolide over Utah that it claims occurs on April 19. In reality, the Utah and Nevada sightings are only minutes apart (8:15 p.m. Mountain Time). However, there is quite a bit of information from numerous sources concerning this major incident, including Project Blue Book documents, and now possible confirmation by a radar man at ATIC. The case is also not explained in a Blue Book monthly sighting listing for April 1962. It is interesting that every one of these states except Utah has or was in the process of obtaining ICBM bases: New York (Plattsburg AFB); Kansas, (Forbes AFB and McConnell AFB); Utah (Minuteman production at Air Force Plant 77 at Hill AFB); Idaho (Mountain Home AFB); Montana (Malmstrom AFB); New Mexico (Walker AFB); Wyoming (F. E. Warren AFB); Arizona (Davis Monthan AFB); California (Beale AFB). (NICAP, “National Defense Alert”; Frank Edwards, Strange World, Ace ed., 1964, pp. 38–41; “Meteor Lands in Utah, Lights Western Skies,” Los Angeles Times, April 19, 1962, p. 15; “Brilliant Fireball Flashes in Skies,” Salt Lake City Deseret News, April 19, 1962, pp. 1, 5; Las Vegas Sun, April 19, 1962; Kevin D. Randle, A History of UFO Crashes, Avon, 1995, pp. 79–94; Clark III 333–335; Sparks, p. 291; Randle, Levelland, 2021, pp. 87–99)
April 24 — 7:45 p.m. Alice W. Gasslein and her mother are driving near their home in Springfield, Delaware County, Pennsylvania, when they see a large domed object emitting flashes of green light moving over the roofs of nearby homes. A rotating band around the main body consists of a series of square windows from which come shafts of bright white light. They drive back home to alert her husband, Joseph A. Gasslein, an aviation worker. By that time, the UFO is about a half-mile distant, giving off colored lights. Around 8:10 p.m., the object returns flying
toward the Gassleins’ home (south of Walsh Park) only 20 feet above ground level and passes over their backyard before making a sharp left turn and moving away to the east. (“Out of the Past: A Very Close CE-1,” IUR 10, no. 1 (Jan./Feb. 1985): 9–10, 14; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: January– June 1962, The Author, 2005, pp, 56–57)
April 25 — The A-12 is taken on its first (unofficial and unannounced) flight with Lockheed test pilot Louis Schalk at the controls. Intended as only a taxi run, the A-12 unexpectedly takes flight and Schalk lands it 2 miles past the runway. (Wikipedia, “Lockheed A-12”; Jacobsen, Area 51, pp. 177–178)
April 26 — Schalk makes another unofficial low-altitude, 40-minute test flight with the A-12. The takeoff is perfect, but after the A-12 gets to about 300 feet it starts shedding all the “pie slice” fillets of titanium on the left side of the aircraft and one fillet on the right. (On later aircraft, those pieces are paired with triangular inserts made of radar- absorbing composite material.) Technicians spend four days finding and reattaching the pieces. Nonetheless, the flight pleases Kelly Johnson. (Wikipedia, “Lockheed A-12”; Jacobsen, Area 51, pp. 178–179)
April 30 — Schalk takes the A-12 up to 30,000 feet on its first official flight at Area 51 for 59 minutes. His top speed is 400 mph. (Jacobsen, Area 51, p. 179)
April 30 — Just before 10:00 a.m. During a free-flight test (Flight 52) of the X-15 to a height of 246,700 feet (46.7 miles) by NASA pilot Joseph A. Walker from Edwards AFB, California, to Ely, Nevada, the instruments photograph 5–6 cylindrical objects. No visual confirmation. On May 11, at NASA’s Second National Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Space in Seattle, Washington, Walker mentions the objects photographed (and perhaps shows the slides; it is not mentioned in the proceedings). NICAP is unable to obtain the photos. NASA claims the objects are ice flaking off the aircraft (“fireflies”). They are described by a NASA spokesman as “barbell shaped, bright-orange in color, and passing in groups up to six behind the X-15.” Opinion ranges from “definitely something up there,” to “film spots,” to “sun rays on the lens.” Jacobsen implies it was the A-12 test the same day. (“AF Criticizes NASA Release of ‘Mystery Object’ Photo,” UFO Investigator 2, no. 5 (Aug./Sept. 1962): 8; UFOEv, p. 139; Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, May 11, 1962; MUFON UFO Journal, November 1989, pp. 6–7; Good Above, p. 366; Proceedings of the Second National Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Space, Seattle, Washington, May 8–10, 1962, NASA Office of Scientific and Technical Information, November 1962; Curtis Peebles, “Fireflies: The X- 15 ‘UFO’ Sighting Controversy,” Magonia 78 (June 2002); Jacobsen, Area 51, p. 205)
Late April or early May — Three women and a 10-year-old boy are driving home to Granby, Connecticut, when two bright yellow lights appear in the sky ahead. The lights cross the road and disappear behind some shrubbery. Driving nearer and stopping, the witnesses see the lights hovering above a field, one above the other. The objects realign horizontally and move toward the car. The driver starts the car up and speeds away, but the lights are right behind her, only a few feet from the rear window and matching the car’s speed. The yellow lights are only a few feet in diameter and have a reddish patch that rotates. They follow the car for four minutes then turn away. (Swords 299–300)
May 4 — The A-12 achieves supersonic speed of Mach 1.1 at 40,000 feet during a test at Groom Lake, Nevada. May 11 — 7:40 p.m. Argentine Rear Adm. Eladio M. Vázquez and Capt. Aldo Molinari watch a UFO from the US
Military Mission at the Comandante Espora Air Naval Base in Bahía Blanca, Argentina. (UFOEv, p. 170; “In Argentina,” APRO Bulletin, July 1963, p. 4)
May 12 — 4:10 a.m. Three truckers (Valentino Tomassini, Guro Tomassini, and Humberto Zenobi) are driving from Bahia Blanca to Jacinto Aráuz, La Pampa, Argentina, when they see a lantern-like light resting in a nearby field. It brightens and dims alternately. As they slow down, a row of 20–30 lights come on. When they approach to within 210 feet of the object, it rises up and crosses the road at a height of 12 feet. Its lights go out, a reddish flame comes from the bottom, and it makes a soft humming noise. The UFO then divides into two parts that fly off in different directions. Navy Capt. Luis Sanchez Moreno, chief of intelligence at the Puerto Belgrano Naval Base, interviews the witnesses. At the landing site, grass is burned over an area 180 feet in diameter, and there are damp, gray-colored patches. These are taken for analysis to either or both the Puerto Belgrano Naval Base and Universidad Nacional del Sur, both in or near Bahia Blanca. It consists of calcium carbonate and potassium carbonate. (UFOEv, pp. 170–171; “In Argentina,” APRO Bulletin, July 1963, pp. 2–4; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: January–June 1962, The Author, 2005, pp. 60–61; Oscar A. Uriondo, “Preliminary Catalogue of Type 1 Cases in Argentina,” Flying Saucer Review Case Histories, no. 12 (December 1972): 10)
May 13 — 4:00 a.m. Near Oncativo, Córdoba, Argentina, two women driving from Rosario see a long object flying at moderate altitude and emitting a powerful, multicolored light. They enter a fog and see through the trees a sort of “little house” on the ground, with green, red, and yellow lights set in an arrow-shaped arrangement. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: January–June 1962, The Author, 2005, p. 62;
Oscar A. Uriondo, “Preliminary Catalogue of Type 1 Cases in Argentina,” Flying Saucer Review Case Histories,
no. 12 (December 1972): 10)
May 21 — Miguel Thomé, a reporter for La Nueva Provincia, takes several photos of a luminous object above Bahia Blanca, Argentina, one of which is exactly at a point when the object changes course. (UFOEv, p. 170; ClearIntent, pp. 138–139; “Un avistaje de OVNI en Bahía Blanca aparece en los archivos de la CIA de Estados Unidos,” La Nueva (Bahía Blanca), February 3, 2016)
May 21 — Day. Capt. Gordon Pendleton and First Officer J. P. Murphy are flying an Aer Lingus Vickers Viscount airliner above southern England at 17,000 feet when they see a brown globe-shaped object approaching head-on. It speeds 3,000 feet below the aircraft at about 700 mph. The object has a number of antenna-like projections on its surface. (Irish Times, May 22, 1962; UFOEv, p. 122)
May 22 — 7:10–7:45 p.m. A formation of Navy planes, led by flight instructor Lt. Rodolfo César Galdos, near Comandante Espora Air Naval Base in Bahia Blanca, Argentina, observes several UFOs over a 35-minute period. Witnesses at the control tower also see an object. Student pilot Roberto Wilkinson sees a luminous object trailing his plane. It lights up his cockpit and his radio transmission is disrupted as it passes underneath. (UFOEv, pp. 119, 171; Schopick, p. 129; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: January–June 1962, The Author, 2005, pp. 65–67; Scott Corrales, “Saucers in My Backyard: Argentina’s Trancas Case,” Inexplicata, May 8, 2007)
May 22 or 24 —A woman is hospitalized after she and her husband see an object land near Winifreda, Las Pampas, Argentina. Two large “robot-like creatures” emerge. Argentine Air Force investigators find a circle of scorched grass. (Lorenzen, Encounters with UFO Occupants, Berkley Medallion, 1976, p. 152)
May 25 — USAF Pentagon spokesman Maj. Carl R. Hart tells NICAP that Air Force investigations involve hundreds of intelligence officers, as well as “the best scientific brains available in the laboratories of all government agencies,” also scientific investigators in commercial laboratories, wherever needed. He adds that Hynek has consulted with the “world’s leading scientists.” Around the same time, Lt. Col. Spencer Whedon from ATIC informs NICAP that the Air Force spends about $10,000 on each major sighting investigation. (“AF Admits UFO Probe Still in Full Operation,” UFO Investigator 2, no. 4 (March/July 1962): 2)
Summer — Col. Joseph J. Bryan III, special assistant to the Secretary of the Air Force and advisor to NATO, joins the board of NICAP. In 1959 he had contacted Keyhoe and asked to see some of his “really hot cases.” It is later revealed that he was also founder of the CIA’s psychological warfare staff. Bryan never discloses his CIA background to NICAP or Keyhoe. Although Bryan, the father of later UFO author C. D. B. Bryan, makes strong pro-UFO statements, he is later suspected of helping to discredit Keyhoe and undermine NICAP; his son and Richard H. Hall deny it. (“AF Colonel, Noted Astronomer, Join Board,” UFO Investigator 2, no. 5 (Aug./Sept 1962): 2; “Col. Joseph Bryan,” UFO Investigator 3, no. 8 (May/June 1966): 5; “NI-CIA-AP or NICAP?” Just Cause 1, no. 7 (January 1979): 5–13; “CE4K Author C. D. B. Bryan Dies,” Rigorous Intuition, December 18, 2009)
Summer — Around 9:00 p.m. Harvey Packard and five other men are fishing near East Peru, Maine, when three orange globes show up across the pond and begin dancing about. The globes move toward the witnesses, who get scared and jump in their car and speed away. The globes follow the car, one in the rear and the others on each side. The objects appear to be transparent, 3-foot spheres that easily pace the speeding vehicle. Occasionally they leave their positions and form into a triangle with squarish bridges between them, then split up and continue the car chase.
The car radio is filled with static. Finally, they veer off and fly into the woods. (NICAP case file; Swords 300) Summer — Donald MacKenzie, a shepherd, discovers some strange wreckage in a remote moor near Ardgay, Sutherland,
Scotland, that he thinks is related to Sputnik. In October, a team from RAF Kinloss [now Kinloss Barracks] on the Moray Firth arrives to investigate. They find a strange box-shaped object, large enough to have carried a person and containing spaces for cameras and a brass panel that explains, in pictures, what the finder should do in the event of discovery to claim a reward. Buried nearby are a number of bottles of colorless fluid. The team is mystified and suspects something Russian but can’t confirm it. The debris now seems likely to have come from a secret spy balloon, one of many launched in 1955–1956 by the US Air Force from RAF Evanton [now closed], to take reconnaissance photos of Russian military and nuclear facilities. Once clear of Soviet territory, the balloons were designed to drop into the Pacific Ocean where its VHF beacon would guide recovery efforts. (David Clarke, “The Scottish Roswell?” Dr. David Clarke: Folklore and Journalism, July 29, 2012)
June 5 — Contactee Gabriel Green runs for the US Senate in California and claims to have received 171,000 votes in the Democratic primary. (Wikipedia, “1962 United States Senate election in California”; S. D. Tucker, False Economies: The Strangest, Least Successful, and Most Audacious Financial Follies, Plans, and Crazes of All Times, Amberly, 2018, chapter 3, excerpted in “Taxing Credulity,” Fortean Times 367 (June 2018): 52–55)
June 6 — 11:20 a.m. Six silent objects are seen at intervals over Caroda, New South Wales. A trail of shiny, web-like filaments falls and gradually disintegrates as they drift through the air. Witnesses say they are up to 5 feet long. (Keith Basterfield, “Angel Hair: An Australian Perspective,” IUR 27, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 7; Keith Basterfield, “A Catalogue and Analysis of Australasian ‘Angel Hair’ Cases,” March 2001)
June 7 — A brilliant white light, approximately 20 times brighter than first magnitude stars, is seen at Hallett Station [now closed], Cape Hallett, East Antarctica, at 250° (true) azimuth, and 30° elevation. Over 5 minutes it remains stationary and is viewed both with binoculars and the naked eye. It appears circular. It is a dazzling gold color and observed between two mountain peaks. The sun at the time is below the horizon. After 5 minutes it moves in a southerly direction and is lost to view behind a peak. Project Blue Book concludes it is Jupiter, even though that planet’s position is only at 5° elevation. (NICAP, [Blue Book documents]; Sparks, p. 292; Swords 298)
June 25–26 — 9:00 p.m.–2:00 a.m. John, 14, and James Westmoreland, 12, are camping out in their backyard at 7466 East 18th Street, Tucson, Arizona, with a friend, Ronald Black, 11. About 9:00 p.m. John notices a bright star in the west that moves occasionally, dips, and hovers. Around 11:45, they notice that the star is brighter and has moved closer, taking the shape of a triangle. At 12:15, the object noiselessly emits three green flares that take on a speedy horizontal flight path. They notice a second, ball-shaped object that races from west to east, flips, and stops at a higher elevation than the first. A “flare-like” light approaches the second and seems to be absorbed by it. The first UFO spits out more green flares, two of which disappear into the second object a few minutes later.
The second object shoots out a rocket that disappears in the sky. A third whitish object, larger and disc-shaped, appears above Pontano Wash with a cone-shaped superstructure. Three stiltlike protuberances appear briefly then are drawn back in. The third object also drops something like a rope that extends to the ground for 3–5 minutes. The boys soon get sleepy and retire after a while, telling the mother, Pansy Westmoreland, about it in the morning. (“Saucers, Rockets Inhabit Night Sky,” Tucson (Ariz.) Daily Citizen, June 26, 1962, p. 17; Coral E. Lorenzen, “Saucers Shoot Rockets over Tucson, Arizona,” APRO Bulletin, July 1962, pp. 1, 3–4; Lorenzen, UFOs over the Americas, Signet, 1968, pp. 114–118)
July — APRO refers to NICAP as merely a “lobbying” effort in APRO Bulletin, while APRO is “gradually drawing the endorsements of the scientific community.” (“Support NICAP?” APRO Bulletin, July 1962, pp. 1–2; Clark III 50)
July 7 — Soviet Col. Georgy Mosolov reaches 1,665 mph in a Mikoyan Gurevich Ye-166 (a modified Ye-152) over Russia. (Wikipedia, “Georgi Mosolov”)
July 7 — 11:10 p.m. C. B. Taylor, chief scientist at Hallett Station [now closed], Cape Hallett, East Antarctica, sees an intense light followed by two smaller lights pass over the facility in a few seconds leaving a clearly visible trail. Its passage is registered by an all-sky camera used for the study of auroras. Probable bolide. (NICAP, [Blue Book documents]; NICAP, “Object Filmed by All Camera (IFO)”)
July 17 — Maj. Robert Michael White is piloting Flight 62 of the X-15 at Edwards AFB, California. He flies it to 314,750 feet (59 miles), qualifying him for USAF astronaut wings. For this, he is featured on the cover of the August 3 issue of Life. At the top of his climb he sees a small grayish object “like a piece of paper” about 30–40 feet away. He exclaims, “There are things out there. There absolutely is!” (“Space: Inside the Sky,” Time, July 27, 1962; MUFON UFO Journal, November 1989, pp. 6–7; Good Above, p. 366)
July 28 — Before dawn. The skipper of a chartered fishing boat 6 miles southeast of Avalon, Santa Catalina Island, California, sees several stationary lights low in the water dead ahead. Through binoculars he sees a squat, lighted structure in which several men are working, apparently the stern of a submarine with no markings and dacks almost awash. He and another crew member see five men, “two in all-white garb, two in dark trousers and white shirts, and one in a sky-blue jumpsuit.” The craft swept in their direction toward the open sea, still on the surface, and the skipper has to turn hard to keep clear. It makes no noise and leaves no wake. (Marvin Miles, “Report Studied on Soviet Sub off Catalina,” Los Angeles Times, October 25, 1962, pp. 1, 10)
August — 7:00 p.m. Three witnesses are driving south toward San José de Métan, Salta, Argentina, when they see a light against the mountains to the west. It approaches, growing as large as the full moon when it is 300 feet ahead of them. It has a bulge at the top and reddish-pink, green, and white blinking lights. It continues to approach and passes above a Fiat truck in the road ahead of them. The truck stops, and the witnesses stop their car as well, two of them walking into some nearby bushes to observe. The object now seems to be the diameter of a DC-3’s wingspan and is 150 feet in the air. The truck’s lights go out, and the object rocks back and forth, taking off to the north at a great rate of speed. Five minutes later, they drive up to the stopped truck, whose driver is scooping up dirt to cool its overheated engine down. (Lorenzen, UFOs: The Whole Story, Signet, 1969, pp. 157–158)
August — Night. Marilyn Chenarides, her younger brother Roger, and their mother Mildred Anderson are vacationing in a cabin on Movil Lake, Minnesota. The two women see a glowing red, domed disc with large windows hovering
above the boat dock 50 feet away. Silhouetted in the windows are three entities who seem to be looking at them. The women shut off the cabin lights for a better look, and the UFO switches off its own lights. Anderson runs out of the cabin toward the object, which lifts and disappears rapidly. (“The 1962 Occupants Case,” APRO Bulletin 21, no. 2 (Sept./Oct. 1972): 6)
August 2 — Around 12:00 midnight. Air traffic control operators at Cambá Punta Airport [now Doctor Fernando Piragine Niveyro International Airport], near Corrientes, Argentina, see an unidentified light approaching the airport. They call the airport manager, Luís Harvey, who arrives from home in a hurry and sees the light circling at high speed. Harvey orders a landing strip freed up but the light, apparently a spherical object, comes down, hovering and revolving a few feet above the same spot on the runway for 3–4 minutes, emitting strong blue, green, and orange flashes. Then it climbs and vanishes at staggering speed. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: July–December 1962, The Author, 2005, pp. 18–19; Patrick Gross, “Camba Punta, Argentina, August 2, 1962”)
August 7 — Midnight. A contract worker at the not-yet-operational Titan II launch complex of the 570th Strategic Missile Squadron near Oracle, Arizona, sees a brilliant light descending over the site. He is joined by a colleague as the light gets larger. Both men go inside and contact Davis-Monthan AFB outside Tucson, which sends out two jet interceptors. When the aircraft arrive, the light takes off to the north and disappears rapidly. After the jets circle and head back, the light returns, descends toward the silo, and takes off vertically. (Lorenzen, UFOs: The Whole Story, Signet, 1969, pp. 235–236; Nukes 220–221)
August 17–19 — Evening. Walking home, diamond prospector Rivalino Mafra da Silva sees two small beings, about three feet tall, digging a hole near Duas Pontes, 17 miles north of Diamantina, Minas Gerais, Brazil. On August 19, Mafra da Silva and his sons are in bed when they are awakened by sounds and see a shadowy figure, apparently floating in the room. In the morning, he and his son Raimundo see two humming balls floating outside. They merge into one larger ball that moves toward Rivalino, enveloping him in yellow smoke. Raimundo says: “Then the yellow smoke dissolved. The balls were gone. The ground below was clean as if the dust had been removed by a big broom.” He tells his story to Lt. Wilson Lisbõa, chief of police at Diamantina, who conducts a search for 10 days. Only a few drops of blood are found. (“The Brazilian Abduction: Boy’s Story Unshaken,” Flying Saucer Review 8, no. 6 (Nov./Dec. 1962): 10–12; Clark III 418–419; Brazil 123–127; Patrick Gross, URECAT)
Late August — 2:00 p.m. Ann Druffel and Aileen Cummings are at Long Beach, California, when they see a small rectangular cloud over the Santa Catalina Channel. Its vapor appears to churn and it doubles in size, then elongates to 20–30 times its original size. (Ann Druffel, “Santa Catalina Island Recurring ‘Cloud Cigars,’” in Proceedings of the 1976 CUFOS Conference, Chicago, 1976, pp. 63–64; Ann Druffel, “Santa Catalina Channel Cloud Cigars,” IUR 31, no. 1 (January 2007): 12–13)
Late August — 7:00 p.m. Three witnesses are driving in a rural area about 87 miles from Salta, Argentina, when two of them (the third sleeps through the event) see a light against the mountains to the west that grows larger and moves about 300 feet above the road ahead of them. It is a domed disc with flashing reddish-pink, green, and white lights around its perimeter. The object illuminates a truck ahead of them. The truck stops, and the two witnesses get out of their car and hide in some bushes to see what happens next. The object appears to be nearly 100 feet wide and 150 feet above the truck. The truck’s lights go out and the object takes off to the north at a high rate of speed, climbing out of sight within seconds. They drive up to the truck, whose drivers are throwing dirt into its smoking engine compartment and are more concerned about an insurance claim than a UFO encounter. (Lorenzen, UFOs over the Americas, Signet, 1968, pp. 12–13)
August 26 — 12:05 a.m. Geraldo Bichara, 18, is standing guard at the Escola de Sargentos das Armas in Três Corações, Minas Gerais, Brazil, when an electrical blackout occurs in the city. Suddenly he is paralyzed by a light beam from an unseen object, apparently for a few minutes. In 1980, Bichara undergoes hypnosis and discovers that the incident was an abduction in which he is taken aboard a UFO by beings wearing pumpkin-colored jumpsuits and subjected to a medical examination. He attempts to flee at one point and grabs his rifle lying nearby, but he is still paralyzed. After about 2 hours he is returned to the guardhouse. (Brazil 60–66; “Caso Giraldo Bichara,” Grupo de Amigos que Estudam Mistérios e Ufologia, May 2014)
August 26 — 12:30 a.m. Walter T. Jones Jr. watches a triangular formation of 6 white lights and one green light pass silently over Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for 3–5 minutes. (“Another ‘Mother’ Ship?” APRO Bulletin, July 1963, p. 3)
August 29 — Afternoon. A U-2 spy plane flying over Cuba spots an SA-2 surface-to-air missile site under construction at La Coloma, eight Komar-class guided missile patrol boats, and a cruise missile site at Banes. (Kenneth Michael Absher, Mind-Sets and Missiles, US Army War College, 2009)
August 30 — 7:35–7:55 p.m. While having supper at an outdoor restaurant near Port-au-Prince, Haiti, three men, one of whom works for Techint Engineering Company, watch a UFO that approaches and hovers for 20 minutes. The engineer has a portable theodolite with him, and they set it up and track the object. It is a silvery-gray disc, like two rounded hubcaps together, and is spinning on its axis. It has an antenna on the top and exhaust ports all around its mid-line, and it is surrounded by gaseous emissions that run through all the colors of the spectrum. The object flips to a vertical alignment, showing its base, and then tips over so that its original topside is on the bottom. The object silently accelerates and disappears in 5 seconds. Project Blue Book concludes that the men were watching the planet Venus. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: July– December 1962, The Author, 2005, p. 33; Swords 298–299)
September — California contactee Gloria Lee takes channeled blueprints for a spaceship to Washington, D.C., to show to government officials. She gets nowhere, but while in town she gets messages from her space contact J.W. saying that the space people are upset with human wars and nuclear weapons. J.W. orders her to go on a fast for peace until he sends a “light elevator” to take her to Jupiter. Her fast lasts from September 23 to November 28. No one pays attention. After about 66 days without eating, Lee’s husband, aircraft engineer William H. Byrd, summons an ambulance to take her to George Washington University Hospital. She dies there on December 3. Lee continues to channel post-mortem information through a medium named Nada-Yolanda (Pauline Sharpe) in the Miami-based Mark-Age MetaCenter. (Clark III 682–683; Tristan, “The Airline Stewardess Who Starved Herself to Death for Aliens,” Bizarre and Grotesque, December 18, 2016)
September — Thomas M. Comella, writing under the pseudonym “Peter Kor,” proposes that UFOs originate, not from space (as he apparently thought when he favored the extraterrestrial hypothesis in the December 1955 issue of Fate), but from a reality “so strange that it cannot be confined to our three-dimensional world.” (Clark III 877; Thomas M. Comella, “Why the Real Saucer Is Interplanetary,” Fate 8, no. 12 (December 1955): 17–23; Peter Kor [Thomas M. Comella], “The Solution to the Flying Saucer Mystery,” Flying Saucers, September 1962, pp. 68–74)
September 1 — The USSR publicly announces an agreement to supply arms and military technicians to Cuba.
Construction begins on SS-5 IRBM sites in Guanajay. (Wikipedia, “Cuban Missile Crisis”) September 5 — U-2 photos reveal for the first time the presence of MiG-21 jet fighters in Cuba. ()
September 15 — Construction begins on Soviet SS-4 MRBM sites at San Cristobal, Cuba. ()
September 15 — 5:00 p.m. Two bright discs are seen over Oradell, New Jersey. At 6:00 p.m., former Navy flying officer
J. J. McVickers sees two discs just across the state line near Oradell. At 7:50 p.m., Victor Cipolla sees a glowing object descend toward Oradell. Two other witnesses see one round object with a fin on top and another under it at darting back and forth near Oradell Reservoir. At 7:55 p.m., three teens see and hear a bright, oval object land in the reservoir with a loud splash. A moment later, it lifts off and climbs silently at high speed. (“Disc Landing Reported in New Jersey,” UFO Investigator 2, no. 6 (Oct./Nov. 1962): 3–4; UFOEv, p. 140; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: July–December 1962, The Author, 2005, pp. 48, 49; Sparks,
p. 292)
September 20 — Construction begins on Soviet SAM sites at Los Angeles, Chaparra, and Juguani, Cuba. ()
September 29 — A CIA U-2 mission over the Isle of Pines and Bay of Pigs, Cuba, reveals additional Soviet SA-2 and cruise missile sites. (Jacobsen, Area 51, p. 183; Kenneth Michael Absher, Mind-Sets and Missiles, US Army War College, 2009)
Fall — Arlene Cook is awakened by her young, terrified son, at their home in Anaheim, California. He says something is in his bedroom, so they go to investigate and see a half-dollar-sized light on his bed. The spot stays visible when she puts her hand on the bed or when she removes the covers, but she can find no source for the light. It then just switches off and does not return. (Michael D. Swords, “A Trick of the Light,” IUR 31, no. 2 (June 2007): 8)
Fall — Patricia Ellingson is seeing “glowing, flame-like lights” in her bedroom in Azusa, California, every evening. She thinks they appear only when she is mentally calm. The lights are the size of a quarter, sometimes switch off abruptly, and other times fade out slowly. At times they do not appear for months, and she feels sad when they are not there. (Michael D. Swords, “A Trick of the Light,” IUR 31, no. 2 (June 2007): 8)
October — The CIA and USAF instruct Lockheed to study a high-speed, high-altitude drone concept. Kelly Johnson specifies speeds of Mach 3.3–3.5, an operational altitude of 87,000–95,000 feet, and a range of 3,500 miles. It would make a one-way trip, eject its camera payload at the end of the mission for recovery, then self-destruct. It has a double-delta wing similar to the A-12’s wing design. The Q-12 is to be air-launched from the back of an A- 12 and uses key technology from the A-12 project, including titanium construction and radar cross-section reduction design features. Johnson wants to power the Q-12 with a ramjet engine modified to operate at high temperatures for at least 90 minutes at high altitude. (Wikipedia, “Lockheed D-21”)
October 2 — Night. A Boeing security guard at an unidentified Minuteman missile site near Moore, Montana [likely the M-01 launch site that is part of Malmstrom AFB complex], sees a tear-shaped object with a blue top and a red bottom. (“Flying Objects Reported in Separated Areas,” Helena (Mont.) Independent-Record, October 3, 1962, p. 7)
October 2 — Night. Airmen on security patrol at Larson AFB [now Grant County International Airport] near Moses Lake, Washington, see a white light hovering a few hundred feet in the air near where the ICBM storage bunkers are located. It silently shoots into the air as the guards approach it. (“Flying Objects Reported in Separated Areas,” Helena (Mont.) Independent-Record, October 3, 1962, p. 7; Nukes 145–147)
October 7 — New U-2 flights show there are now 19 Soviet SA-2 missile sites in Cuba. ()
October 12 — Dawn. An object like an orange or yellow meteor is observed over Forbes AFB [now Topeka Regional Airport], Topeka, Kansas. Its flight path is curved upward, with an occasional jerky motion; it moves quickly at first but slows down as it reaches the zenith. It is visible for 5 minutes before fading out. ([Blue Book documents]; Nukes 145)
October 14 — A U-2 (loaned to the Air Force by the CIA because the CIA U-2s have better surveillance capabilities) piloted by USAF Major Richard S. Heyser out of Laughlin AFB, Del Rio, Texas, takes 928 pictures on a path selected by DIA analysts, capturing images of what turn out to be an SS-4 MRBM construction site at San Cristóbal, Pinar del Río Province [now in Artemisa Province], in western Cuba. (Wikipedia, “Cuban Missile Crisis”; “U-2 Pilot’s Cuba Photos Made History,” Wilmington (N.C.) Star-News, October 9, 2005)
October 15 — The CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center reviews the U-2 photographs and identifies objects that they interpret as medium-range ballistic missiles. The CIA notifies the Department of State. National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy chooses to wait until the next morning to tell the President. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara is briefed at midnight. (Wikipedia, “Cuban Missile Crisis”)
October 16 — 6:30 p.m. Kennedy gathers a select group of advisors known as the ExComm (Executive Committee of the National Security Council) to discuss a strategic response. McNamara presents him with three basic options: a political option of approaching Castro and Khrushchev; a naval blockade to stop Soviet ships carrying weapons to Cuba; and “military action directed against Cuba, starting with an air attack against the missiles.” The ExComm’s initial discussions focus on a massive US military assault on the nuclear installations and other bases in Cuba, and whether the Soviets would counterattack in Berlin or elsewhere. Kennedy rejects an attack, favoring a quarantine to buy time to negotiate a missile withdrawal. (Wikipedia, “Cuban Missile Crisis”)
October 17 — A U-2 takes the first photo of an IRBM site under construction in Cuba. (“The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962: The Photographs,” National Security Archive)
October 22 — 7:00 p.m. President Kennedy addresses the American public for 18 minutes and announces his plan to implement a naval blockade of Cuba. US military alert is set at DEFCON 3, and Castro mobilizes all of Cuba’s military forces. US ambassador to the Soviet Union Foy D. Kohler delivers to a letter from JFK to Khrushchev, saying, “the one thing that has most concerned me has been the possibility that your government would not correctly understand the will and determination of the United States in any given situation, since I have not assumed that you or any other sane man would, in this nuclear age, deliberately plunge the world into war which it is crystal clear no country could win and which could only result in catastrophic consequences to the whole world, including the aggressor.” (Wikipedia, “Cuban Missile Crisis”; John F. Kennedy, Letter to Chairman Nikita Khrushchev, October 22, 1962)
October 23 — Khrushchev writes to Kennedy, rebuffing his demand that the Soviets remove the missiles, which the Soviet leader insists “are intended solely for defensive purposes.” Kennedy writes back, bluntly reminding Khrushchev that he started the crisis by secretly sending missiles to Cuba. As US ambassador Adlai Stevenson explains the matter to the United Nations Security Council, US ships already are moving into position in the waters around Cuba. Soviet submarines menacingly move into the Caribbean as well, positioned as if they might try to break a blockade. But Soviet freighters bearing military supplies headed for Cuba stop in their tracks. (Nikita Khrushchev, Letter to President John F. Kennedy, October 23, 1962; John F. Kennedy, Draft letter to Chairman Nikita Khrushchev, October 23, 1962)
October 24 — Khrushchev sends an indignant letter to Kennedy, accusing him of threatening the Soviet Union: “You are no longer appealing to reason, but wish to intimidate us.” (Nikita Khrushchev, Letter to President John F. Kennedy, October 24, 1962)
October 25 — The US raises the readiness level of SAC forces to DEFCON 2. For the only confirmed time in US history, B-52 bombers go on continuous airborne alert, and B-47 medium bombers are dispersed to various military and civilian airfields and made ready to take off, fully equipped, on 15 minutes notice. The Soviet arms freighters turn back toward Europe, but the oil tanker Bucharest approaches the US quarantine zone, directly headed for Cuba. Two American warships, the USS Essex and the USS Gearing, prepare to intercept it, which
could have led to war. Instead, Kennedy decides to let the Bucharest through the quarantine because it isn’t carrying any contraband. (Wikipedia, “Cuban Missile Crisis”; McGeorge Bundy, “Record of Action of the Fourth Meeting of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council,” October 25, 1962; Wikipedia, “Cuban Missile Crisis”)
October 26 — Castro sends a letter to Khrushchev, urging him to launch a nuclear first strike against the US, which the Soviet leader disregards. Instead, Khrushchev sends a letter to Kennedy, in which he offers to work with him to deescalate the conflict and ensure that they do not “doom the world to the catastrophe of thermonuclear war.” The CIA reports that the construction of Cuban missile sites is continuing and accelerating. Robert Kennedy meets secretly with Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin and agrees after a phone call to the president that the removal of US missiles from Turkey is negotiable as part of a comprehensive settlement. (Fidel Castro, Letter to Chairman Nikita Khrushchev, October 26, 1962; Nikita Khrushchev, Department of State Telegram Transmitting Letter to President John F. Kennedy, October 26, 1962; Wikipedia, “Cuban Missile Crisis”; Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, Bloomsbury, 2017, chapter 12–13)
October 26 — 6:15 a.m. Mrs. Alvie Frank sees several flat, glowing objects moving slowly about 11 miles south of Monte Vista, Colorado. (“Variety of Objects in Colorado,” APRO Bulletin, January 1963, p. 1)
October 26 — 7:16 a.m. Bessie Rogers of Fort Collins, Colorado, spots a large, black parachute-shaped object weaving back and forth over the mountains somewhere between the south end of Horsetooth Reservoir and Masonville. It flies around for about 10 minutes, disappears, and then returns. (“Variety of Objects in Colorado,” APRO Bulletin, January 1963, p. 1)
Late October — Day. Two Air Force B-52 Stratofortress bombers are returning to Loring AFB [now the Loring Commerce Centre] near Limestone, Maine, following an Operation Chrome Dome mission. They are on final approach to landing when a huge, metallic-gray, cigar-shaped UFO descends over the flight line and hovers for a few minutes. It stretches halfway across the aircraft ramp area, which would make it half a mile wide. Jet engine mechanic Sgt. Christopher Smith is watching the scenario from the ground and notes that the UFO is silent and has no lights or visible openings. After the second B-52 lands, the UFO silently zooms away toward the east and disappears. All the ground witnesses and the flight crews do not talk about the incident afterward and act as if nothing happened. (Nukes 132–136, 138–139)
October 27 — A U-2 piloted by Maj. Rudolf Anderson is shot down over Cuba. However, Kennedy correctly concludes that Khrushchev has not himself given the order to shoot down Anderson’s plane. The incident prompts both leaders to realize the situation is spiraling dangerously out of control. Khrushchev sends another letter to Kennedy, in which he demands that the United States withdraw missiles from Turkey as part of the deal.
JFK responds by offering to promise not to attack Cuba after the Russians withdraw. In the evening, Robert Kennedy tells Soviet ambassador Dobrynin, “You have drawn first blood. The president had decided against
advice not to respond militarily to that attack, but he [Dobrynin] should know that if another plane was shot at
... we would take out all the SAMs and antiaircraft And that would almost surely be followed by an invasion.”
However, he also says that the US already plans to remove its missiles from Turkey but cannot say so publicly. This is the moment when both nations step back from the brink of war. (Wikipedia, “Cuban Missile Crisis”; Nikita Khrushchev, Letter to President John F. Kennedy, October 27, 1962; Anatoly Dobrynin, Cable to the Soviet Foreign Ministry, meeting with Robert Kennedy, October 27, 1962; John F. Kennedy, Letter to Chairman Nikita Khrushchev, October 27, 1962; Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, Bloomsbury, 2017, chapter 12–13; Christopher Klein, “How the Death of a US Air Force Pilot Prevented a Nuclear War,” History Stores, October 28, 2019)
October 28 — In a speech aired on Radio Moscow, Nikita Khrushchev announces the dismantling of Soviet missiles in Cuba and does not insist on his demands concerning the removal of US missiles from Turkey. (Wikipedia, “Cuban Missile Crisis”; Nikita Khrushchev, Letter to President John F. Kennedy, October 28, 1962)
October 28 — 7:30 p.m. Mrs. Ellen D. Sylvester is driving with her three children in Norwood, South Australia, east of Adelaide, when they see an orange glow on the ground about 2–3 miles away. It has three legs, round windows, and the boy remarks that he can see people in it. One of the “men” gets out and descends to the ground. He appears to be doing something to one of the landing legs. He seems to have some trouble in making it retract, which finally he overcomes. He is about 6 feet tall, as his head reaches the outer fringe of the craft. He wears a helmet like a gas mask. He returns to the UFO, which begins to move slowly away, then very fast, and disappears in a northerly direction. Total time of observation is 40 minutes. (Keith Basterfield, “‘This Is One of the Most Remarkable Cases of a Flying Saucer…,’ Adelaide, 1962,” Unidentified Aerial Phenomena—Scientific Research, September 22, 2014)
October 29 — Defense Department Assistant Secretary Arthur Sylvester admits that withholding evidence on UFOs from the public is necessary if the means justifies it. He cites USAF “administrative practices” Air Force Regulation
11-30, where withholding information “in the public interest” is allowed, and AFR 11-7, which states that sometimes information requested by Congress may not be furnished “even in confidence.” (Keyhoe, Aliens from Space, Signet ed., 1974, p. 86; UFOEv, p. 106)
October 29 — Vera Rogers sees a round, shiny object flying low over Fort Collins, Colorado. The object, heading south, makes a soft, whirring sound followed by a popping noise. (“Variety of Objects in Colorado,” APRO Bulletin, January 1963, p. 1)
November — Evening. A French businessman is driving along a minor road in Var department, southeastern France. It is raining heavily. Rounding a bend, he sees a group of figures in the road 260 feet ahead. He slows down to drive around them and sees that they are actually bizarre animals with the heads of birds and covered in plumage.
Terrified, he speeds ahead and stops about 500 feet further ahead. Turing around, he sees the entities heading toward a luminous, dark-blue object hanging in the air over a field on the other side of the road. It resembles two plates upside down. The entities are sucked into the bottom of the object. He hears a “clack,” and the UFO takes off at “prodigious speed.” (Lyonel Trigano, “Strange Encounter in Var,” Flying Saucer Review 14, no. 6 (Nov./Dec. 1968): 18; Clark III 280)
November 13 — Two IBM engineers, C. D. Jackson and Robert E. Hohmann, present a paper at the American Rocket Society annual meeting in Los Angeles, California, noting the alleged extraterrestrial signals detected by Nikola Tesla, Guglielmo Marconi, and David Todd between 1899 and 1924. They speculate that the signal source was 11 light years away, perhaps the Epsilon Eridani system. (C. D. Jackson and Robert E. Hohmann, “An Historic Report on Life in Space: Tesla, Marconi, Todd,” paper presented at the 17th Annual Meeting of the American Rocket Society, Los Angeles, November 13–18, 1962; Michael D. Swords, “Radio Signals from Space, Alien Probes, and Betty Hill,” IUR 29, no. 4 (July 2005): 10–15)
November 15 — Stanford astronomer Carl Sagan presents a paper at the American Rocket Society annual meeting in Los Angeles, California, that explores models for the distribution of technical civilizations in the galaxy. Using Frank
D. Drake’s equation to suggest that 0.001% of stars in the sky have a planet on them on which an advanced civilization resides, Sagan suggests the nearest such advanced civilization is several hundred light years away from earth. From there, he explores the feasibility of interstellar spaceflight as a means for traversing such distances. The paper ends in consideration of the possibility of extraterrestrial contact with Earth in the past, including the ancient Mesopotamian myth of Oannes (Apkallu), a mythical being who taught mankind wisdom. Berossus describes Oannes as having the body of a fish but underneath the figure of a man. (Carl Sagan, “Direct Contact among Galactic Civilizations by Relativistic Interstellar Spaceflight,” Planetary and Space Science 11 (May 1963): 485–498; Wikipedia, “Adapa”)
November 17 — 9:00 p.m. F. L. Swindale, ex-Marine captain, sees three bright, star-like lights approach, hover, and bounce at Tampa, Florida, for about 15 minutes, then fade. (UFOEv, p. 140; Sparks, p. 293)
November 23 — The Hills attend a meeting at the parsonage of their Unitarian church in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where the invited guest speaker is USAF Capt. Ben H. Swett, who has recently published a book of his poetry. After he reads selections of his poetry, the pastor asks him to discuss his personal interest in hypnosis. After the meeting breaks up, the Hills approach Swett privately and tell him what they can remember of their strange encounter. He is particularly interested in the missing time of the Hills’ account. The Hills ask Swett if he will hypnotize them to recover their memories, but Swett says he is not qualified and cautions them against going to an amateur hypnotist, such as himself. (Clark III 584)
November 30 — Two teenage boys in Lethbridge, Alberta, see an elliptical object hovering near a school building and decide to throw rocks at it. The object is about 8 feet in diameter and glowing blue. Their stones seem to ricochet off the UFO and forcefully returned, landing on structures behind the teens. (CUFOS case file)
December — Kennedy closes the Cuban Project, the CIA’s Operation Mongoose. (Wikipedia, “Operation Mongoose”)
December 1 — Evening. A husband and wife in East Point, Georgia, are watching the first-quarter Moon through a 6-inch reflector. In the dark area, well away from the terminator, the man sees a bright-red spot light up. It gets so bright that he points it out to his wife. She notices it starting to move across the illuminated portion of the Moon, then continues passing in a straight line across the blue Georgia sky, faster and faster until it is gone. (Michael D. Swords, “Gazing at the Moons,” IUR 32, no. 4 (October 2009): 15)
December 7 — A full-scale mockup of the Q-12 drone is ready at Groom Lake, Nevada, and has already undergone preliminary tests to measure its stealth quality. However, the CIA is not enthusiastic about the Q-12, mostly because the agency is overextended at the time with U-2 missions, getting the A-12 up to speed, and covert operations in Southeast Asia. The USAF, however, is interested in the Q-12 as both a reconnaissance platform
and a cruise missile and the CIA finally decides to work with the USAF to develop it. (Wikipedia, “Lockheed D- 21”)
December 12 — 4:30 p.m. Five schoolgirls in Amagasaki, Hyogo Prefecture, Japan, see a brightly glowing UFO. All five students independently sketch a Saturn-shaped object. (UFOEv, p. 124)
December 18 — 2:20 p.m. Night watchman Francesco Rizzi is reporting for work at a mill on Via Santa Valeria in Milan, Italy. In the center of the mill’s courtyard he hears a swishing sound and turns to see a domed metallic disc 12–15 feet in diameter with portholes hovering 3 feet above the ground. A door opens at the bottom and a small man just over 3 feet tall and wearing a luminous overall emerges. The man motions Rizzi to come nearer, but he is frozen with fear. Another small man comes out of the disc, but they both return, the door closes behind them, and the object takes off in a cloud of white smoke. Rizzi reports the sighting to a colleague, the police, and the press, and soon loses his job. (1Pinotti 130–131)
December 21 — Ali R. Diaz is aboard a DC-3 tourist plane on a vacation trip to Angel Falls, Venezuela. He obtains color film of a UFO rising from the base of a mountain. The film shows a yellowish teardrop-shaped object rising across the face of Auyán-tepui plateau. The UFO seems to oscillate from side to side until it is lost in clouds. The falls and mountain provide location points throughout. (“Angel Falls UFO Film 1962,” UFO History Group You Tube channel, August 30, 2014; UFOEv, p. 96)
December 22 — About 3:00 a.m. At Ezeiza International Airport [now Ministro Pistarini International Airport] at Ezeiza Partido in Greater Buenos Aires, Argentina, tower operators Horacio Alora and Mario Pezzutto are watching an Aereolíneas Argentinas plane that is about to take off. It is also seen by an approaching DC-8 jet operated by Panagra, whose captain asks what the object is at the end of the runway. Alora sees a large, round, glowing object that has evidently descended when he is watching the airliner. The UFO immediately rises about 30 feet, hovers, then accelerates on a northeast course. (UFOEv, p. 119; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: July–December 1962, The Author, 2005, pp. 75–76)
1963
1963 — Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev examines the radio source CTA-102, the first Soviet effort in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). He comes up with the idea that some galactic civilizations could be perhaps millions or billions of years ahead of us, and creates the Kardashev scale to rank such civilizations.
Kardashev defines three levels of civilizations, based on energy consumption: Type I (planetary civilization) with “technological level close to the level presently attained on earth”; Type II (stellar civilization), “a civilization capable of harnessing the energy radiated by its own star”; and Type III (galactic civilization), “a civilization in possession of energy on the scale of its own galaxy.” Various extensions of the Kardashev scale have since been proposed, including the use of metrics rather than pure power. The idea that the CTA-102 emission is caused by a civilization is later rejected when it is identified as one of the many varieties of quasar (quasi-stellar radio source), a term coined by Hong-Yee Chiu in May 1964 to describe these objects. (Wikipedia, “Kardashev scale”; Wikipedia, “CTA-102”; Nikolai Kardashev, “Transmission of Information by Extraterrestrial Civilizations,” Soviet Astronomy 8 (1964): 217; Frank Edwards, FS Serious Business, Bantam ed., 1966, pp. 84–85)
1963 — Astronomer Donald H. Menzel and science writer Lyle G. Boyd publish The World of Flying Saucers, a skeptical overview of UFO sightings and a contemptuous treatment of UFO groups. (Donald H. Menzel and Lyle G. Boyd, The World of Flying Saucers, Doubleday, 1963)
January — The A-12 fleet at Groom Lake, Nevada, is now operating with J58 engines built by Pratt and Whitney, allowing for speeds up to Mach 3. ()
January — Night. Brothers Rosauro Antonio, Ricardo, and Victor Domingo López discover a burned area of grass in a field just over a mile from their house in Cañada de Alzogaray, near Burruyacú, Tucumán, Argentina. The burn is in the shape of two rings (each a foot wide and 10.8 feet in diameter) where the grass is burned down to its roots to a depth of 3–4 inches. They find a carbonized residue and whitish powder. Some days previously, a neighbor named Juan Gerónimo Pera, his wife, and children, had seen a luminous oval-shaped object that landed in the field. (Oscar A. Uriondo, “Preliminary Catalogue of Type 1 Cases in Argentina,” Flying Saucer Review Case Histories, no. 12 (December 1972): 11)
January 11 — At 11:00 p.m., at San Pietro Vernotico, Italy, farmer Antonio de Luca is awakened by restless animals and goes out to calm them. Fifteen minutes later he sees a domed disc some 132 feet long land in the village square. Dark figures are moving inside the transparent dome. He tries to approach but is paralyzed at 30 feet away. It ascends in the direction of Brindisi to the north, emitting a vertical beam of green light. (Vallée, Magonia, p. 290;
Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: January–June 1963, The Author, 2005,
p. 8)
January 17 — A formation of objects passes over Entre Ríos province, Argentina, and discharges angel hair. Vitreous particles are recovered, which consist of an “amalgam of silicon, boron, calcium, and magnesium.” (Gordon Creighton, “Argentina, 1963–64,” Flying Saucer Review 11, no. 6 (Nov./Dec. 1965): 15; Brian Boldman, “Angel
Hair Physical Analyses: A Review,” JUFOS 9 (2006): 104)
February 11 — The CIA establishes a Domestic Operations Division for its clandestine services, conducted within the US against “foreign targets.” ()
February 15 — 7:10 a.m. Farmer Charles Brew and his son Trevor are in a shed, milking a herd of cows near Moe, Victoria, Australia. Charles sees an object descend very steeply out of the east from a low cloud, at about a 45° angle. The UFO is about 25 feet in diameter, and about 9–10 feet high. The lower portion, about 3 feet high, is rotating in an anticlockwise direction and is bluish. The upper portion appears to be stationary, battleship-gray in color, with a transparent dome on top. Protruding out of the dome is something resembling a broom handle. A sound, described as swishing or burbling, is heard by both Charles and Trevor. (NICAP, “Rotating Object and Animal Reaction”; Bill Chalker, “Tully Saucer Nests of 1966, Part Two,” IUR 23, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 15–16; Sparks, p. 293; Swords 388–390)
February 23 — 9:45 p.m. An oval object is seen in the sky above Highcliffe, Dorset, England. Emerald-green in color and surrounded by a glow, it hangs in the sky for 10 minutes before witnesses see two smaller objects emerge from it. These fly away and disappear over the English Channel. (Herbert S. Taylor, “Satellite Objects and Cloud Cigars,” IUR 29, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 10)
March — Austrian ufologist Luis Schoenherr offers a paranormal explanation for UFOs, saying that they either emanate from an unobservable fourth dimension or are time machines. (Luis Schoenherr, “UFOs and the Fourth Dimension,” Flying Saucer Review 9, no. 2 (March/April 1963): 10–12; Luis Schoenherr, “UFOs and the Fourth Dimension, Part 2,” Flying Saucer Review 10, no. 1 (Jan./Feb. 1964): 16–20, 23)
March 3 — The Hills are invited by their Unitarian church to discuss their UFO experience. They speak about it for the first time publicly. (Clark III 584)
April — An article by J. Allen Hynek appears in the Yale Scientific Magazine. (J. Allen Hynek, “Flying Saucers I Have Known,” Yale Scientific Magazine 37 (April 1963): 6–9; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: January–June 1963, The Author, 2005, pp. 42–62)
April 30 — Adamski arrives in Copenhagen for another scheduled lecture tour of Europe at the invitation of Hans C. Petersen, He attends the Skandinavisk UFO Information Congress in Frederica, Denmark. (“Final Years,” The Adamski Case, June 11, 2009)
May 15 — Sandia National Laboratories conducts the first of four top-secret, dry-surface plutonium-dispersal tests at the Tonopah Test Range in Nevada, as part of Operation Roller Coaster. The other tests are on May 25, May 31, and June 9. The intent is to investigate exposure of animals (dogs, sheep, and burros) to plutonium dispersal in a non- nuclear scenario. (Wikipedia, “Operation Roller Coaster”; Lt. Col. J. L. Dick, et al., “Operation Roller Coaster: Interim Summary Report (II),” Department of Defense, September 1963)
May 24 — An A-12 piloted by Kenneth S. Collins crashes near Wendover, Utah. The CIA thinks it might have been due to pilot error and contracts with a well-known Boston, Massachusetts, psychiatrist with a specialty in hypnosis (unnamed, but possibly Benjamin Simon, of Betty and Barney Hill fame later). After a lengthy investigation it is determined that a tiny, pencil-sized part called a pilot tube, a device that controls the airspeed indicator, froze when the A-12 entered a cloud, causing the aircraft to stall. (Wikipedia, “Lockheed A-12”; Jacobsen, Area 51, pp. 190–197)
May 31 — Adamski allegedly has a private audience with Pope John XXIII in Rome, Italy. The pontiff is seriously ill and dies three days later. Adamski claims that he has received a “Golden Medal of Honor” from the pope, but skeptics note that the medal is actually a common tourist souvenir made by a company in Milan, and that Adamski displays it to his friends in a cheap plastic box—which is how it is sold in tourist shops in Rome. Adamski says his meeting is at the request of the extraterrestrials he is in contact with in order to ask for a “final agreement” from the pope because of his decision not to communicate directly with them anymore and to offer John XXIII a liquid substance in order to save him from the gastric enteritis that he suffers from. (Lou Zinsstag and Timothy Good, George Adamski: The Untold Story, Ceti, 1983; Colin Bennett, Looking for Orthon, Paraview, 2001;
“Vatican Visit,” The Adamski Case, October 7, 2019; Marc Hallet, A Critical Appraisal of George Adamski: The Man Who Spoke to the Space Brothers, The Author, 2016)
Summer — Allen H. Greenfield and Rick Hilberg start publishing Saucer Album in Cleveland, Ohio. It becomes UFO Magazine in mid-1964 and continues through the summer of 1970. After a few years’ hiatus, it returns as UFO Magazine News Bulletin in early 1974 and continues at least until February 1979. (Saucer Album 1, no. 1 (Summer 1963))
June 15 — 8:39 p.m. In the Indian Ocean southwest of India, 3rd Mate R. C. Chamberlin of the SS Thetis sees in the northwest a luminous disc travel at 1.5 times the angular speed of a satellite. (Sparks, p. 294)
June 26 — Around 1:00 a.m. Enrico A. Gilberti Jr. and his wife Janet are awakened at their home on 344 Commercial Street, Weymouth, Massachusetts, by a loud roar. They look out the window and see a Saturn-shaped object moving slowly above the treetops 100 feet off the ground and 300 feet away. Gilberti describes it as “two hamburger buns one on top of another with a sandwiched piece of meat protruding around.” It is about 30–40 feet across and has two brilliant lights. The UFO follows some power lines across a field and disappears to the northeast. “The roar was deafening.” Neighbors hear the noise but do not see anything. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: January–June 1963, The Author, 2005, pp. 84–85)
June 26 — Four glowing greenish objects with halos are seen by a technician and many others at Pinecrest, California. Three objects moving westerly are approached by a similar object from the west. The fourth object stops and hovers as the three approach, split formation, and continue west. Then the fourth object continues east. (UFOEv, p. 140)
June 28 — 9:30 p.m. A man is driving along the Lyndoch-Gawler Road near Sandy Creek, South Australia, when he comes across a blood-red, glowing object, 25 feet across and 12 feet high, in the road ahead. He is within 12 feet of it when he hits the brakes. The object turns a lighter reddish-yellow and rises up into the air several hundred feet. It turns on its side and speeds away. This and other UFO incidents cause Sen. Jim Cavanagh to ask the federal government to make its UFO dossier public, but Minister for Air David Fairbairn refuses, saying that the vast majority of reports are explainable. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: January–June 1963, The Author, 2005, pp. 86–87)
July — The CIA has synthesized many of the findings from its psychological research into what became known as the “KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation” handbook, which cites the MKUltra studies and other secret research programs as the scientific basis for their interrogation methods. Donald Ewen Cameron regularly travels around the US teaching military personnel about his techniques (hooding of prisoners for sensory deprivation, prolonged isolation, humiliation, etc.), and how they can be used in interrogations. Latin American paramilitary groups working for the CIA and US military personnel receive training in these psychological techniques at places such as the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia. (In the 21st century, many of these torture techniques are used at US military and CIA prisons such as Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and Abu Ghraib, Iraq.) In the aftermath of the 1975 congressional hearings, major news media mainly focus on sensational stories related to LSD, mind-control, and brainwashing, and rarely use the word “torture.” This suggests that the CIA researchers are, as one author put it, “a bunch of bumbling sci-fi buffoons” rather than a rational group of men who have run torture laboratories and medical experiments in major US universities; they have arranged for torture, rape, and psychological abuse of adults and young children, driving many of them permanently insane. (Central Intelligence Agency, “KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation,” July 1963; Wikipedia, “Unethical human experimentation in the United States”)
July 2 — Nineteen-year-old NICAP member John P. Speights of Raleigh, North Carolina, writes a letter questioning the Air Force’s treatment of UFOs to Rep. Carl Vinson (D-Ga.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. Vinson forwards it to USAF along with his own request for information on Blue Book. The Air Force treats the request gingerly because of the implication of a congressional hearing and prepares a reply to Vinson on July 18, but there is no evidence that it is sent. USAF Maj. Maston M. Jacks does reply to Speights on August 5. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: July–December 1963, The Author, 2005, pp.
19–20; US Air Force, Foreign Technology Division, “Congressional Correspondence on the U.S. Air Force UFO Program, Congressman Carl Vinson”)
July 16 — Farmer Roy Blanchard of Charlton, Wiltshire, England, discovers a strange crater on the ground overlapping his potato and barley fields. It is about 8 feet wide and 4 inches deep. A hole in the center is 3 feet deep and less than a foot in diameter. All vegetation inside the circle is burned, leaving only bare earth, and there are four slots in the ground around it, each about 4 feet long and a foot wide. A small piece of metal is found. Astronomer Patrick Moore states that a “shrimp-sized meteorite” has caused the crater. But a military investigation shows no
burn or scratch marks or any trace of an explosion. (Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: July–December 1963, The Author, 2005, pp. 12–16; UFOFiles2, p. 116; Nick Redfern, “The Curious Caper of the Charlton Crater, Part 1,” Mysterious Universe, September 28, 2015; Nick Redfern, “The Curious Caper of the Charlton Crater, Part 2,” Mysterious Universe, September 28, 2015; Matthew Richardson, “The Charlton Crater”)
July 20 — An A-1 piloted by Louis Schalk briefly achieves a speed of Mach 3 for the first time. (Jacobsen, Area 51, p.
201)
August 1 — Evening. A former RAF pilot and flight instructor sees a triangular UFO that lingers for a long time over Garston, Hertfordshire, England, then climbs out of sight. Thousands of other people in the London area, including an air traffic controller four miles away and future UFO researcher Timothy Good in Bcckenham, London, also see the object, which has a tetrahedral shape and glassy appearance when seen through binoculars. A USAF F-100 Super Sabre from RAF Bentwaters [now Bentwaters Parks] in Woodbridge, Suffolk, and another plane from the De Havilland Aircraft Company are sent up to investigate but cannot get anywhere near the UFO, which is at an estimated 90,000 feet. An amateur astronomer in Bushey, Hertfordshire, takes a clear photo. The official explanation is a balloon. (UFOEv, p. 141; Good Above, p. 149)
August 4 — 11:30 p.m. Ronnie Austin and Phyllis Bruce are driving east on State Highway 15 past the Mount Vernon, Illinois, airport when they notice a bright white round object about 20° above the southwest horizon. It seems to be keeping pace with them for several miles. Suddenly it moves about 600 feet in front of them and to the left. When Austin drops Phyllis off at home in Wayne City, it is hanging in the southeast. They continue watching it about 15 minutes, then Austin leaves for home. As he turns east on a gravel road, it shoots ahead of him, taking on an orange hue. At one point it comes within 100 feet of his car, swerves upward, and passes above him as the car radio makes a whining noise and the car engine almost fails. The object then moves behind him from west to east. When he arrives home, it is hovering about 900 feet to the southeast. Ronnie is so shaken, he is given a sedative. His parents, Mr. and Mrs. Orville Austin, and brother and sister also see the light, which finally becomes indistinguishable with a star by 1:10 a.m. (NICAP, “The Wayne City Car Chase (EM RA Traces)”; Jeffrey Liss, “The Light That Followed a Car,” Fate 16, no. 11 (November 1963): 26–35; Schopick, pp. 81–88)
August 5 — The Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty is signed by the USSR, UK, and US governments in Moscow, Russia, before being opened for signature by other countries. The treaty formally goes into effect on October 10. The treaty prohibits all above-ground tests of nuclear weapons. (Wikipedia, “Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty”)
August 7 — The first flight of the USAF version of the A-12, the Lockheed YF-12 interceptor, takes place at Edwards AFB in California. (Wikipedia, “Lockheed YF-12”)
August 10 — 9:32 p.m. Several airmen of the 91st Bombardment Wing at Glasgow Air Force Base [now closed] near Glasgow, Montana, are walking in the parking lot when a bright light appears above them, bathing everyone in an orange glow. It is coming from a disc-shaped object with a dome that has some odd characters carved in it. The object moves up, then to the right, then down and left. It makes a square, then an X within the square, stopping at all points before moving again. The underside of the object is a large panel of blue light. They watch it for 3 minutes then it disappears. (“Out of the Past,” CUFOS Associate Newsletter 6, no. 2 (April/May 1985): 3)
August 20 — 9:30 p.m. Italian President Antonio Segni’s personal driver encounters a UFO near the entrance of the Castel Porziano Presidential Estate in Rome, Italy. When he sees a metallic domed disc with portholes moving in front of him in the driveway ahead, the driver stops the Fiat 2300 immediately. The UFO, about 65 feet diameter, passes a few feet above the car, making a hissing noise and causing the body to vibrate and the instruments to go crazy, then reverses course and passes over the car again with the same effect. It then tilts 90° and darts away to the west. It leaves behind a smell of heated metal. (1Pinotti 148–151; “Quando gli UFO arrivarona anche in Italia,” Oggi Notizie, November 26, 2011)
August 22 — Test pilot Joseph A. Walker reaches an altitude of 353,200 feet (66.9 miles) in an X-15 rocket plane. (Wikipedia, “Joseph A. Walker”)
August 28 — After the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, J. Edgar Hoover singles out Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as a major target for COINTELPRO. Soon after, the FBI is systematically bugging King’s home and his hotel rooms, as they are now aware that King is growing in stature daily as the leader among leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. (Wikipedia, “COINTELPRO”)
August 28 — 7:00 p.m. José Marcos Gomes Vidal, 7, and his friends Fernando, 12, and Ronaldo Gualberto, 7, are in the Gualbertos’s backyard in Sagrada Familia, Belo Horizonte, Brazil, to wash a coffee strainer in a cistern.
Suddenly, Fernando notices a glow coming from the top of an avocado tree. When he looks up, he sees a UFO hovering above the tree’s branches. The craft, which is spherical and has a pair of antennas on top, is completely transparent. It holds four human-like passengers sitting inside, one of whom sits in front of a machine that appears
to be a control panel. The passengers are about 6 feet tall and dressed in spacesuits. They all have only one eye like a cyclops. Three of them are thin and bald, while the other looks like an overweight woman with blonde hair. The UFO shoots out two rays of yellow light. One of the cyclops appears between the lights, slowly floating down onto the ground. Once his boots touched the earth, the creature begins to walk toward José, who is completely unaware of what is happening since he is still collecting water. Fernando panics and tackles José, who falls to the ground, and Fernando gets back up and faces the cyclops. Now all three boys are aware of the visitor. The
cyclops moves his head and makes hand signals. It speaks a few sounds in a strange language. The creature then turns around and stares back at the UFO. Fernando, spotting a brick on the ground, picks it up and aims it at the cyclops, who turns around and shoots Fernando’s hand with a yellow light from a triangular crest on his chest. Fernando drops the brick, and all three of the boys become calm and frozen. For a few more minutes, the cyclops speaks to them, then it points one of his fingers at the moon and begins to walk back toward the UFO. José asks if he will ever come back. The cyclops shakes his head affirmatively, plucks a plant from the ground, and then waves his hand at the UFO, which shoots out two rays of yellow light again. The cyclops slowly floats back up into the vehicle, and the UFO takes off eastward and disappears out of their sight. (Brazil 66–72; Tristan, “The Alien Cyclops of Sagrada Familia,” Bizarre and Grotesque, March 24, 2016)
September — Lt. Col. Robert J. Friend leaves Project Blue Book and is replaced by Maj. Hector Quintanilla. (Hynek UFO Report, pp. 25–27; Sparks, p. 14)
September 7 — Capt. Swett gives a formal lecture on hypnosis to a meeting at the Unitarian Church in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. After the lecture, the Hills tell him that Barney was going to a psychiatrist, Duncan Stephens, whom he likes and trusts. Swett suggests that Barney ask Stephens about the use of hypnosis in his case. At his next therapy session, Barney mentions his UFO encounter to Stephens, who recommends Dr. Benjamin Simon, a well- known psychiatrist in Boston, Massachusetts, with much experience in hypnosis. ()
September 12 — Patrick Loreno and 18 other men aboard Texas Tower 2, a USAF radar station 110 miles east of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, spot an object 3 miles from their location. They report the sighting to the Coast Guard and request an investigation, but the object sinks before a boat can get there. The object has a controlled light and smoke or steam appears on its surface. The mn watch it for 20 minutes. There is no record of a ship or a submarine in the area. (Lorenzen, UFOs over the Americas, Signet, 1968, p. 53)
September 14 — 3:15 p.m. US Forest Service instructor Edward A. Grant and his son see a round object over Susanville, California, that at first seems to be a balloon, but is moving erratically. The movements are very fast and the direction changes very definite. They watch it pass overhead for several minutes. Suddenly, a long cylindrical object with fins along its sides appears from the north and passes overhead toward the south. The round object moves very rapidly to intercept the long object, ejecting a yellowish-brown trail, and merges with it. (Herbert S. Taylor, “Satellite Objects: A Further Look,” IUR 29, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 4; Sparks, p. 295)
September 19 — Adm. Roscoe Hillenkoetter writes to astronomer Donald H. Menzel, saying that his book The World of Flying Saucers has “effectively put to rest all surmises about flying saucers being from ‘outer space.’” (Christopher D. Allan, “Admiral Hillenkoetter: From Believer to Skeptic,” IUR 20, no. 2 (Mar./Apr. 1995): 17)
September 19 — 6:50 p.m. More than 140 residents of Wonthaggi and South Dudley, Victoria, Australia, observe a mystery object like an orange beach ball maneuver in the sky for 25 minutes. At first it hovers, then it begins moving slowly and silently, putting on sudden and intermittent bursts of speed, before disappearing in an easterly direction into the Bass Strait. During the 25 minutes that the object is visible, TV sets malfunction in South Dudley, Wonthaggi, and lnverlock. TV sets variously display white screens, gray screens, double images, or snow and lines. Still other sets go completely blank. After the UFO leaves at 7:15, all TV sets resume normal operation. (“UAO’s Upset TV Reception,” APRO Bulletin, May 1964, pp. 1, 6; Schopick, pp. 109–111)
September 19 — 8:00 p.m. Four children in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, see a bright, oval object hover in a field and drop something. Approaching the site, they are confronted by a man about 10 feet tall dressed in a white “monk-like” suit who holds out his hands and makes unintelligible sounds. The children flee, and one girl is admitted to the hospital in shock. (Vallée, Magonia, p. 294; Mark Cashman, “Behavioral Classification System for UFO Occupants,” IUR 24, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 18)
September 27 — Blue Book releases a statement on the Hill case, claiming insufficient information, although they strongly suspect the UFO is the planet Jupiter. (Clark III 581)
October — Maj. Hector Quintanilla is appointed director of Project Blue Book. He is assisted by Sgt. David Moody, who is particularly hostile to UFOs and tends to label every report as “possible” this or that. (Sparks, p. 14; Clark III 922–923)
October — A Lisunov Li-2 airliner on the Guangdong to Wuhan, China, air route is chased by three luminous UFOs for 115 minutes. The pilots provide a minute-by-minute report by radio to the Chinese Civil Aeronautics Administration. After landing, the crew is debriefed by air traffic control, and the passengers are told not to discuss the incident with anyone. (Wendelle Stevens and Paul Dong, UFOs over Modern China, UFO Photo Archives, 1983, pp. 44–45)
October — 9:30 p.m. Five members of a family in Millersport, Ohio, see what seems to be an airplane on fire, but the house-sized object approaches and hovers about 300 feet away. They see a dark disc with a dome and antenna on top and three ball-shaped protrusions on the bottom. Around the rim are evenly spaced openings that emit fiery beams. In the dome, several large windows are visible in which a figure can be seen, at least by the mother. The dome rotates as the object hovers, and it makes a low humming noise. It finally rises slowly and makes a small circle in the air before speeding away. (Michael Swords, “Close Encounters of the First Kind: Do We Really Care? Part Two,” The Big Study, February 15, 2012)
October 4 — 1:00 p.m. Connecticut State Representative Luther B. Martin sees a delta-shaped, silvery object leaving a flare-like trail at Hartland, Connecticut. A row of black markings is visible along the blunt forward edge as the object passes from south to north. He estimates its speed at 2,000 mph. (“UFO Sightings Centered in Western U.S.,” UFO Investigator 2, no. 10 (Dec. 1963/Jan. 1964): 3)
October 12 — 3:30 a.m. Driving in a blinding rainstorm on the road between Monte Maíz and Isla Verde, Córdoba, Argentina, Eugenio Douglas feels heat and a prickly sensation all over his body. He sees a brilliant light in front of him. Temporarily blinded, he loses control of his truck and ends up in the ditch. Shaken but not injured, he gets out of the vehicle and looks up at the road, which he finds is blocked by an oval-shaped object at least 30 feet high. A door opens on the side and three huge “robots in human form” emerge. They wear helmets with short antennas and are 12–15 feet tall. Douglas takes a few shots at them with his revolver and runs away. The robots return to the UFO, which chases him down the road and eventually flies away. The next day, police find large footprints near the abandoned truck. (Gordon Creighton, “Argentina, 1963–64,” Flying Saucer Review 11, no. 6 (Nov./Dec. 1965): 16–17; Clark III 280; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: July–December 1963, The Author, 2005, pp. 64–65; Roberto Banchs, “Monte Maíz, Cordoba: La Vision Fantasmagorica de E. Douglas (11 Oct 1963),” Visión OVNI, November 10, 2008)
October 21 — 9:30 p.m. Yolié del Valle Moreno and her family at Trancas, Tucumán, Argentina, observe six strange objects for 40 minutes in the back courtyard of their house. One UFO hovers at ground level above some railroad tracks, while another with a dome and portholes is near another house. They can see some 40 humanlike figures (silhouettes) moving around within two bright lights linked by a prolongation or tube. When witnesses flash a light at the object, the house is flooded with a strong beam. The temperature rises inside the house and the inhabitants smell a strong sulfurous odor. All six objects are about 24 feet in diameter, have a white and a red beam of light, and leave a cloud of white smoke that does not disperse for 4 hours. Beneath the space where one of the objects has been rocking back and forth, the witnesses find innumerable white balls one-quarter-inch in diameter piled into a cone 3 feet high and within a circle 28–30 feet in diameter. They consist primarily of calcium carbonate. (Gordon Creighton, “Argentina 1963–64, Part II,” Flying Saucer Review 12, no. 1 (Jan./Feb. 1966): 23–24; Oscar A. Galindez, “Trancas, after Seven Years,” Flying Saucer Review 17, no. 3 (May/June 1971): 14–20, 32; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: July–December 1963, The Author, 2005, pp. 66–74; Carlos Iurchuk, “Los Asombrosos Fenomenos de Trancas por el Dr. Oscar Galindez,” Visión OVNI, January 1, 2009)
October 23 — 11:00 p.m. Driving south of South River, New Jersey, on State Route 18, a man glimpses something like a flashlight off to his left, and three figures, 3–4 feet tall, cross the road in front of him. They are dressed in “tight- fitting silver-gray one-piece suits” that “seem to glow once they hit the headlights.” Their heads are found, but the witness can see no other features. They begin quickly “fluttering” across the road, faster than the “fastest sprinter.” (Center for UFO Studies, [case documents]; Clark III 278)
October 31 — Eight-year-old Rute de Souza hears a strange roar and watches a silvery object coming towards her house near Iguape, São Paulo, Brazil. It soars above her, hits a palm tree, gyrates a bit in the air, then falls into the Rio Peropava near the opposite shore. She runs to get her mother and uncle, who also hear the sound. They see the river boiling up in the spot, followed by an eruption of muddy water and mud. Fishermen, including Tetsuo Ioshigawa, also view the event. The UFO is estimated to be 25 feet in diameter. Divers, both equipped and unequipped, fail to find any wreckage in the river, which is only 12 feet deep. (“Disc Submerged in Brazilian River,” APRO Bulletin, January 1964, pp. 1–2; Harry E. Rieseberg, “A Submerged UFO?” Exploring the Unknown 6, no. 2 (December 1965): 64–67; Brazil 517)
November — 5:00 p.m. A man and his daughter are driving just north of Andover, New Jersey, when they see three strange lights in the sky. They are perfect ovals possibly a quarter mile high. The lights take off at a great speed in “perfect unison” toward the north. (Center for UFO Studies, [case documents])
November 1 — A member of the CIA-trained 35th Black Cat Squadron, Republic of China pilot Yeh Changti is flying an American U-2 reconnaissance aircraft to spy on China’s nuclear program when he is shot down by an SA-2 missile over Shangrao, Jiangxi, and held in mainland China until 1982. Yeh is incarcerated for four years and undergoes numerous interrogations. Although some claim he was tortured, Yeh later says he was treated humanely. After the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution, he is released and sent to work on a farm, before being transferred to work at Hanyang Arsenal in Wuhan. (Wikipedia, “Yeh Changti”; Jacobsen, Area 51, pp. 216–218)
November 3 — The Hills give a presentation at the Two State UFO Study Group in Quincy Center, Massachusetts. One of the attendees tape-records the session. Another speaker at the session is Capt. Ben Swett of Pease AFB, himself a practicing hypnotist, who tells them he thinks hypnotic regression is a good idea. (Clark III 584)
November 12 — The crew of the Argentine Naval auxiliary transport, ARA Punta Médanos, sees a large UFO off its stern [in the Atlantic Ocean?]. It is moving at high speed; when it appears, the needles of the ship’s magnetic compass suddenly and simultaneously swing off course, pointing towards the UFO, which is about 6,000 feet away. The compasses return to normal after the object leaves. (“Argentine Navy Discloses Important E-M Case,” UFO Investigator 3, no. 4 (Aug./Sept. 1965): 6; Schopick, pp. 3–4)
November 16 — Evening. Four teenagers—John Flaxton, Mervyn Hutchinson, Jenny Holloway, and another youth—are in Sandling Park near Saltwood, Kent, England, when they see a moving reddish-yellow “star” above the woods. It comes down at an angle of 60°, then vanishes. Moments later, they see a bright, golden light in a field about 240 feet away, floating 10 feet above the ground, and seemingly 15–20 feet across. It seems to move along with the teens for a short while. It disappears behind trees, then a dark figure shambles out of the woods. It is all black, about the size of a human but without a head and has bat wings. The teenagers run away. Other witnesses come forward to report strange lights and giant footprints in the woods. (Charles A. Strickland, “Sightings at Saltwood, near Hythe, Kent,” LUFORO Bulletin 4, no. 5 (Nov./Dec./Jan. 1963–1964): 2–3; “The Saltwood Mystery: Strange Happenings in Kent,” Flying Saucer Review 10, no. 2(Mar./Apr. 1964): 11–12; A. Cecil Harper, “A Saltwood Sighting,” BUFORA Journal and Bulletin 1, no. 1 (Summer 1964): 12; Nick Redfern, “An Update on a Sinister Winged Monster,” Mysterious Universe, June 14, 2018; Theo Paijmans, “The Headless Horrors of Sandling Road,” Fortean Times 374 (Christmas 2018): 30–31; Clark III 779)
November 17 — Jacques Vallée meets J. Allen Hynek for the first time at his residence in Evanston, Illinois. He begins actively assisting Hynek in his UFO work and helping him analyze Project Blue Book data. (Clark III 1213)
November 20 — 6:00 p.m. Capt. J. Murray and three members of the crew of the Aberdeen collier Thrift see a flashing red light as they are traveling south in the North Sea from Aberdeen to Blyth, Northumberland, England. It passes within a mile of their port side, 15–30 feet above sea level and suddenly disappears 3 miles astern, presumably into the water. The collier, which puts about and makes for the object’s vanishing point, has 2 radar contacts on its screens, but they disappear as the ship approaches. They search for 3 hours but find no wreckage. (“Mystery at Sea,” Flying Saucer Review 10, no. 2 (Mar./Apr. 1964): 22)
November 22 — President John F. Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas, Texas, by Lee Harvey Oswald. (Wikipedia, “Assassination of John F. Kennedy”; Wikipedia, “John F. Kennedy assassination conspiracies”)
Winter — A series of at least three incidents at Walker AFB [now closed] at Roswell, New Mexico, involve unidentified aerial craft maneuvering silently above an Atlas missile silo designated Site 9, northeast of Sunset, New Mexico. Three former missile personnel at the base—Jerry C. Nelson, Bob Caplan, and Gene Lamb—relay their experiences to Florida Today reporter Billy Cox in June 2001. (Nukes 147–152)
December 10 — 11:30 p.m. A large, bright, dome-shaped UFO lands at RAF Cosford in Shropshire, England, seen by two student cadets returning late from leave. It bathes the area in intense green light from a height of 10 feet, then disappears behind a hangar. Scorch marks are later found where the object had been. (“A Landing at Cosford?
More Confusion at the Air Ministry,” Flying Saucer Review 10, no. 2 (Mar./Apr. 1964): 17, iv; “The Cosford UFO: The Mystery Deepens,” Flying Saucer Review 10, no. 3 (May/June 1964): 31–32; “The Lesson of Cosford,” Flying Saucer Review 10. No. 4 (July/Aug. 1964): 1–2; Loren E. Gross, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse: UFOs, a History: July–December 1963, The Author, 2005, pp. 85–86; Good Above, pp. 56–58; Nick Redfern, “UFO Landing or Much Ado about Nothing?” Mysterious Universe, October 20, 2016)
December 14 — The Hills have an initial meeting with Benjamin Simon, a well-known hypnotist in Boston, Massachusetts, recommended to them by Dr. Stephens. It is clear to Simon that the Hills believe they have seen a UFO, but which may have been an experimental aircraft. This has set in motion an anxiety-provoking psychological experience whose sources it might be possible to uncover through hypnosis. (Clark III 584)
December 27 — At Bank’s Stables in Epping, Essex, England, trainee riding instructor Pauline Abbott sees a shiny white UFO on the ground. It is about 8 feet long, 3 feet high at the center, and has what looks like a window on one side that is brighter than the rest of the object. It takes off, flies horizontally for 100 feet, and disappears. Grass is found flattened over a circular area. Marks “like three large fingerprints pushed together into mud” are found, forming a square with 8-foot sides within an 11-foot circular depression that contains a 3-foot central circle. (G.
G. Doel, “The Epping Sightings,” BUFORA Journal and Bulletin 1, no. 1 (Summer 1964): 5–6; J. Cleary-Baker, “Evaluation by BUFORA Evaluating Officer,” BUFORA Journal and Bulletin 1, no. 1 (Summer 1964): 6–7)
1964
1964 — MKSEARCH is the name given to the continuation of the MKUltra program. The MKSEARCH program is divided into two projects dubbed MKOFTEN / CHICKWIT. Funding for MKSEARCH commences in 1965 and ends in 1971. The project is a joint project between the US Army Chemical Corps and the CIA Office of Research and Development to find new offensive-use agents with a focus on incapacitating agents. The purpose of the project is to develop, test, and evaluate capabilities in the covert use of biological, chemical, and radioactive material systems and techniques for producing predictable human behavioral and/or physiological changes in support of highly sensitive operational requirements. (Wikipedia, “Project MKUltra”)
1964 — Ray Stanford founds Project Starlight International to document the existence of UFOs. He establishes a Laboratory for Instrumented Research on a 400-acre site northwest of Austin, Texas, that includes two buildings. Equipment eventually includes radar, a laser system, magnetometers, a gravimeter, microcomputer, microphones, video equipment, and still cameras. In the event of UFO activity, the Operation ARGUS (Automated Ring-up on Geolocated UFO Sightings) computer kicks in and automatically telephones all volunteers within the computed visibility radius of the UFO. Volunteers attempt to locate and photograph the UFO visually. On June 8, 1977, the FCC licenses its Raytheon Model 1700 radar system with the call sign K12XBJ. (Margaret Sachs, The UFO Encyclopedia, Putnam, 1980, pp. 259–260; Ray Stanford, “A Technological Approach to UFOs: A Status Report on Project Starlight International, June 30, 1977,” IUR 2, no. 8 (August 1977): 5–7)
1964 — British writer W. Raymond Drake writes Gods or Spacemen?, the first of a series of books espousing his view that the world’s folklore, mythology, and religion are replete with references to space beings who came to Earth in several waves: the Uranids hundreds of thousands of years ago; the Saturnians centuries later; and the Jupiterians who landed near Crete. (W. Raymond Drake, Gods or Spacemen? Amherst, 1964; Wikipedia, “W. Raymond Drake”; Clark III 108; Jerome Clark, “Vimanas Have Landed: Ancient Astronautics in Ufology,” IUR 22, no. 3 (Fall 1997): 27–28)
January — Lionel Beer begins publishing Spacelink, a newsletter of the Isle of Wight UFO Investigation Society. It folds in April 1971. (Spacelink 1, no. 1 (Jan./Feb. 1964))
January 1 — Many witnesses in Shanghai, China, see a huge cigar-shaped UFO flying toward the southwest. MiG fighters are scrambled in pursuit but fail to intercept it. The official explanation is that it is a US missile. (Wendelle Stevens and Paul Dong, UFOs over Modern China, UFO Photo Archives, 1983, p. 45)
January 4 — Barney Hill has his first hypnosis session with Benjamin Simon. The sessions will continue until June 6. The Hills undergo sessions separately, and for the most part are instructed not to remember their experiences afterwards. Barney’s sessions are particularly intense. However, by the end of the sessions, although they disagree with Simon on the nature of the experience, both the Hills and Simon agree that the therapy is successful. The stress and anxiety are gone. Simon submits a statement to the Hills’ insurance company, which initially declines to pay, until Simon explains that he was treating them for what will later be called PTSD. (Clark III 584–585)
January 23 — The landing craft Loellen M. is in the Gulf of Carpentaria between Cape Grey and Groote Eylandt, Northern Territory, Australia, when a crew member notices the compass is malfunctioning (“haywire”) and the vessel is off course, He notices an odd phosphorescence in the water on the starboard side about 6 feet away from the ship. It is a ghostly, pulsating white light that is rotating in a clockwise direction. It seems to be “miles across.” As the light wheel moves to the ship’s port side, another rotating light approaches the ship’s starboard side. This undoubtedly involves some unusual bioluminescence, but it is significant that it is the first “unknown” in the RAAF’s UFO files. (Swords 390)
January 25 — The London UFO Research Organisation merges with the British UFO Association (a consolidation of several UFO groups in the UK) to form the British UFO Research Association. It begins publishing a new magazine, BUFORA Journal, in the summer. (“Editorial: The Problems Facing Us,” BUFORA Journal and Bulletin 1, no. 1 (Summer 1964): 2)
February 3 — 2:00 a.m. Doris Player wakes up to see her bedroom illuminated near Gum Creek, Kangaroo Island, South Australia. Suddenly a 5-foot 3-inch being wearing blue-green coveralls, a brown balaclava, and an open brown jacket appears. He wears elbow-length, black gloves with a cord going from his helmet to his left shoulder. He has a red face and a big nose and holds a black box that buzzes and clicks as he points it. The witness goes back to sleep. (Mark Cashman, “Behavioral Classification System for UFO Occupants,” IUR 24, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 19– 20; Thomas Brisson, “UBO’s (Unidentified Box-like Objects), Part 2,” Vomanomalous, July 15, 2014; “Documentary on UFO’s, Adelaide, Australia, Part 1,” MaS7eRjEd3ye YouTube channel, February 5, 2009, at 6:05)
February 10 — “The Bellero Shield” episode of Outer Limits airs on ABC-TV. It features an alien with wraparound eyes.
UFO skeptic Martin S. Kottmeyer alleges that this episode influenced Barney Hill’s hypnotic recounting of events, although Betty Hill says they had never watched it. (Clark III 589; Internet Movie Database, “The Bellero Shield”; Martin Kottmeyer, “Entirely Unpredisposed: The Cultural Background of UFO Reports,” Magonia 35 (January 1990))
February 29 — President Lyndon B. Johnson holds a press conference to announce that the US has repeatedly broken the Soviet’s world record for air speed by a secret aircraft called the A-11—a fictitious name for the Air Force’s YF- 12, a twin-seat version of the Lockheed A-12 built as an interceptor. He says the A-11 can fly more than 2,000 mph at an altitude of 70,000 feet. The YF-12A is announced in part to continue hiding the A-12, its still-secret ancestor; any sightings of CIA/Air Force A-12s based at Area 51 in Nevada can be attributed to the well- publicized Air Force YF-12As based at Edwards Air Force Base in California. (Jacobsen, Area 51, pp. 232–233)
March — Allen H. Greenfield, Rick Hilberg, and Dale Rettig begin publishing the American UFO Committee Review in preparation for their first Congress of Scientific Ufologists meeting in Cleveland, Ohio. Greenfield publishes the journal in Atlanta, Georgia, for seven issues, until fall 1966. (American UFO Committee Review 1, no. 1 (March 1964))
March 7 — Betty Hill has her first hypnosis session with Benjamin Simon. Betty’s account closely matches her dreams from 2 years earlier, and her account is consistent with Barney’s. Many abduction elements come to light: telepathic commands, semen extraction, a rectal probe, skin scrapings, a pregnancy test with a needle, the Star Map. The aliens are 5 feet tall with gray skin, oddly shaped heads, and broad foreheads. Simon discounts the possibility of an alien abduction and prefers to think that Betty’s dream influenced Barney’s memories. The Hills do not agree. (Wikipedia, “Barney and Betty Hill”)
April 1 — The UK Air Ministry, Admiralty, and War Office are consolidated into a new Ministry of Defence. The Air Ministry becomes the Air Force Department, within which is a secretariat called S4 (Air) that deals with, among other things, UFO reports from the public. Another office, Defense Secretariat 8, is created under the authority of the Secretary of State and also has authority over UFO reporting. (Wikipedia, “Ministry of Defence (United Kingdom)”; Good Above, pp. 58–59)
April 3 — 9:00 p.m. R. Wold, a graduate student in anthropology, and two others see four huge red lights in a rectangular formation, with a white light above, near the ground about one mile west of Monticello, Wisconsin. It tilts and flies away. (Sparks, p. 296)
April 11 — 6:30 p.m. Physiotherapist William B. Ochsner and his wife and two children are having a picnic on a hill about 10 miles northwest of Homer, New York. They see an unusually wide vapor trail in the sky stretching from northeast to southwest. At the far end of the white trail is a smoky, spiral portion about one mile long. The vapor trail drifts off. After 10 minutes, Ochsner notices that the spiral portion is still visible, having moved a bit to the west. With binoculars, he sees wisps of smoke streaming out of it. It changes from a horizontal to a vertical position with greater smoke activity. It stops and hangs there for 2–3 minutes before sinking into the clouds. After another 3 minutes, they see a horizontal pencil-shaped object moving from left to right on the horizon. A flash of white light erupts from its end and shoots forward a short distance then stops. It becomes thick in the middle, a cloud of smoke emanates from it, and it shoots backward rapidly. Again it hovers and changes to a saucer shape. It then divides into two parts, one above the other. The top object slowly recedes into the distance, while the bottom objects heads downward at a 45° angle, divides in two again, with the top part fading away and the bottom part assuming a vertical pencil shape, which fades away. The whole display takes 45 minutes. (J. Allen Hynek, The UFO Experience, Ballantine ed., 1974, pp. 60–61; Herbert S. Taylor, “Satellite Objects and Cloud Cigars,” IUR 29, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 7–9; Sparks, p. 297)
April 20 — Early morning, During Operation Deep Freeze VII, six members of a US Coast Guard aircraft sight a V-formation of 9 glowing-white objects speeding at an estimated 35,000 feet altitude. They are flying a in a C-130 turbo-prop
transport from McMurdo Station, Antarctica, with supplies. The right-side observer first sees the objects approaching at about 460 mph from above and to their right side. When they come abreast of the airplane, they slow to its speed. After a short time, they fly above the airplane and take up position above and to its left side. The pilot attempts to radio the ground but the radio is dead, and their radar also stops working. When the pilot tries to switch to auxiliary power, it too is not functioning. At one point the airplane’s engines stop (the oil begins to congeal in the cold air). Instead of losing altitude, it maintains “a steady altitude and course.” The airplane allegedly continues flying in complete silence, then it enters a “strange haze” (like a white-out) with the air filled with static electricity. There is electrical arcing from one observer’s body to metal inside the fuselage. The haze vanishes after about 20 minutes. The power suddenly returns, and the crew can restart the engines in sequence. The airplane has covered a distance of 305 miles during the 45–50 minutes at indicated airspeed of 184–218 knots. (NICAP, “C-130 Crew Encounters UFO / EME to Radio and Radar”)
April 22 — 9:00 p.m. Marie Morrow, Ruth Ovelette, and Morrow’s son are driving west about 10–15 miles east of Lordsburg, New Mexico, when a brilliantly luminous object sweeps about 10 feet above their car from behind, illuminating the interior and emitting a whirring, whining sound. The UFO then rises but maintains its course along the highway before veering toward the north and vanishes. (“Huge Light Buzzed Car in New Mexico,” APRO Bulletin, May 1964, p. 10; Clark III 1091–1092)
April 24 — 10:00 a.m. Dairy farmer Gary Wilcox of Newark Valley, New York, is driving a tractor on his property when he sees a shiny object on the inside edge of a nearby patch of woods. He gets off the tractor and approaches the object, which is egg-shaped, 20 feet long, 16 feet wide, and four feet high. It is hovering two feet above the ground and making a sound like a car idling. He touches it and feels a hard metal. Two figures suddenly appear from under the object. They are 4 feet tall and 2 feet wide, dressed in seamless silvery garments. Each carries a tray filled with alfalfa, roots, soil, leaves, and brush. Wilcox hears a voice say, “Do not be alarmed. We have talked to people before.” They ask him what he is doing, and Wilcox says he is spreading manure. One humanoid asks if he can have some and converses some more about space exploration. They claim they are from Mars. After a while, the UFO takes off in a horizontal direction. Wilcox notices some small depressions where the figures were standing, as well as a thin, red, jellylike substance. (Olga M. Hotchkiss, “New York UFO and Its ‘Little People,’” Fate 17, no. 9 (September 1964): 38–42; Berthold E. Schwarz, “Gary Wilcox and the Ufonauts,” in Charles Bowen, ed., UFO Percipients, special issue no. 3 of FSR, September 1969, pp. 20–27; Clark III 795–799; Marcus Lowth, “The Gary Wilcox Occupant Encounter: The Fertilizer Case,” UFO Insight, December 27, 2018; Story, pp. 246–249)
April 24 — Around 5:50 p.m. Socorro, New Mexico, police officer Lonnie Zamora, while chasing a speeder, hears a continuous roaring sound and sees a brilliant blue “cone of flame” in the sky to the south-southwest. The bottom of the flame is out of sight behind a hill. Thinking there has been an explosion, he tries to pursue it, turning off to the right on a rough gravel road, but loses sight of it while trying to get the car up a steep hill. By the time he reaches the top, the sound stops and the flame is no longer visible. He then notices a metallic object in a ravine about 450 feet away. At first, he thinks it is an overturned car, but then he sees “two figures in what resembled white coveralls, pretty close to the object on the northwest side, as if inspecting it.” One seems to turn in a startled way as if he hears Zamora’s car approaching. The figures are small, and the object is oval-shaped and positioned so its long axis is horizontal. Zamora loses sight of object as he drives through a dip in the road. He radios headquarters that he is investigating a possible car accident. He stops a second time and gets out, hearing 2–3 loud thumping noises like a door shutting hard. He walks three steps to the front of the car to possibly 50 feet away from the object when he hears a very load roar increasing in volume and sees a smokeless blue-orange flame coming from beneath. He notes a red insignia or lettering on the side of the object. Zamora thinks it is going to explode and runs away, putting the car between him and the object and dropping to the ground. He feels some slight heat from the flame. The roaring noise stops, and Zamora looks up to see the UFO flying away to the southwest at a level height, just clearing an 8-foot dynamite shack. He runs back to the patrol car and radios headquarters, just as the object climbs slowly and goes past Box Canyon or Six Mile Canyon Mountain (about 6 miles away). The entire incident takes place in less than 2 minutes. Police Sgt. M. S. Chavez arrives, and they find burning brush (including a badly damaged creosote bush) where the UFO has been, as well as four asymmetrically placed, trapezoidal imprints 12–16 inches long, 6–8 inches wide, and 4–6 inches deep. An FBI agent, D. Arthur Byrnes Jr., who has heard about it on the police radio, speaks with Zamora in the evening. He notifies army intelligence at White Sands Missile Range, who sends Capt. Richard T. Holder. Military police arrive and collect samples, working by flashlight. The next morning, Holder gets a call from a colonel at the war room of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, asking for a report. T/Sgt. David Moody from ATIC and Maj. William Conner from Kirtland AFB check the area for radioactivity on April 26. Hynek arrives on April 28 and interviews Zamora and Chavez. Richard H. Hall and Ray Stanford arrive for NICAP and obtain some metal traces on a rock in the landing area; they take the sample to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, where metallurgist Henry E. Frankel
agrees to analyze the material. His tentative analysis suggests a zinc-iron alloy, perhaps from a zinc pail. In 1966, Blue Book chief Maj. Hector Quintanilla writes in a classified article in Studies in Intelligence that “This is the best-documented case on record, and still we have been unable, in spite of a thorough investigation, to find the vehicle or other stimulus that scared Zamora to the point of panic.” Some investigators think the case might involve a test of a Lunar Surveyor module from White Sands. (Wikipedia, “Lonnie Zamora incident”; NICAP, “Lonnie Zamora / Socorro Landing Case”; Sparks, p. 297; “UAO Landing in New Mexico,” APRO Bulletin, May 1964, pp. 1, 3–10; “Physical Evidence: Landing Reports,” UFO Investigator 2, no. 11 (July/Aug. 1964): 4–5; Coral Lorenzen, “UFO Lands in New Mexico,” Fate 17, no. 8 (August 1964): 27–38; Hector Quintanilla Jr., “The Investigation of UFOs,” Studies in Intelligence 10, no. 4 (February 1966): 95–110; Clark III 1083–1093; J. Allen Hynek, The UFO Experience, Ballantine ed., 1974, pp. 165–166; Hynek UFO Report, pp. 223–229; Good Above,
pp. 343–345, 371–373; Story, pp. 341–344; Lorenzen, Encounters with UFO Occupants, Berkley Medallion, 1976, pp. 8–11; Ray Stanford, Socorro ‘Saucer’ in a Pentagon Pantry, Blueapple, 1976; “The Socorro, New Mexico, Landing: Additional Witnesses?” IUR 3, no. 9 (September 1978): 15; ClearIntent, pp. 139–141; Kenneth Eugene Firestone and Ronald L. Firestone, “Socorro, New Mexico: Revisited,” Ground Saucer Watch, 1981; Kim Hansen, “UFO Casebook,” UFOs 1947–1987, Fortean Tomes, 1987, pp. 62–66; Don Berliner, with Marie Galbreath and Antonio Huneeus, UFO Briefing Document: The Best Available Evidence, Dell, 2000, pp. 78–80; David E. Thomas, “A Different Angle on the Socorro UFO of 1964,” New Mexicans for Science and Reason, 2001; Paul Harden, “The 1964 Socorro UFO Incident,” El Defensor Chieftain, August 2, 2008; Kevin D. Randle, “Socorro UFO Landing Analysis,” A Different Perspective, November 22, 2009; Kevin D. Randle, “The Socorro Symbol: Resolved?” A Different Perspective, October 15, 2016; Kevin D. Randle, “No Socorro Solution by Chief of Project Blue Book,” A Different Perspective, November 7, 2017; Kevin D. Randle, “Zamora vs. People,” A Different Perspective, November 9, 2017; Kevin D. Randle, Encounter in the Desert: The Case for Alien Contact at Socorro, New Page, 2017; Justice Fodor, “Ray Stanford and His NASA-Goddard UFO-Metal Cover-Up Claim,” Alien Expanse, February 14, 2019; Center for UFO Studies, [correspondence]; Center for UFO Studies, [case files: Files 1 and 4R, Files 2, Files 3, MiscR, Zamora]; Center for UFO Studies, [Clippings1, Clippings2])
April 25 — Morning. J. D. Hatch is driving on US Hwy 70 between Mescalero and Tularosa, New Mexico, when a bright oval object descends and seemingly lands on the other side of Round Mountain east of Tularosa. (Clark III 1092)
April 25 — Evening. Two motorists driving on US Hwy 84 between Abiquiu and Espanola, New Mexico, see a strange object that is definitely not an airplane fly straight toward their car before shooting away. All they can see is a blue-flamed exhaust. (Clark III 1092)
April 25? — Night. Two Spanish-speaking people 9 miles away from Golden, New Mexico, watch a light come down from the sky and leave three “smelted” circles some 2 feet in diameter and separated from each other by 20 feet. They mention this story to James Scartacinni, 15, and his grandfather visit the site the next day and find the circles, which they estimate must have been subjected to a temperature of 2,300° F. They return to town and call the state police, who notify the military. Almost immediately, men in uniform cordon off the area, dig up the burned areas to a depth of one foot, and carry the material away. (“Hunting Old and New UFOs in New Mexico,” IUR 7, no. 2 (March 1982):12)
April 26 — Around 1:00 a.m. Orlando Gallegos steps outside his father’s ranch at La Madera, New Mexico, to chase away some horses in the yard. He sees a peculiar structure in the Rio Vallecitos creek bed some 900 feet away. It looks like a butane tank “as long as a telephone pole” about 14 feet in diameter, metallic, and shooting blue flames out of holes in the sides. As he watches over the next minute, the flames subside. It is still there when he goes inside, where no one else believes him. It is gone the next morning, but state police (including Capt. Martin E. Vigil, David Kingsbury, and Albert Vega) investigate and find the ground still smoldering and scorched with four depressions, one of them 8 by 12 inches in size. The charred area is in the shape of two overlapping circles and about 20 feet across. Hynek is refused authorization to go visit the site. (“Mystery Object Report Is Told,” Albuquerque Tribune, August 27, 1966, p. 1; Lorenzen, FSHoax, pp. 222–223; Donald E. Keyhoe and Gordon I.
R. Lore Jr., Strange Effects from UFOs, NICAP, 1969, pp. 54–55; “Hunting Old and New UFOs in New Mexico,” IUR 7, no. 2 (March 1982):12–13; Clark III 1092; Sparks, p. 298)
April 28 — Early evening. A round, whitish object hovers then darts away over Anthony, New Mexico. State policeman Raúl Arteche sees it moving west over the Port of Entry near El Paso, Texas. He says it looks like the object Lonnie Zamora saw. (“Other Recent Sightings,” UFO Investigator 2, no. 11 (July/Aug. 1964): 7)
April 28 — Early morning. Don Adams is driving in Edgewood, New Mexico, when his car stalls. He sees a glowing, greenish object 100 feet overhead and fires six rounds from a .32 pistol at it with no effect. He can hear the bullets bouncing off. It silently moves away to the north. (“Other Recent Sightings,” UFO Investigator 2, no. 11 (July/Aug. 1964): 7; “Green Object at Edgewood,” APRO Bulletin, September 1964, p. 3)
April 30 — A B-57 pilot at Holloman AFB, Alamogordo, New Mexico, radios to the control tower that he is watching an egg-shaped, white UFO with markings that match the Socorro object. He continues to watch it as it lands at the base. Coral and Jim Lorenzen insist they heard the story from a reliable source. In addition, a ham radio operator claims to have heard the exchange between the pilot and control tower. Holloman AFB denies the incident occurred. Shortly afterward, an airman walks into a clothing store in Alamogordo and spins an incredible story of a UFO parked in a hangar under heavy guard at Holloman. A couple days later, he returns to the store and denies everything. (Coral Lorenzen, “UAO Landing at Air Force Base,” APRO Bulletin, July 1964, pp. 1, 3–4; Coral Lorenzen, “UFO Lands at Air Force Base,” Fate 17, no. 10 (October 1964): 45–52; Clark III 332)
April 30 — 10:30 p.m. Several children living in Canyon Ferry, Montana, see a lighted, egg-shaped object the size of an automobile land about 150 feet away, then take off. The witnesses are Linda Davis, 11, and children of the Harold Rust family. It leaves four 8 x 10 inch rectangular indentations in the ground, 4–8 inches deep, about 13 feet apart, and a burned area. (“Kids Called Hoaxers by U.S.A.F,” APRO Bulletin, July 1964, pp. 1, 5; Lorenzen, FSHoax, pp. 223–224; Sparks, p. 298)
May — NICAP publishes its special 184-page report, The UFO Evidence, but due to a printing delay, copies are not actually available until late June. Copies are sent to the media and to every member of Congress on July 1. Edited by Richard H. Hall, it consists of a summary of hundreds of unexplained reports studied by NICAP investigators through 1963. Sightings are systematically broken down by witness category and special types of evidence.
Individual chapters are devoted to sightings by military personnel, pilots and aviation experts, and scientists and engineers. Another chapter is devoted to evidence of intelligent control and another to physical evidence or interactions, such as electromagnetic effects, radar tracking, photographs, sound, physiological effects. Another section examines observed patterns, such as descriptions of shape, color, maneuvers, flight behavior, and concentrations of sightings. House Majority Leader John W. McCormack (D-Mass.) requests two copies, one for his Capitol Hill office and another for his state home office. (Richard H. Hall, ed., The UFO Evidence, NICAP, 1964; Wikipedia, “National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena”; Richard Hall, “NICAP and Lessons from the Past,” IUR 17, no. 3 (May/June 1992): 17, 24)
May 5 — 8:30 a.m. Alfred Ernst, a farmer near Comstock, Minnesota, sees a luminous UFO like a child’s top from about 1,500 feet away. It rises straight up and disappears into the overcast sky after a few seconds. Ernst and his brother find a crater-like depression, about 3 feet in diameter and 6 inches deep at the center, at the spot where the object was sitting. A series of smaller holes form an X around the larger depression. The earth seems burned on the perimeter of the hole and a whitish substance is found. (“Physical Evidence: Landing Reports,” UFO Investigator 2, no. 11 (July/Aug. 1964): 5; Donald E. Keyhoe and Gordon I. R. Lore Jr., Strange Effects from UFOs, NICAP, 1969, pp. 56–58)
May 13 — 10:15 p.m. Mrs. M. Walter McKarley and her children see a large round object that appears in their headlights after they pull into a driveway at Rio Vista, California. It seems to be resting on the ground about a quarter of a mile away. Higher in the sky is a small star-like object (probably Venus). As they drive away, the large object seems to pace their car for a short time. It then moves swiftly to the left and disappears behind a water tank. (“Physical Evidence: Landing Reports,” UFO Investigator 2, no. 11 (July/Aug. 1964): 6)
May 15 — Between 11:30 a.m. and 12:15 p.m. Two targets are simultaneously tracked on surveillance and FPS-16 radars at Stallion Site, the most northerly range of the Army-controlled Holloman–White Sands complex a few miles east of San Antonio, New Mexico. The targets are north of the radar site, performing “perfect, precise flight maneuvers” in tandem, involving separations and rejoins and “up-and-down ‘pogo’ maneuvers.” One radar operator obtains a visual sighting of two brown-colored, football-shaped objects that are flying at very low altitude and are lost from view behind buildings at the site. The two targets are displayed as skin paints. However, IFF transponder codes are also received on two different frequencies alternately. (NICAP, “UFO Auto-Tracked, Sends Phony IFF”)
May 19 — 7:00 a.m. Mike Bizon, 10, sees a square or spindle-shaped, bright-silver UFO on the ground in Hubbard, Oregon, while he is leading a cow out to pasture. The cow, normally eager to be let out, acts very reluctant and nervous. The object is resting on four legs in an adjacent wheat field. It rises slowly off the ground to the height of a telephone pole, then zooms straight up emitting a soft beeping sound. Bizon smells an odor like gas fumes.
Three imprints in the shape of an equilateral triangle are found in an area of flattened wheat about 4 feet wide. (Donald E. Keyhoe and Gordon I. R. Lore Jr., Strange Effects from UFOs, NICAP, 1969, pp. 53–54)
May 21 — 4:30 a.m. At Altus AFB, Oklahoma, Missile Site 7, southeast of Ranchland, Texas, a large bright light is seen directly over the facility below 10,000 feet. The light is bright enough to light up the silo cap. Its apparent size is as large as a basketball held at arm’s length. The object is first noticed hovering over the south fence of Site 7 for 8–10 minutes. (NICAP, “Light Hovers over Missile Silo”; Nukes 159–160)
May 24 — James P. Templeton, using a Pentacon camera with Kodacolor X stock, takes a photo of his 5-year-old daughter Elizabeth when his family is picnicking on the marshes at Burgh by Sands, Cumbria, England. When the film is developed, a man, encased in a white spacesuit and helmet, is clearly visible behind Elizabeth’s head.
Templeton and his family claim they had seen no one when the photo was taken. He tells the Carlisle police, who are puzzled. Kodak is intrigued enough to conduct an inquiry. They rule out a double exposure. However, one possibility is that the image is an overexposed view of the back of Templeton’s wife. After the photo receives some local publicity, Templeton gets a call from someone describing himself as an investigator. Templeton agrees to meet with him and an associate and visit the marsh. Two men dressed in dark business suits show up and drive him to the site. They refuse to give Templeton their names, referring to themselves only as “9” and “11.” They are mostly interested in finding out if any nearby animals had been agitated. Then they insist that the figure was just a passerby, get angry, and drive away, leaving Templeton stranded and having to walk home 5 miles away. (Gordon
W. Creighton, “The Mysterious Templeton Photograph,” Flying Saucer Review 10, no. 6 (Nov./Dec. 1964): 11– 12; Jenny Randles, “The Riddle of the Templeton Photograph,” IUR 20, no. 4 (July/Aug. 1995): 12–15; “The Templeton photograph” [in color], Flying Saucer Review 46, no. 2 (Summer 2001): inside cover; Jenny Randles, “Casebook: The Solway Spaceman,” Fortean Times 196 (May 2005): 29; Andy Roberts and David Clarke, “Farewell to the Solway Spaceman?” Fortean Times 286 (April 2012): 28–29; Jenny Randles, “Moderations, Part One: Lost and Found Files,” Fortean Times 292 (September 2012): 29; Clark III 1126–1127; Patrick Gross, “The Solway Firth Photograph, 1964”)
May 26 — 7:43 p.m. Paul Wańkowicz, RAF pilot and ex-Smithsonian satellite tracker, sees a thin, white ellipsoid, estimated at 15–20 feet in length at 1,000 feet altitude, at Cambridge, Massachusetts. It flies straight and level from nearly overhead to the east-northeast, where it disappears behind the roof of a Sears Roebuck store as viewed from his car in the parking lot to the south. He briefly loses sight of it as it passes behind cumulus cloud cover. No noise or trail. The tops of cumulus clouds are at least 3,500 feet altitude, thus the UFO’s speed is at least 700 mph and length 50– 70 feet. (NICAP, [Blue Book documents]; Sparks, p. 299)
May 26 — 10:00 p.m. Mr. and Mrs. Terry Balliet, their family, and two neighbors see two UFOs in the northwest sky near Palmerton, Pennsylvania. One is a large, stationary, dome-like object emitting hazy whitish light from the underside. A smaller disc-like object is intermittently visible maneuvering around the larger one. It finally merges with the large object, which moves away to the east. The large object is seen twice more in the evening, moving back and forth from east to west. (“Other Recent Sightings,” UFO Investigator 2, no. 11 (July/Aug. 1964): 7)
May 26 — 11:00 p.m. Rev. H. C. Shaw sees a yellow-orange light shaped like the bottom of a ball in a field at Pleasant View, Pennsylvania, and chases it down the road for two miles. (Sparks, p. 299)
Summer — 10:00 p.m. A meteorologist at Westford, Massachusetts, sees a bright lightning flash 5 miles to the south. At the same time, his car headlights and the headlights of an approaching car go out, as well as his radio. No thunderclap is heard. He notes that the sky is clear and there are no thunderstorms in the entire Boston area. (“Astronomers and UFO’s: A Survey, Part 2, Sightings,” IUR 2, no. 4 (April 1977): 4)
June — 2:00 a.m. A young couple is driving home from a dance at a small place north of Santa Barbara, California, when a circular, glowing object silently appears above their car. They stop to watch. It is about 100 feet high and 40 feet in diameter and seemingly emits some heat. It hovers for 2 minutes then speeds off ahead of them, lighting up the valley as it goes and apparently traveling about 1,800–2,400 mph. (“Correspondence,” CUFOS Associate Newsletter 3, no. 4 (Aug./Sept. 1982): 3)
June — 6:30 p.m. Bert Gammie, his mother, and his daughter Lynn are driving along the northern shore of Green Lake, British Columbia, when they see a light above a mountain across the lake to the south. Soon they notice it is moving and is now almost directly overhead. He stops the car and gets out for a closer look. The object is circular, dull metallic, and has a series of vents in the tail trailing white, blue, red, and orange exhaust. They watch it for 3 minutes moving slowly to the north at about 50 mph and making a whistling noise. It makes a sharp right-angle turn, proceeds west, and disappears from sight. Gammie reports the sighting to the RCAF in Vancouver, and a senior air force officer visits him later and shows him a bulky portfolio of glossy UFO photos, many of them showing detailed features. Gammie tells him that the UFO he had seen did not exactly resemble any of the photos, and the officer tells him that the RCAF would not admit to interviewing him if the case receives any publicity. (“‘That Awful Looking Shooting Star,’” Canadian UFO Report 3, no. 5 (1975): 14)
June — BUFOI magazine (Belgian UFO Information) is launched by a George Adamski group in Anvers, Belgium, and edited by May and Patrick Morlet. It runs until 1979. (BUFOI Magazine, no. 1 (June 1964))
June 2 — 4:00 p.m. Charles Keith Davis is outside his grandmother’s home in Hobbs, New Mexico, when a small, tan, top-shaped object with a soot-like trail appears and hovers above the boy’s head, enveloping him in a cloud. He starts crying and screaming, and the object shoots straight up and disappears. His hair is singed and his face and
ears are swollen and burned, although he does not feel any pain. They take him to the hospital, where doctors notice the soot embedded in his flesh. The burns respond well to treatment and he stays 5 nights in the hospital. (Lorenzen, UFOs: The Whole Story, Signet, 1969, pp. 191–192)
June 14 — 8:35 p.m. Charles Englebrecht, 18, is watching TV at home in Dale, Indiana, when the house lights and TV suddenly go out. He notices that a small, bright orange-colored, basketball-sized object has landed in his back yard. As he goes out the side door and tries to approach it, he feels a tingling sensation and has difficulty moving. After a few seconds the sphere takes off and goes over the nearby barn. Several items in the backyard have been moved (lawn mower, chicken feeder). He smells sulfur or burning rubber and find three imprints in a triangle with the dimensions of 2 feet by 4.5 feet by 4.5 feet. (NICAP, “The Dale Landing Case”)
June 27 — Teenage UFO buffs Allen H. Greenfield, Rick Hilberg, and Dale Rettig hold the first Congress of Scientific Ufologists in Cleveland, Ohio. It becomes an annual meeting and changes its name to the National UFO Conference, which runs until 2005. (Wikipedia, “National UFO Conference”; “Ufologists to Meet,” Lexington (Ky.) Herald, June 22, 1964, p. 20; Story, p. 91; David Halperin, “Cleveland 2015: ‘Congress of Scientific Ufologists’ 50th Reunion,” davidhalperin.net, June 25, 2015; National UFO Conference, “Congress of Scientific UFOlogists”)
June 30 — 1:00 a.m. Beauford E. Parham is driving near Lavonia, Georgia, on his way back from a business trip when he notices a brilliant light in the sky. It is moving towards his car at a 45° angle. In an instant it appears right in front of his headlights, no more than 5 feet away and a foot above the ground. Shaped like a giant top, it emits a “hissing sound like a million snakes.” The amber-colored UFO has a sharp, steeple-like cone rising from its top midsection. It moves above his car leaving a strong odor of embalming fluid and a gaseous vapor that leaves an oily substance over his car, even after repeated washings. After several passes over his car, it starts spinning and takes off vertically. Parham now notices his arms are beginning to burn. He immediately reports his sighting to the mayor of Lavonia, then personnel at the Anderson Regional Airport in South Carolina, where he meets local FAA officials who check his car for radiation. They get readings from the oily stains, as well as both his arms from the shoulder down. (“Man Claims Car Buzzed by an Unknown Object,” Greenwood (S.C.) Index-Journal, July 3, 1964, p. 5; NICAP, “Lavonia / Tallulah Case (Radiation)”; Schopick, pp. 71–72; Donald E. Keyhoe and Gordon I. R. Lore Jr., Strange Effects from UFOs, NICAP, 1969, pp. 5–7; Clark III 678–680)
July 7 — Around 9:00 p.m. Three members of the Henry Ivester family in Turnerville, Georgia, are watching TV when sudden interference prevents them from further viewing. They go out on the front porch and see an object moving silently above the trees 300 feet away. It stops to hover a few feet above a neighbor’s garden across the highway. Its bottom side is fully visible; on the dark upper side are three lights: red, clear, red. The red lights are blinking. As the object ascends, the lights go out. A brilliant green light then shines from the bottom, illuminating the trees. A foul odor “like embalming fluid or brake fluid” hangs in the air after the object leaves. (“Unearthly Objects Hovering in Sky?” Atlanta (Ga.) Constitution, July 17, 1964, p. 23; Schopick, pp. 72–73; Clark III 679; “An Interesting UFO Story from Georgia,” The Paranormal Effect, October 3, 2010)
July 12 — Assistant Professor Vyacheslav Zaitsev is aboard a Tupolev Tu-104 airliner above Bologoye, Tver Oblast, Russia, when he sees a huge disc with a domed cabin suddenly appear below the aircraft, fly a parallel course for a while, then swerve abruptly and speed away. (Felix Ziegel, “Unidentified Flying Objects,” Soviet Life, no. 137 (February 1968): 28; “Russian Scientist Confirms Important Cases,” UFO Investigator 4, no. 5 (March 1968): 6; Good Above, p. 220)
July 14 — After 11:00 p.m. Atlanta Constitution reporter Tom Winfield sees a top-shaped, misty-orange object circling above the southeast section of Gainesville, Georgia, at about 500 feet. It stops and hovers a few moments then shoots up out of sight. He takes a photo, but nothing registers on the film. (“Unearthly Objects Hovering in Sky?” Atlanta (Ga.) Constitution, July 17, 1964, p. 23)
July 15 — MP Arthur Henderson in the UK House of Commons asks the former Secretary of State for Air Hugh Fraser about cooperation between the RAF and USAF in UFO investigations. Fraser says he is aware of the US Project Blue Book, and that 10% of the cases are insufficient evidence. (Good Above, p. 60)
July 16 — Shortly after noon. Five boys (Edmund Travis, Randy Travis, Floyd Moore, Billy Dunlap, and Gary Dunlap) are playing around an apple tree at Conklin, New York, when they notice a shiny, dome-shaped object in a field along the roadside. Looking for the source of a whistling sound, the boys spot a 3-foot-tall humanoid figure crouching in a tree about 150 feet away. It is dressed in a shiny black uniform, short-sleeved shirt, and black helmet. The whistling appears to emanate from his stomach. The boys throw stones and apples at it, but the figure is too far away. After about 15 minutes, the figure, moving stiffly, falls backwards out of the tree and floats slowly into the bushes. They can see it crawling through the weeds back to the UFO. A round, flattened area is found in the field where the grass is crushed and bushes are broken. In the middle is dried, yellow moss that