Unidentified - It was Raining UFOs

The second installment of Unidentified suffered from the same problems as the first which were repeated bits of video, repeated statements by the witnesses, and a seemingly ignorance of the history of UFOs.

But before we get into that, let’s look at the good. I have said for years that the best UFO cases need multiple chains of evidence. In this case there are the video clips from the attempted intercepts of the UFOs. Although what we have seen is rather limited, there are hints that more exists, it’s just not in the hands of those of us in the civilian world. More video might provide the identity of the objects, or it might complicate things because it shows something that is truly unidentified.

The second chain are the witness testimonies. Here there are highly qualified Navy pilots whose job, and whose lives, depend upon their ability to identify craft at a distance. In a combat environment there isn’t much time to determine if the oncoming craft is friend or foe. They must identify that craft quickly and here they got a good look at the object, or objects, and were unable to identify them. This tends to support the suggestion that the object is not anything conventional. The eyewitnesses add to the conclusion that what was seen was not something that was manufactured on Earth.

This idea was later underscored by the appearance of another member of Luis Elizondo’s team. He was a man who had worked at the famous Skunk Works, and who was familiar with what was being developed in the way of the next generation of military aircraft. According to him, there was nothing being planned, let alone that was operational in the sense of being tested in 2004, that could account for the sightings from the Nimitz battle group.

So, we have witness testimony that is backed up by the limited video that has been released. But we are then told of a third chain of evidence, that is, radar sightings. Now, one of the sailors, a man well versed in the capabilities of the radar, an expert in its operation, tells us that he had tracked these same objects on radar. He was able to watch them as they paraded over his radarscope, flying at very high altitudes at speeds that were so slow that they seemed to rule out conventional aircraft. It even resulted in the ship’s captain suggesting that the objects be intercepted and that resulted in the visual sightings and the video footage and a new estimate of the speed. The “tic tac” dived out of the sky at such speed that it would have ripped any conventional aircraft into pieces.

There are now three distinct chains of evidence, that when combined, created a persuasive picture of the events around the USS Nimitz. If we had access to all of the additional evidence, there might be terrestrial answer buried in there… or more likely there might be the best evidence to date of something truly extraterrestrial is flying around in our atmosphere. But there is a problem.

Those data seem to be missing. The recordings from the radar and the airborne conversations has supposedly disappeared. According to the witness, when he was putting together an after-action report, he attempted to retrieve the data but found all the recordings had disappeared. He found that highly suspicious.

A secondary back up would be the ship’s deck logs, But Christopher Mellon said that they too, were missing. Not the whole deck log, but those for the relevant days. They should have been at the National Archives, but were not.

This means, unfortunately, that important parts of the corroborative evidence are missing. According to one witness, a mystery helicopter had arrived at his ship. The records apparently disappeared with the passengers of that helicopter as they departed.

And, just as I mentioned last week, this has happened before. During the Washington National sightings of July 1952, there were radar sightings, there were attempted intercepts, and there were visual sightings by commercial airline crews. But there was no reliable photographic evidence of the sightings.

The Air Force dismissed everything then as the result of a temperature inversion that was claimed to have been over the city at the time. However, those in the radar room on those consecutive Saturday nights said that the objects being tracked on radar were not weather related. I spoke with two of those men, Major Dewey Fournet and Al Chop, and they said that the images on the radar were not caused by weather. So did the radar operators and the Navy radar expert who was there with Fournet and Chop. Both of Fournet and Chop told me that one of the intercepts that got a little “hairy.” That told me that there was something real going on that did not involve temperature inversions and illusions.

The “hairy” incident involved one of the pilots in one of the fighters who found his plane surrounded by glowing objects. Other pilots, in commercial planes, when asked to look for the objects, reported that they did see them. In other words, as in the case of the USS Nimitz, there were blips on the radars and visual sightings by pilots. A wonderful combination of information that was ignored in the race to find an explanation that would appease the public.

In fact, these sightings resulted in the creation of a CIA sponsored panel to investigate the reports in particular and UFOs in general. Known as the Robertson Panel, their conclusion was that there was nothing to the UFO reports and that interest in flying saucers should be challenged in such a way as to dissuade the public from interest in them. Interestingly, Dan Wright, who appeared on A Different Perspective just a few days ago, had found CIA documents that suggested the CIA do everything to convince people that there was no CIA interest in UFOs. You can listen to that interview here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/18186330

Once we wade through all the repetition on Unidentified (Yes, we heard the witness say it was “Raining UFOs,” about 96 times), the number of witnesses is increasing, they had multiple tasks and multiple roles, and the eyewitness nature of the sightings, coupled to the video and radar images, suggests something more than a mistake on the parts of those involved. It is difficult to ignore those witnesses and the information they gathered.

The big worry is the lack of recordings and other written records. Not that the recordings and records suggest something different, but that the records have disappeared. Without those records it is difficult to support the case, but then, it is also difficult to reject it. Those missing records would supply some important answers. If the Navy didn’t want that corroboration, they could have made the records disappear…

I’m waiting for the next show, to see what they can present in the way of new evidence. They seem to be building to that point by dribbling out the information. It will be interesting to see what the end game is.

Project Blue Book - The Washington Nationals - Season Finale

I know some of my colleagues are delighted that we’ve seen the season finale of Project Blue Book, not because they like the show but because it is over… for a while. I confess that I don’t understand their hostility. Project Blue Book is not a documentary but a drama that has a historical background and a loose, very loose, interpretation of some of the sightings that are found in the Blue Book files.

The prior two episodes were based on cases that were not found in the files, though there is some information about the Hill abduction found there. It seems, however, that the mention of the Hill case is because someone queried the Air Force about it and not because they were actively investigating it.

The finale dealt with what are known as the Washington Nationals, which were sightings on two consecutive Saturday nights in July 1952. Blips were seen on radarscopes and pilots were reporting the lights in the ski near them.

I have talked to two of the officials who observed the sightings on the second night, Major Dewey Fournet and Al Chop. Both men believed that the UFOs were reacting to the presence of jet fighters scrambled to intercept the objects. According to both men, at one point, it got pretty hairy, meaning one of the fighters was surrounded by the objects.  They also mentioned that it seemed the objects, except for that one instance, would disappear when the fighters arrived and would reappear when the fighters left the area. More on that later.

The sightings, unlike those shown in the program, were at night and not over the National Mall in Washington, D.C. At no point did any of the fighters fire at the objects. These sightings resulted in what I think of as the greatest science fiction headline ever published by a real daily newspaper. “Saucers Swarm Over Capitol.”

Here is the short version of the Washington Nationals. It began late in the evening on July 19, 1952, when two radars at the Air Routing and Traffic Control Center (ARTC) picked up eight unidentified targets near Andrews Air Force Base. According to reports made by the controllers, these were not airplanes because they moved too fast. One object, according to the calculations made at the time was tracked at 7,000 miles an hour.

About twenty minutes later, or just after midnight on July 20, the tower radars at Washington's National Airport tracked five objects. What this meant was that three radars at three different locations had solid targets that were not identified as aircraft.

One of the controllers at the ARTC called for a senior controller, Harry C. Barnes who in turn called the National Airport control tower. They had unidentified targets on their scopes, as did the controllers at Andrews Air Force Base. They had already eliminated a mechanical malfunction as the cause, but with the objects on other scopes in other locations, there was no longer any question of their reality. The performance of the blips ruled out airplanes. All the men, including Barnes, was sure they were looking at solid objects based on their years of experience with radar. Weather related phenomenon wouldn't produce the same effect on all the radars at the widely scattered locations. In fact, if weather was the explanation, the targets would have varied from scope to scope.

Just after midnight, Airman Second Class (A/2c) Bill Goodman, called the Andrews control tower to tell them he was watching a bright orange light about the size of a softball that was gaining and losing altitude as it zipped through the sky.

During this time, Goodman talked to Airman First Class (A/1c) William B. Brady, who was in the tower. Goodman told Brady that the object was to the immediate south. Brady saw a ball of orange fire. There were discrepancies between the physical description given by Goodman and Brady, but the problems were relatively small. It can be argued that the discrepancies are the result of the points of view of the two observers.

Joseph DeBoves, who was also on the scene as a civilian control tower operator at Andrews, said that Brady became excited during one of his telephone conversations, yelling, "There one goes." DeBoves believed that Brady was watching nothing more interesting than a meteor.

About two in the morning on July 20, the Radar Officer, Captain Harold C. Way, at Andrews Approach Control, learned that the ARTC had a target east of Andrews. He went outside and saw a strange light which he didn't believe to be a star. Later, however, he went back out, and this time decided that he was looking at a star. There is a suggestion that he was pressured into revising his first observations.

Bolling Air Force Base became involved briefly about the time Way went outside. The tower operator there said that he saw a "roundish" object drifting low in the sky to the southeast of Bolling. There were no radar confirmations of the sighting, and that was the last of the reports from that base. This might will have been a star.

The ARTC again told the controllers at Andrews that they still had the targets on their scopes. There is conflicting data because some of the reports suggest that the Andrews radar showed nothing, while other reports claim they did. Now DeBoves, and two others in the tower, Monte Banning and John P. Izzo, Jr., swept the sky with binoculars but could see no lights other than the stars.

The sightings lasted through the night, and during that time, the crews of several airliners saw the lights right where the radars showed them to be. Tower operators also saw them, and jet fighters were brought in for attempted intercepts. Associated Press stories written hours after the sightings claimed that no intercepts had been attempted that night but those stories were inaccurate. Documents in the Project Blue Book files, as well as eye witnesses, confirm the attempted intercepts.

Typical of the civilian sightings were those made by Captain Casey Pierman on Capital Airlines Flight 807. He was on a flight between Washington, D.C. and Martinsburg, West Virginia at 1:15 A.M. on July 20, when he, and the rest of the crew saw seven objects flash across the sky. Pierman said, "They were like falling stars without trails."

Capital Airline officials said that National Airport radar picked up the objects and asked Pierman to keep an eye on them. Shortly after takeoff, Pierman radioed that he had the objects in sight. He was flying at 180 to 200 mph, and reported the objects were traveling at tremendous speed. Official Air Force records confirm this.

Another Capital Airlines pilot, Captain Howard Dermott, on Capital Flight 610, reported a single light followed him from Herndon, Virginia, to within four miles of National Airport. Both the ARTC and the National Tower confirmed that an unidentified target followed the aircraft to within four miles of landing. At about the same time, an Air Force radar at Andrews AFB was tracking eight additional unknown objects as they flew over the Washington area.

One of the most persuasive sightings came early in the morning when one of the ARTC controllers called the Andrews Air Force Base control tower to tell them that there was a target south of the tower, over the Andrews Radio range station. The tower operators looked to the south where a "huge fiery-orange sphere" was hovering. This again was later explained by the Air Force as a star.

Just before daylight, about four in the morning, after repeated requests from the ARTC, an F-94 interceptor arrived on the scene, but it was too little too late. All the targets were gone. Although the flight crew made a short search of the local area, they found nothing unusual and returned to their base quickly.

During that night, apparently the three radar facilities only once reported a target that was seen by all three facilities at the same time. There were, however, a number of times when the ARTC radar and the Washington National tower radars had simultaneous contacts. It also seems that the radars were displaying the same targets that were seen by the crews of the Capital Airlines flights. What it boils down to is that multiple radars and multiple eyewitnesses were showing and seeing objects in the sky over Washington, D.C.

Air Force intelligence, including ATIC and the officers assigned to the Project Blue Book, had no idea that these sightings had taken place. They learned of the Saturday night - Sunday morning UFO show when the information was published in several newspapers on Monday. Captain Ed Ruppelt, chief of Blue Book, on business in Washington and unaware of the sightings, reported "I got off an airliner from Dayton and I bought a newspaper in the lobby of Washington National Airport Terminal Building. I called Major Dewey Fournet, but all he knew was what he read in the papers."

A week later, almost to the minute, with the same Air Traffic Control crew on duty, the UFOs returned. About 10:30 P.M. spotted several slow-moving targets. This time the controllers carefully marked each of the unidentifieds. When they were all marked, they called the Andrews AFB radar facility. The unidentified targets were on their scope too.

An hour later, with targets being tracked continually, the controllers called for interceptors. Al Chop, the Pentagon spokesman for the UFO project, told me, that he was in communication with the main basement command post at the Pentagon. He requested that interceptors be sent. As a civilian, he could only make the request and then wait for the general or admiral in command at the Pentagon to make the official decision.

As happened the week before, there was a delay, but by midnight, two F-94s were on station over Washington. At that point, the reporters who had assembled to observe the situation were asked, by Chop, to leave the radar room at National Airport because classified radio and intercept procedures would be in operation.

Major Dewey Fournet, the Pentagon liaison between the UFO project in Dayton and the intelligence community in Washington was at National Airport that night. Also, there were Al Chop, a public information officer and Naval Lieutenant Holcomb, an

Al Chop

electronics specialist, assigned to the Air Force Directorate of Intelligence.

With those men watching, as well as the controllers at various facilities using various radars, the F-94s arrived. And the UFOs vanished from the scopes immediately. The jets were vectored to the last known position of the UFOs, but even though visibility was unrestricted in the area, the pilots could see nothing. The fighters made a systematic search of the area, but since they could find nothing, they returned to their base.

Chop told me, "The minute the first two interceptors appeared on our scope all our unknowns disappeared. It was like they just wiped them all off. All our other flights, all the known flights were still on the scope... We watched these two planes leave. When they were out of our range, immediately we got our UFOs back."

Later, Air Force officers would learn that as the fighters appeared over Washington, people in the area of Langley Air Force Base, Virginia, spotted weird lights in the sky. An F-94, in the area on a routine mission was diverted to search for the light. The pilot saw it and turned toward it, but it disappeared "like somebody turning off a light bulb."

The pilot continued the intercept and did get a radar lock on the now unlighted and unseen target. That was broken by the object as it sped away. They fighter continued the pursuit, obtaining two more radar locks on the object, but each time the locks were broken.

The scene then shifted back to Washington National. Again, the Air Defense Command was alerted and again fighters were sent. This time the pilots were able to see the objects, vectored toward them by the air traffic controllers.  But the fighters couldn't close on the lights. The pilots saw no external details, other than lights where the radar suggested that something should be seen.

After several minutes of failure to close on a target, one of them was spotted lopping along. A fighter piloted by Lieutenant William Patterson turned, kicked in the afterburner and tried to catch the object. It disappeared before Patterson could see much of anything.

Interviewed by the press the next day, Patterson said, "I tried to make contact with the bogies below one thousand feet, but they [the controllers] vectored us around. I saw several bright lights. I was at my maximum speed, but even then, I had no closing speed. I ceased chasing them because I saw no chance of overtaking them. I was vectored into new objects. Later I chased a single bright light which I estimated about ten miles away. I lost visual contact with it..."

Al Chop remembered this intercept, as did Dewey Fournet. Chop told me, "The flight controllers had directed him to them [the unknowns]. We had a little cluster of them. Five or six of them and he suddenly reports that he sees some lights... He said they are very brilliant blue-white lights. He was going try to close in to get a better look... he flew into the area where they were clustered and he reported they were all around him."

Chop said that he, along with the others in the radar room, watched the intercept on the radar scope. What the pilot was telling them, they could see on the radar.

Patterson had to break of the intercept, though there were still lights in the sky and objects on the scope. According to Chop, the pilot radioed that he was running low on fuel. He turned so that he could head back to his base.

Chop said that the last of the objects disappeared from the scope about the time the sun came up. Ruppelt later quizzed Fournet about the activities that night. According to Ruppelt, Fournet and Holcomb, the radar expert, were convinced the targets were solid, metallic objects. Fournet told Ruppelt that there were weather related targets on the scopes, but the controllers were ignoring them. Everyone was convinced that the targets were real and solid.

At 4:00 P.M., in Washington D.C., Major General John A. Samford, Chief of Air Intelligence, held a press conference. Of that press conference, Ruppelt wrote, "General Samford made an honest attempt to straighten out the Washington National Sightings, but the cards were stacked against him. He had to hedge on many answers to questions from the press because he didn't know the answers. This hedging gave the impression that he was trying to cover up something more than just the fact his people fouled up in not fully investigating the sightings. Then he brought in Captain Roy James from ATIC to handle all the queries about radar. James didn't do any better because he'd just arrived in Washington that morning and didn't know very much more about the sightings than he'd read in the papers. Major Dewey Fournet and Lieutenant Holcomb, who had been at the airport during the sightings, were extremely conspicuous by their absence..." As was the Pentagon spokesman on UFOs, Al Chop.

This was the largest Pentagon press conference held since the end of the Second World War, at least to that time. Interestingly, one of the general officers also at the conference was Roger Ramey… yes, he of Roswell fame.

For those interested in a transcript of that press conference, I published, in a series of posts about it that can be found at:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/search?q=Press+conference

It runs to several postings, but the whole thing, along with some of my commentary, is found there. For those who wish more detailed information about the sightings, see my book, Invasion Washington. It covers the sightings of the summer of 1952, the events

What I have noticed in these last couple of episodes is that they’re moving farther away from the reality of Blue Book and this last episode was no exception. For example, the chief of Blue Book, Quinn, decided that he wanted to see what was going on. Somehow, somewhere, he finds a fighter, and heads up to engage with the objects. He fires on them, without results. He lands and gives his report… but I can’t see a situation in which the local commander would allow some random officer to show up and then take off in a fighter assigned to him and carried on his property book. That pilot would have to appear with his flight records that would then have to be verified and he would have to have a check ride by one of the local instructor pilots to ensure he had the proper training and skill level in the aircraft

The Mall in Washington, D.C., where Quinn
and Hynek saw the lights for the TV program.
Photo copyright by Kevin Randle

he wished to fly. There is no way that Quinn would have been allowed to join the intercept, even if a general called down to arrange it. These things just don’t happen in the real military. It looks good on television but it doesn’t happen in real life.

My point is that this drama, and it should be considered a drama, doesn’t claim to be the situation as it really happened and those short segments at the end underscore that. Maybe it drives some traffic to the History website to look at the facts or inspires some to google the sightings. If we’re going to complain about History’s version, then what about all those websites that put up UFO information that is totally bogus with no disclaimers whatsoever. That is far worse than a television drama.

To repeat myself, I do enjoy the program. I don’t find it boring but do wish they would ditch the Soviet spy angle. I do wish they would be a little more careful with the military customs and courtesies, and I don’t really want to see Allen Hynek in another fist fight with Quinn.

I will be looking forward to the next season (but certainly not with the enthusiasm that I await the final season of Game of Thrones… which I mention only because Little Finger plays Allen Hynek). I do hope they will be a little closer to reality, but if they’re not, I’ll remember that they’re making a TV series and not a documentary.

The Estimate of the Situation: A Different Perspective

While studying the legendary “Estimate of the Situation,” the document written in secret in 1948 by Air Force personnel in Dayton, Ohio, I came to understand some more about it. The Estimate, or EOTS as it has come to be called, was described by Ed Ruppelt, one time chief of Project Blue Book and Dewey Fournet, the Pentagon’s liaison for UFOs in the 1950s. They provided a limited listing of the cases included in it, and in today’s world, it is possible to access some of that information.

What struck me was the poor quality of some of the cases reviewed. Yes, the Arnold sighting that sort of began everything was in there. Today there are those who believe that Arnold was fooled by mirages, or by drops of water on the windshield, or snow blowing off the mountaintops, or by pelicans. None of the solutions is very satisfactory. The thing we don’t know is if the Johnson sighting, a prospector who was on the ground and seemed to have seen the objects about the same time as Arnold, was included in the report.

Many of the sightings that I have reviewed are not as strong as the Arnold case. Some are single witness and I believe were selected because they involved pilots or technically trained people. I would guess that those making the selections believed that pilots, especially fighter pilots, would be familiar with what was in the sky around them. Fighter pilots would have to make snap decisions about what they were seeing and their skills would have been honed during the war when a single mistake could kill them. Those selecting the cases respected the abilities of the pilots to quickly and accurately determine what they were seeing. Not too long before their lives would have depended on that ability.

And in the world of 1948, those with college degrees, especially those in the sciences or engineering would be given a higher credibility. The thinking was that these people had been exposed to a great many startling sights and would be able to identify a balloon, a celestial object, a weather phenomenon, when they saw it. If they reported something strange in the sky, then it probably did defy identification… which is not to say that it was an alien spacecraft.

At any rate, these seemed to be the sightings selected for the EOTS. Pilots, military officers, scientists, and technicians were those whose tales were taken, almost at face value. But when we look at the sightings today, they are very thin on evidence other than the observations of the witnesses. As but a single example taken this case from the Lake Meade area:

On 14 July 1947, 1^st Lt Eric B Armstrong… departed Williams Field, Arizona at 1400 CST on 28 June in a P-51 for Portland, Oregon, by way of Medford, Oregon. At approximately 1515 CST on a course of 300 degrees, and a ground speed of 285, altitude 10,000 feet, approximately thirty miles northwest of Lake Meade, Nevada Lt. Armstrong sighted five or six white, circular objects at four o’clock, altitude approximately 6,000 feet, courses approximately 120 degrees and an estimated speed of 285 MPH. Lt. Armstrong said the objects were flying very smoothly and in a close formation. The estimated size of the white objects were approximately 36 inches in diameter. Lt. Armstrong stated that he is sure the white objects were not birds, since the rate of closure was very fast. Lt. Armstrong was certain that the white objects were not jets or conventional type aircraft since he has flown both types. 

This report is from a single witness and the UFOs described are only three feet in diameter. He said they weren’t birds, based on the rate of closure, which meant that they were coming at him faster than his speed and that of the birds would account for. He didn’t believe the objects were meteors and he didn’t think they were conventional aircraft. The Air Force eventually determined that Armstrong had seen a cluster of balloons.

I don’t know why those in Dayton were impressed with this sighting, unless there is something more about it than is in the Project Blue Book file. There is no physical evidence, no photographs, and no radar tracks, nothing other than the observations of the pilot.

As I said, this is an example of the sightings reported in the EOTS. There are no indications from either Ruppelt or Fournet that there was anything more. While the document might have been thick, and it might have contained dozens of sightings (177 by one estimate), without some sort of tangible evidence, I’m not surprised that General Vandenberg rejected it. Hell, I’m usually on board with those who think that some UFOs might represent alien craft, but from what I’ve seen of the EOTS and the reports contained in it, I wouldn’t have found the conclusion of spacecraft supported by the evidence either.

That is why it was rejected, I believe. Not because of a culture at the Pentagon that thought all UFOs could be explained in the mundane, but because, in the words of Jason Robards in All the President’s Men, “You don’t have it.”

Robards meant that the conclusions of the reporters were not supported by the evidence and with the EOTS we see the same thing. To make it worse, this failed attempt to impress those outside the halls of ATIC at Wright Field damaged their case beyond repair. It might have signaled the beginning of what Ruppelt would call the “Dark Ages,” when all UFOs were to be explained… period.

Where Have the UFOs Gone?

The late Karl Pflock and I used to talk about why there were no more really good UFO sightings. We weren’t getting the kind of reports that had been so prevalent at the beginning of the modern era. Nothing as robust or as interesting as those over Washington, D.C., or at Levelland, Texas. In today’s world, it seem as if the UFOs stayed up in the air, usually away from the witnesses, and did nothing other than cross the sky in a straight line. 

Karl Pflock (right) and me.



We can point to all sorts of interesting sightings in the past, some of which had mundane answers and some of which are still puzzling today. There was, of course, the Arnold sighting. He believed he saw a number of objects that he timed as traveling at 1800 miles an hour, or much faster than anything flying at the time, other than rockets and missiles, and they didn’t fly in formation.

There is a possibility that another man, Fred Johnson, saw the same objects about the time that Arnold lost sight of them. He reported that his compass spun wildly while the objects were overhead, but when they disappeared, the compass settled down. You can argue, and I’m sure some will, that the Johnson sighting isn’t related to that of Arnold, or that it is a hoax based on the Arnold sighting, or if related, doesn’t really add much to our overall knowledge.

 

But the point is that there are two sightings that seem to go together to create a nice little anomaly. Arnold might have been fooled. Johnson might have been inventing the tale. Or maybe they both witnessed something unusual that provided interesting descriptions and even one of the first cases with electro-magnetic effects.

 

Or take the Washington Nationals from late July 1952. Here was a series of sightings spread over two Saturday nights in which airline pilots, jet interceptor pilots, people on the ground, and radar operators reported strange lights and strange blips over Washington, D.C.

 

I talked to both Al Chop and Major Dewey Fournet, both associated with the official UFO investigation in 1952, and who had been in the radar room on that second Saturday. They told me there had been one intercept that had gotten “hairy,” meaning dangerous. According to them, and they were watching in the radar rooms at Washington National and listening to the interceptor pilots talking to one another, as they Air Force attempted to catch the UFOs the interceptor pilot found himself surrounded by the lights. It was all tracked on radar. What the pilot, William Patterson said over the radio, the men in the radar center could see on the scope. Patterson decided to break off the intercept at that point.

 

It doesn’t matter here if you believe that Patterson intercepted and the radar showed alien craft. What matters here is the nature of the sighting, meaning it was robust. There were those in radar centers who watched it all on the scopes, there were the pilots seeing the objects where the radar said they were. The sightings lasted for hours, though not continuously, and there were many witnesses.

 

True, the Air Force eventually wrote the sightings off as temperature inversions, and it does seem that temperature inversion was responsible for some of the radar returns, but that doesn’t explain the lights in the sky and it doesn’t square with what the controllers, who saw the blips, said. They told investigators that they were familiar with the way weather phenomena were displayed on the radar scopes and these blips didn’t look like that.

 

In today’s world, we get nothing as interesting. Nothing with multiple chains of evidence, with literally dozens of witnesses. We have one or two people seeing a light, or we get a cell phone video that doesn’t do much to increase our knowledge. Just some image that could be almost anything but that has fooled the person who recorded it.

 

Karl and I tried to figure this out. I suppose you could say that people today don’t have the imagination of those fifty years ago. I suppose you could say that people today are more familiar with what is in the sky around them. I suppose you could say that we are all more in tune with our environment.

Or maybe you could say that the aliens, from wherever they came, have now gone home to study the data they collected. Think of it as our exploration of the moon. In 1969, and for the next couple of years, if you were living on the moon, you would have had lots of UFO sightings, including landings. But, since 1972, there hasn’t been a whole lot of activity. We gathered our samples and went home.

Oh, sure, the analogy breaks down when you say, “But we left physical evidence behind to prove we were there... and it was only the landings of astronauts that have ended. Other moon missions have been lost.”

 

But then I say, “Yeah, but the robust sightings have ended.”

Yes, there have been some interesting sightings. There are those from Bentwaters and, of course Belgium, but these are the exceptions. The older sightings have more witnesses, more data, more evidence than those of today, with rare exception.

 

Karl and I never really came to a conclusion about this, other than collecting more sighting reports wouldn’t expand our knowledge much. We never really found a satisfactory answer for the change. We agreed that older cases were more interesting than newer case but we didn’t really know why.

 

Oh, Karl believed that the Hills had been abducted, but I disagreed. I believed the answer would be found in the terrestrial. Neither of us thought much of the widespread claims of abduction, though it might have supplied part of the answer. Too many research assets were diverted into abduction research without much in the way of tangible results.

 

I suppose I could say the same thing about crop circles. These had once been called UFO landing sites, or UFO nests, but evolved into crop circles, which were another subset of the UFO phenomenon.

 

And I know the number of sightings has increased recently, but these are sightings, often with pictures that don’t add much to the case. Sometimes it’s clear that the pictures are lens flares, clouds, or other natural phenomena, and some times the cases are simple hoaxes.

The point, again, is that the sightings aren’t nearly as exciting as they were forty or fifty years ago, and I have no explanation for that. Maybe it’s all just a matter of perspective.

The Washington National UFO Sighting Press Conference, Part 7

Please note, as we begin to talk about Major Fournet and Lieutenant Holcomb, who were in the radar room on the second Saturday, they are nowhere to be found at the press conference.

Reporter: You had two experts over there last Saturday night, Major Fournet and
Lieutenant Holcomb, who described themselves as radar technicians and intelligence officers. What was their opinion?

Samford: May I try to make another answer and ask for support or negation, on the quality of the radar operator. I personally don’t feel that is necessarily associated with quality of radar operators because radar operators of great quality are going to be confused by the things which now appear and may appear in radar. The ability to use the radar for the thing it was designed for is, I believe, dependent upon the thing that they see doing a normal act. If it does a normal act, then it becomes identified as the thing that they thought it was and then it pulls itself along through this mass of indication and they say, "That one has normal processes." I think that a description of a GCA landing has some bearing on that in which to get associated with the GCA you have to make a certain number of queries and do a certain number of things and then you become identified through the fact that you obey. If you obey, then you have an identity and you can then be followed with precision. So I wouldn’t like to say that this is a function of inadequate radar operations. I think it’s a thing that can happen to any radar operator. If he sees something in there and says, "That one is neither behaving nor any other normal pattern." What is it? Curiosity stimulus, any other kind of stimulus can result in overemphasis at any particular time on any radar scope. These recently appear to have been much more solid returns than ordinarily classifiable by the arguments that I have just given. Would you address yourself to what I’ve just said.

Reporter: Yes. What do the experts think? That was the question.

Samford: The experts?

Reporter: The ones that saw it last Saturday night. What did they report to you?

Reporter: Two of them saw it in --

Reporter: What did they say?

Samford: They said they made good returns.

Reporter: Did they draw any conclusions as to what they were, whether they were clouds?

Samford: They made good returns and they think that they ought to be followed up.

Reporter: But now you come to the general belief that it was some either heat inversions or some other phenomena without substance.

Samford: The phrase "without substance" bothers me a little.

Reporter: Well, could you --

Samford: -- say what we do think?

Reporter: Yes.

Samford: I think that the highest probability is that these are phenomena associated with the intellectual and scientific interests that we are on the road to learn more about but that there is nothing in them that is associated with material or vehicles or missiles that are directed against the United States.

Reporter: General, you said that -- can you stop that short of the United States, sir, or the menace to the United States?

Samford: Well, that was the -- I think that is the part that I believed. Now, what was it that I would have said otherwise?

Reporter: Well, you said were not associated with vehicles --

Reporter: Materials.

Reporter: Missiles.

Reporter: Period.

Reporter: Material, vehicles, and missiles directed against the United States.

Reporter: The question whether these are hostile or not makes very little difference. What we’re trying to get at is are you eliminating, excluding from consideration a missile, a vehicle, or any other material object that might be flying through the air other than sound or light or some other intangible.

Reporter: Somebody from this planet or some other planet violating our air space.
(Laughter)

Samford: The astronomers are our best advisers, of course, in this business of visitors from elsewhere. The astronomers photograph the sky continuously perhaps with the most adequate photography in existence and the complete absence of things which would have to be in their appearance for many days and months to come from somewhere else. It doesn’t cause them to have any enthusiasm whatsoever in thinking about this other side of it.

Reporter: Have any astronomical laboratories reported any sightings whatsoever or any astronomers?

Samford: I don’t recall. Captain Ruppelt, do you know whether we’ve had reports from astronomical laboratories or observatories?

Ruppelt: No, sir. None have ever had any real bearing.

The question as posed and the answer as posed, at this point are misleading. Astronomers had made UFO reports on a number of occasions. Dr. Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto, had made a UFO sighting report to the Air Force. He was not at an observatory at the time, but in his backyard, with his wife, but the real point is that here was a scientist, one with impressive credentials, who had made a UFO report to the Air Force.

More recently, studies have been conducted using professional astronomers and engineers as the subjects. It was reported that these people reported UFOs at a higher rate than the general population. In other words, it would be expected that astronomers, who watch the sky on a regular basis, would see UFOs more frequently that the general population and they did, according to a scientifically reported study.

In fact, because they are familiar with the sky and the astronomical phenomena in it, they would be able to eliminate many of the mundane answers that confuse and confound the general population. Their sightings, normally of longer duration, are not easily explained by the mundane and are, therefore, more likely to be labeled as unidentified.

But there was another point that is generally overlooked. According to Dr. J. Allen Hynek’s survey of his fellow astronomers, most astronomers, in 1952, would not have been inclined to report a UFO sighting. Hynek wrote, "I took the time to talk rather seriously with a few of them, and to acquaint them with the fact that some of the sightings were truly puzzling and not at all easily explainable. Their interest was almost immediately aroused, indicating that their general lethargy is due to lack of information on the subject. And certainly another contributing factor... is their overwhelming fear of publicity. One headline in the nation’s papers to the effect ‘Astronomer Sees Flying Saucer’ would be enough to brand the astronomer as questionable among his colleagues."

So, there is a very real possibility, according to the information available, that astronomers do see UFOs, but they don’t report them with any frequency. Ruppelt had to know that Hynek was conducting the study, even if it had not been completed, and he had to know that, at least, one astronomer had reported a UFO.

To be fair, it must be noted that General Samford might not have had the information, or that it might not have been reported to the Air Force at the highest lever. The general attitude of the Air Force was that if something wasn’t reported to them, it simply didn’t exist.