Part 24 (2/2)

I've heard a lot of them try and I've heard the of the twenty-ninth an Air Defense Coet plots on a target that was coinaw Bay on Lake Huron at 625 ht plans on file showed that it was an unidentified target

Three F-94's were in the area just northeast of the radar station, so the ground controller called one of the F-94's and told the pilot to intercept the unidentified target The F-94 pilot started cli that the ground controller gave hiround controller told the pilot to turn to the right and he would be on the target The pilot started to bring the F-94 around and at that instant both he and the radar operator in the back seat saw that they were turning toward a large bluish-white light, ”er than a star” In the next second or two the light ”took on a reddish tinge, and slowly began to get sround controller called and said that he still had both the F-94 and the unidentified target on his scope and that the target had just ht for a jet, and at the speed the target was traveling it would have to be a jet if it were an airplane Now the target was heading back north The F-94 pilot gave the engine full power and cut in the afterburner to give chase The radar operator in the back seat got a good radar lock-on Later he said, ”It was just as solid a lock-on as you get froe and the F-94 was closing slowly For thirty seconds they held the lock-on; then, just as the ground controller was telling the pilot that he was closing in, the light becahter and the object pulled away to break the lock-on Without breaking his transround controller asked if the radar operator still had the lock-on because on the scope the distance between two blips had almost doubled in one sweep of the antenna This indicated that the unknown target had almost doubled its speed in a round radar followed the chase At tiet would slon and the F-94 would start to close the gap, but always, just as the F-94 was getting within radar range, the target would put on a sudden burst of speed and pull away fro jet The speed of the UFO--for by this time all concerned had decided that hat it was--couldn't be measured too accurately because its bursts of speed were of such short duration; but on several occasions the UFO traveled about 4 miles in one ten- second sweep of the antenna, or about 1,400low on fuel, and the pilot had to break off the chase a round radar The last few plots on the UFO weren't too good but it looked as if the target slowed down to 200 to 300 miles an hour as soon as the F-94 turned around

What was it? It obviously wasn't a balloon or a ht have been another airplane except that in 1952 there was nothing flying, except a few experian, that could so easily outdistance an F-94 Then there was the fact that radar clocked it at 1,400 ht for the star Capella, which is low on the horizon and is very brilliant, but what about the radar contacts? Soets,” but the chances of a weather target's iving a radar lock-on, then changing speed to stay just out of range of the airplane's radar, and then slowing dohen the airplane leaves is as close to nil as you can get

What was it? A lot of people I kneere absolutely convinced this report was the key--the final proof Even if all of the thousands of other UFO reports could be discarded on a technicality, this one couldn't be These people believed that this report in itself was proof enough to officially accept the fact that UFO's were interplanetary spaceshi+ps And when some people refused to believe even this report, the frustration was actually pitiful to see

As the end of July approached, there was a group of officers in intelligence fighting hard to get the UFO ”recognized” At ATIC, Project Blue Book was still trying to be impartial--but sometimes it was difficult

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Hoax or Horror?

To the military and the public eren't intiher levels of Air Force Intelligence during the summer of 1952--and feere--General Samford's press conference see saucers It did take the pressure off Project Blue Book--reports dropped from fifty per day to ten a day inside of a week--but behind the scenes the press conference was only the signal for an all-out drive to find out more about the UFO Work on the special cah- priority basis, and General Sa scientists

During the past four months we had collected some 750 comparatively well-docu in these reports ood lead on the UFO My orders were to tell the scientists to e talked that the Air Force was officially still very much interested in the UFO and that their assistance, even if it was only in giving us ideas and coh the statement of the problem orded much more loosely, in essence it was, ”Do the UFO reports we have collected indicate that the earth is being visited by a people from another planet?”

Such questions had been asked of the scientists before, but not in such a serious vein

Then a secondary progra” the military The old idea that UFO reports would die out when the thrill wore off had long been discarded We all knew that UFO reports would continue to come in and that in order to properly evaluate the Flap had shown us that our chances of getting a definite answer on a sighting was directly proportional to the quality of the inforence officers in the field

But soon after the press conference we began to get wires fro they had interpreted the newspaper accounts of General Saer interested in UFO reports A few other intelligence officers had evidently also eneral's res were sloppy and incomplete All of this was bad, so to forestall any misconceived ideas about the future of the Air Force's UFO project, summaries of General Saence officers General Samford had outlined the future of the UFO project when he'd said:

”So our present course of action is to continue on this proble it the attention that we feel it very definitely warrants We will give it adequate attention, but not frantic attention”

The sus out to soot back to nor the aid of scientists, as General Samford had directed, but before this could be done we had a backlog of UFO reports that had to be evaluated During July we had been swamped and had picked off only the best ones Soust had simple answers, but many were unknowns There was one report that was of special interest because it was an excellent example of how a UFO report can at first appear to be absolutely unsoluble then suddenly fall apart under thorough investigation It also points up the fact that our investigation and analysis were thorough and that e finally stamped a report ”Unknown” it was unknown We weren't infallible but we didn't often let a clue slip by

At exactly ten forty-five on the ust 1, 1952, an ADC radar near Bellefontaine, Ohio, picked up a high-speed unidentified targetsouthwest, just north of Dayton Two F-86's froht-Patterson were scra out tohere the radar showed the UFO to be The radar didn't have any height-finding equipround controller at the radar site could do was to get the two F-86's over or under the target, and then they would have to find it visually

When the two airplanes reached 30,000 feet, the ground controller called theet, which was still continuing its southwesterly course at about 525 round controller called back and told the lead pilot that the targets of his airplane and the UFO had blended on the radar-scope and that the pilot would have to et him Then the radar broke down and went off the air

But at almost that exact second the lead pilot looked up and there in the clear blue sky several thousand feet above him was a silver- colored sphere The lead pilot pointed it out to his wing man and both of them started to climb They went to their maximum altitude but they couldn't reach the UFO After ten e silver sphere or disk--because at times it looked like a disk--one of the pilots hauled the nose of his F-86 up in a stall and exposed several feet of gun caht on his radar gun sight blinked on, indicating that so a sundog, hallucination, or refracted light

The two pilots broke off the intercept and started back to Wright- Patterson when they suddenly realized that they were still northwest of the base, in almost the same location they had been when they started the intercept ten minutes before The UFO had evidently slowed down from the speed that the radar hadalmost coround, the un camera was rushed to the photo lab and developed The photos showed only a round, indistinct blob--no details--but they were proof that so object had been in the air north of Dayton

Lieutenant Andy Flues was assigned to this one He checked the locations of balloons and found out that a 20-foot-diaht-Patterson had been very near the area when the unsuccessful intercept took place, but the balloon wasn't traveling 525 round radar, so he investigated further The UFO couldn't have been another airplane because airplanes don't hover in one spot and it was no atmospheric phenomenon Andy wrote it off as an unknown but it still bothered hihty suspicious He talked to the two pilots a half dozen times and spent a day at the radar site at Bellefontaine before he reversed his ”Unknown” decision and caet that the radar had tracked across Ohio was a low-flying jet The jet was unidentified because there was a ht plan Andy checked and found that a jet out of Cleveland had landed at Memphis at about eleven-forty At ten forty-five this jet would have been north of Dayton on a southwesterly heading When the ground controller blended the targets of the two F-86's into the unidentified target, they were at 30,000 feet and were looking for the target at their altitude or higher so theyjet--but they did see the balloon Since the radar went out just as the pilots saw the balloon, the ground controller couldn't see that the unidentified target he'd been watching was continuing on to the southwest The pilots didn't bother to look around any ht they had the target in sight

The only part of the sighting that still wasn't explained was the radar pickup on the F-86's gun sight Lieutenant Flues checked around, did a little experi, and found out that the sive an indication on the radar used in F-86 gun sights

To get a final bit of proof, Lieutenant Flues took the gun camera photos to the photo lab The two F-86's had been at about 40,000 feet when the photos were taken and the 20-foot balloon was at about 70,000 feet Andy's question to the photo lab was, ”How big should a 20-foot balloon appear on a frame of 16-mm movie film when the balloon is 30,000 feet away?”