Part 20 (2/2)

Neither Project Sign nor the old Project Grudge had been higher than the project-within-a-group level The chief of a group normally calls for a lieutenant colonel, and since I was just a captain this caused some consternation in the ranks There was so Lieutenant Colonel Ray Taylor of Colonel Dunn's staff in charge

Colonel Taylor was very much interested in UFO's; he had handled so this function over to the Pentagon and had gone along withabout the project But in the end Colonel Donald Boas my division chief, decided rank be damned, and I stayed on as chief of Project Blue Book

The location within the organizational chart is always indicative of the importance placed on a project In June 1952 the Air Force was taking the UFO probleood UFO reports co silver-colored spheres or disks on several occasions, and radar in japan, Okinawa, and in Korea had tracked unidentified targets

In June our situation an to show an ever so slight trend toward reports beginning to bunch up on the east coast We discussed this build-up, but we couldn't seem to find any explainable reason for it so we decided that we'd better pay special attention to reports co from the eastern states

I had this build-up of reports in ht, June 15 to be exact, when the OD at ATIC calleda lot of reports froood, the OD told ested that I come out and take a look at theood, but when I lined theically and plotted them on a map they took the form of a hot report

At 3:40PM a woinia, had reported a ”very shi+ny object” at high altitude

At 4:20PM the operators of the CAA radio facility at Gordonsville, Virginia, had reported that they saw a ”round, shi+ny object” It was southeast of their station, or directly south of Unionville

At 4:25PM the crew of an airliner northwest of Richinia, reported a ”silver sphere at eleven o'clock high”

At 4:43PM a Marine pilot in a jet tried to intercept a ”round shi+ny sphere” south of Gordonsville

At 5:43PM an Air Force T-33 jet tried to intercept a ”shi+ny sphere” south of Gordonsville He got above 35,000 feet and the UFO was still far above hiinia, about 80 miles south of Gordonsville, reported it It was a ”round, shi+ny object with a golden glow”from north to south By this ti a running account of the UFO's progress

At 7:59PM the people in the CAA radio facility at Blackstone saw it

At 8:00PM jets arrived froley AFB to attempt to intercept it, but at 8:05PM it disappeared

This was a good report because it was the first time we ever received a series of reports on the same object, and there was no doubt that all these people had reported the sa too fast, because it had traveled only about 90 miles in four hours and twenty-five o home when my wife called The local associated Press man had called our ho She had just said that I was out so he ht not call the base I decided that I'd better keep working so I'd have the answer in time to keep the story out of the papers A report like this could cause some excitement

The UFO obviously wasn't a planet because it wasfrom north to south, and it was too slow to be an airplane I called the balloon- plotting center at Lowry AFB, where the tracks of the big skyhook balloons are plotted, but the only big balloons in the air were in the western United States, and they were all accounted for

It ht have been a weather balloon The wind charts showed that the high-altitude winds were blowing in different directions at different altitudes above 35,000 feet, so there was no one flow of air that could have brought a balloon in froher than 35,000 feet because the T-33 jet had been this high and the UFO was still above it The only thing to do was to check with all of the weather stations in the area I called Richton, DC, and four or five other weather stations, but all of their balloons were accounted for and none had been anywhere close to the central part of Virginia

A balloon can travel only so far, so there was no sense in checking stations too far away from where the people had seen the UFO, but I took a chance and called Norfolk; Charleston, West Virginia; Altoona, Pennsylvania; and other stations within a 150-

I still thought it ht be a balloon, so I started to call h I hit a lead Their radiosonde balloon had gone up to about 60,000 feet and evidently had sprung a slow leak because it had leveled off at that altitude Noro up till they burst at 80,000 or 90,000 feet The weather forecaster at Pittsburgh said that their records showed they had lost contact with the balloon when it was about 60 miles southeast of their station He said that the winds at 60,000 feet were constant, so it shouldn't be too difficult to figure out where the balloon went after they had lost it Things s, because he offered to plot the course that the balloon probably took and call ot my call It probably was their balloon, the forecaster said Above 50,000 feet there was a strong flow of air southeast froer southerly flow that was paralleling the Atlantic coast just east of the Appalachian Mountains The balloon would have floated along in this flow of air like a log floating down a river As close as he could estimate, he said, the balloon would arrive in the Gordonsville- Blackstone area in the late afternoon or early evening This was just about the tiood enough answer forat 8:00AM, Al Chop called fro all over his desk wanting to know about a sighting in Virginia

The reports continued to coroup of people with binoculars watched a ”soft white light” go back and forth across the western sky for nearly an hour A UFO ”paced” an Air Force B-25 for thirty minutes in California Both of these happened on June 18, and although we checked and rechecked them, they came out as unknowns

On June 19 radar at Goose AFB in Newfoundland picked up soets caed, and then becaain One unofficial comment was that the object was flat or disk-shaped, and that the radar target had gotten bigger because the disk had banked in flight to present a greater reflecting surface ATIC's official comment eather

Goose AFB was famous for unusual reports In early UFO history someone had taken a very unusual colored photo of a ”split cloud”

The photographer had seen a huge ball of fire streak down through the sky and pass through a high layer of stratus clouds As the fireball passed through the cloud it cut out a perfect swath The conclusion was that the fireball was ain the file because of the photograph