Did Blue Book Obtain Alien Debris - The La Camp UFO Case

 

There are many jewels hidden in the Project Blue Book files. Had I discovered the information about this case earlier (which is to say, had I paid attention to it), it would have been included it in The Best of Project Blue Book. This is a physical evidence case that was marked as “unidentified,” even after samples had been taken and analyzed. They too, remain unidentified.

According to the documentation and newspaper reports, a farmer, Monroe Arnold, living in the Lacamp, (sometimes La Camp) Louisiana area, reported that he had seen a fiery red, disk-shaped object strike the ground about 300 yards from where he was standing. He estimated that it was about eight feet thick, eight feet wide and twelve feet long with a short exhaust flame extending about a foot from one end. This happened about 9:00 on April 12, 1960.

The UFO struck the ground, bounced, and there were three or four explosions. Arnold was the only one to see the object but others, in the area, heard the explosions. The object bounced along for about a thousand feet, finally became airborne again, turned west and disappeared in the distance.

The ground where the UFO hit, was plowed up and there was damage to a nearby tree. The grass and the tree had been scorched but not burned according to the investigation. Metallic residue was recovered, described as looking like paint chips of some kind.

Deputy Sheriff Oscar Haymon, of the Leesville, Louisiana, Sheriff’s Office was the civilian who investigated. The newspaper quoted Haymon as saying:

It came from the dark and landed about 300 yards from the Monroe Arnold home. When it hit the ground there was an explosion that could be heard for miles around.

After landing it bounced around on the ground in an easterly direction… then rose and headed west just above the tree tops.

You could see where it bounced around on the ground and places where it hit the ground and made an impression about the size of a water bucket. It scorched but did not burn the grass.

It cut the top out of a tree and strange as it seems, hit only the one tree.

The sighting was investigated for the Air Force by Major Ray F. Grodhaus and Master Sergeant Robert F. Plympton. Both men were assigned to the intelligence office of the 401^st Tactical Fighter Wing at England Air Force Base, Louisiana, which is not all that far from the crash site.

Included in the Blue Book report were nine photographs of the crash site (landing site?) and a description of damage to the tree. According to the report prepared by Plympton:

A piece of scorched bark and a branch of scorched tree leaves… were taken from the tree at the impact area… at approximately 0300 Zulu 13 April 1960. [Zulu is GMT and the event took place at 9:00 p.m. local time).

The leaves and the bark were removed by the UFOB [which is what they were designating UFOs at that time… to be added to the term UAO, UAP and UAV being used today]. This is evident because the leaves and the bark are missing from one area of the tree only. The branch… that the officer is holding [in one of the photographs] was broken off and laying beside the tree. It is not known if the UFOB did this or not.

Officer holding the branch broken from the tree. Notice
the leaves are missing from part of the tree
.

In an additional report, also prepared by Plympton, said that he found Arnold to be a credible witness. He pointed out that Arnold had found military debris, JATO bottles, that is, jet assisted take off rockets just to shorten the take-off roll for aircraft on his farm in the past. The debris from the object did not resemble them. That conclusion was held up by scientific analysis. In other words, whatever it was that fell, it was not the remains of a JATO bottle.

Plympton also interviewed B. E. Allbritton, Jr., who lived about five miles from the UFO landing site. Although Allbritton, who had not seen nor heard the UFO, pointed out that he had heard, over the radio, that the Navy had been conducting missile tests in the Gulf of Texas. He said that what he heard was a warning to stay away from the area and he thought that a runaway missile might have been responsible for the sighting. Plympton wrote, “This office has no way to inquire to the Navy about these related missile firings.”

I’m not sure why this would even be included in the report. One man heard a radio broadcast about missile tests more than one hundred miles away and thought this might be an explanation. And I’m not sure why the intelligence officer (well, the NCOIC) couldn’t figure out which military department to call for information. This seems to be something of a red herring.

Listed as other contacts, but with no names attached, Plympton wrote, “Other contacts were made with people in the general area. All contacts shared the same description of the sound as it passed over their houses; that it sounded like artillery shells passing overhead, but much louder with a high velocity shrieking sound and low in altitude.”

An official teletype message received at ATIC on April 18, 1960, at 10:50 a.m., provided a couple of additional, and a few additional and interesting, details. According to that document:

The 1908 AACS (RAPCON UNIT) picked up an unidentified target on their radar screens at approximately the time of this sighting. This unidentified target was travelling at an estimated speed of 800 knots. Further investigation is being conducted on this unidentified target…

Major Ray F. Grodhaus... 401^st TFW intelligence officer… From interrogation of the witnesses and the marks on the ground it was apparent that the object hit the ground at a terrific rate of speed. It is my opinion that some type of rocket hit the ground and then ricocheted off across country. It is possible that a wing-tip could have made the impressions on the ground, but I think it is very improbable. There was no sign of, or pieces of any type of equipment in the area at the time of the investigation. Mr. W. P. Harper, a fifty (50) year old farmer, who lives approximately 100 yards from the source said that his T.V. set blacked out for about five (5) seconds at approximately 130310Z Apr. [9:03 local time on April 12]. Before it blacked out, he heard a high whine followed by about ten (10) to (12) fast explosions sounding like, but louder than artillery shells, since these two men live on the border of Fort Polk Reservation, they have much experience in hearing artillery fired. However, Fort Polk is now closed* and no artillery fire is being accomplished. Mr. Monroe Arnold has little formal education but is a keen observer with a passion for accuracy that is common with country folks of his generation. He had had JATO bottles fall on his farm before without causing undue excitement… All the people in the general area heard the explosions, i.e., Buddy Spurgen, Pete Brown, and Wes Geeter.

The document ended, “It is impossible at this time for me to give any estimate of what could have caused the sighting. It is possible that equipment could have been removed from the area prior to my investigation. However, this possibility was denied by Mr. Arnold and Mr. Harper.”

In the interest in fairness, and because it is relevant, there is supplemental information to the initial report. According to that document, received at ATIC on April 21, “It has been determined that the unidentified target could not have been the object in question. Subsequent investigation revealed that the unidentified target was picked up by upon the radar scope was subsequent to 0545 Zuly, 13 April 1960, which is approximately two and thirty minutes later than the original sighting.”

The Lacamp landing (crash?) site.

That would be, basically, the end of the reporting on the case. However, I received a letter from Robert Plympton that provided more information and provides us with a little bit of insight into Project Book and this investigation. He told me that he, and another sergeant, Warren E. Moore had made the investigation. He wrote:

This sighting is without a doubt one of those to which you refer on the inside cover of your book [Project Blue Book – Exposed] as: “…some reports are tagged with labels that don’t fit the facts…”

For instance, Mr. ARNOLD observed the object for longer period than stated. He reported hearing it passover his house, seeing it land, and seeing it lift off. Also, the physical evidence not only included a substantial quantity of paint samples (metal shavings) and soil samples but also tree limbs (branches) which had the appearance of having been scorched. Additionally, a number of high-quality photographs were taken from the air by a professional photographer and included close-up shots of “holes” and other indentations in the ground possibly caused by the object.

I and my associate [I will note here that it is probably Moore] conducted two visits to the point of the sighting. The second visit was prompted by Dr. HYNEK follow [sic] his receipt of my report. He called by phone asking that I return to the sight [sic] and obtain more soil samples from each “hole” as well as from other indentations in the ground with may have been caused by the object. Additionally he requested that additional photographs be taken of certain key points at the sighting. He instructed that all matters be properly packaged, including the tree limbs, and sent by Airfreight (Military or Commercial Airlines) to ATIC as soon as possible. His request was immediately complied with.

After several weeks had passed, I phoned Dr. HYNEK inquiring about the current status of my reports. He thanked me for our prompt handling of his telephone request and stated that we had conducted a very good investigation. He also told me that this was the first time that a report had been received under the Project Bluebook [sic] program where physical evidence was obtained from a reported UFO landing. He said that the paint samples (metal shavings) could not be identified as having come from ore deposits found on this planet. Those were his exact words. He concluded by saying that he would let me know if further assistance was needed. This was the last contact I had with Dr. HYNEK or with anyone else having interest in this report.

In my judgement, this was the only noteworthy UFO investigation that I ever covered. Considering the public focus on UFO’s [sic] at the time (1960), it was surprising to me that no one from ATIC or other Air Force interests come [sic] to the scene to assist us in our investigation of this unusual sighting.

It should be noted here that the Air Force did attempt to analyze the “paint” samples that were recovered. According to the Project Blue Book file, “Samples of paint from impact area obtained and correspondence with paint from rocket samples proved negative. Apparent rocket, however paint samples proved negative and no other physical evidence found.”

We have here, an opportunity to look beyond the activities of Blue Book at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. We see that some investigations were carried out by the intelligence officers and NCOs at the Air Force base closest to the event. There is nothing here to suggest that the investigation wasn’t competent. They talked to the witnesses, both Arnold who saw the object and those who heard it fly over. They gathered samples of soil, the metal debris labeled as “paint chips” for some reason, and the tree limbs and leaves. We do have some results from the analysis but those seem to be inadequate at best. We also know that Hynek requested additional samples be gathered but we don’t know anything about the analysis of that additional material.

I’m not sure why they even worried about the alleged missile testing in the Gulf of Texas. That gulf is, at least, more than a hundred miles from the impact site, and the actual testing, if there was such testing, could have been several hundred miles away. The only indication of this is one man who heard a warning issued over the commercial radio. Had such a warning been issued, then the FAA would have issued a NOTAM (Notice to Airmen) and that warning would be available in the Operations section at England Air Force Base. Given that this was an Air Force base, I’m not sure why Plympton or one of the others didn’t ask the Operations Officer about it. This information is unverified and at this point, useless.

The real problem here, at least for me, was the disappearance of the samples and the analysis of them. Once the material had been gathered in Louisiana and sent on to ATIC and Blue Book, we learn very little about it in the case file. We know it was gathered and we know that the metallic debris was not identified. I’m not overly impressed with the unverified statement from Plympton that Hynek had said that the debris could not be identified as “having come from ore deposits found on this planet.” If there was something in writing in the file, some additional analysis, then would be a major find. Without that sort of documentation, it is interesting but it is also unverified. While I don’t believe Plympton invented the quote, it is certainly possible that he misinterpreted it, or that subsequent analysis revealed the source of the debris. No one ever got back to Plympton with that analysis and I find no reference to it anywhere in the Blue Book files.

However, it must be noted that the case was labeled as “unidentified,” at a time when Blue Book was busy changing designations to remove cases from the unidentified category and when the prevailing attitude was to accept “possible” answers as the true answer without qualification. That this one was left as “unidentified,” especially since there was physical evidence involved is significant.

In the end we have a case that has no explanation, with physical evidence and a suggestion by one of the investigating officials that, at one point, those at Blue Book were looking toward the extraterrestrial as the solution. Granted, without additional information, we shouldn’t make that leap, but the conclusion is intriguing.

*I can find no evidence that Fort Polk was closed at this time. I note that the armor division that had been stationed there was moved to Fort Hood in 1959, which would have required a draw down of forces at Polk. While the fort, in 1960, might have had areas closed (artillery ranges for example), it seems that the post was not completely closed and eventually became a huge training site for infantry soldiers. I took my basic training at Polk in 1967.

Coast to Coast - Sightings (October 22, 2020)

 For the latest of the Coast to Coast report, I mentioned that James Fox’s film, The Phenomenon, had provided the source of the Navy Tic Tac videos. According to him, it was Christopher Mellon who leaked the footage.

This did open a larger issue that wasn’t talked about and it was some of the reviews of the film that suggested there was nothing new in the documentary. Of course, in doing a history of the UFO field, there is going to be a recap of information that has been published or broadcast in the past. The real point is the little nuggets that have somehow not been reported in the past. For those who are immersed in the UFO field, some of it will be familiar, but there are far more out there who are not aware of what has gone on before. It is necessary to recap all that information to bring everyone up to speed. For those who would like to evaluate the film for themselves rather than read what someone else thought, you can find it here:

https://www.amazon.com/Phenomenon-John-Podesta/dp/B08HR6QD3V

I did mention a UFO sighting on April 23, 2020, from Pennsylvania. I don’t have much more information than presented during the show. The case came from Rob Swiatek and from MUFON. Check out the MUFON website for additional information.

The final case is one that I have always found interesting, given that the explanation offered for it was that it was a “phenomenon so rare it had never been seen before or since,” which, is, of course, no explanation at all. According to what I could find, and what I published in The Best of Project Blue Book, following are the details.

The report was made Captain James R. Howard, a pilot for British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC), and who had crossed the Atlantic 250 times, and by members of his flight crew. On June 30, 1954, he spotted something that he could not identify and other crew members saw it as well. According to Howard’s statement as published:

I was in command of a BOAC Boeing Strato cruiser en route from New York to London via Goose Bay Labrador (refueling stop). Soon after crossing overhead Seven Islands at 19,000 feet, True Airspeed 230 kts, both my co-pilot and I became aware of something moving along off our port beam at a lower altitude at a distance of maybe five miles, in and out of a broken layer of Strato Cumulus cloud. As we watched, these objects climbed above the cloud and we could now clearly see one large and six small. As we flew on towards Goose Bay the large object began to change shape and the smaller to move relative to the larger…

We informed Goose Bay that we had something odd in sight and they made arrangements to vector a fighter (F94?) on to us. Later I changed radio frequency to contact this fighter; the pilot told me he had me in sight on radar closing me head-on at 20 miles. At that the small objects seemed to enter the larger, and then the big one shrank. I gave descriptions of this to the fighter and a bearing of the objects from me. I then had to change back to Goose frequency for descent clearance. I don’t know if the fighter saw anything as he hadn’t landed when I left Goose for London.

Jenny Randles, writing in The UFO Conspiracy, expanding on this, mentioned that Lee Boyd, the first officer, alerted Goose Bay that there was an unidentified object escorting them. Goose Bay told them that an interceptor would be launched with the call sign of Pinto One.

Although the BOAC crew never saw the interceptor, and the radar on the fighter never painted the object, the BOAC crew were told that the radar at Goose Bay did see it. That would, of course, eliminate some sort of natural phenomenon given the observations of the flight crew. It also provided a bit of instrumentality for the sighting, something that was outside the problems of human perception.

According to Randles, when the aircraft landed at Goose Bay at 1:51 a.m., the crew was met by both US Air Force and Canadian officials that included intelligence officers. Both pilots, Howard and Boyd, were taken away to be debriefed. The navigator H. McDonnell, said that the flight logs were taken by the Air Force and that he was questioned about their airspeed and direction. His interrogation didn’t last very long. He said the pilots were gone much longer.

That wasn’t the end of it. Once they reached London, the pilots were ordered to the Air Ministry. The explanation offered then for the sighting was that the crew and some of the passengers had seen a solar eclipse. The trouble was that the eclipse had not begun when the sighting was made.

Howard, in a report in the New York Times said that the objects resembled “a large burst of flak and six smaller blobs.” He had refined the description in other reports, saying that the UFO was opaque, dark and jelly-fish-like. He also said that all but one of the crew and many of the passengers had seen the object. In one newspaper article, Howard said, “sometimes it was wedge shape, sometimes like a dumbbell, sometimes like a sphere with tail-like projections. The six smaller objects dodged about, either in front or behind.”

McDonnell met up with Howard some months later. He asked Howard what had happened at the Air Ministry. Howard responded, “Sorry. I can’t say. You know the score.”

Howard, his crew and passengers, however, were not alone spotting the strange object. According to the Blue Book file, more information came from a ship, USS Edisto, in the area. They described the same thing. The ship’s crew identified the object as Mars and suggested that there were “mirage conditions” on that date which could have influenced the sighting from the air.

The file confirmed the attempted intercept. The fighter pilot, who wasn’t identified by name, said that no intercept was made, meaning he didn’t see the object. He also said that he did not make radar contract with it.

The file also contained a message that had been sent to various commands. It said, “NEAC evaluates sighting as unknown natural phenomena cma (comma) possibly a mirage as a temperature inversion in referenced area made this condition possible pd (period).” That information came from Project Blue Book.

The Blue Book file also provided some additional information. Howard estimated that they watched the objects for about eighteen minutes. Eleven other crew members verified the information. One of the messages ended with “No further information available. Duty officer regards as improbable threat to US.”

Given this lack of information, this certainly not one of Blue Book’s best cases. The explanation seems to be clear, and while some might reject that explanation because it came from the Air Force, it is based on observations made at the time by another set of witnesses. There seems to be no reason to reject their solution.

The Condon Committee, however, thought the case deserved more attention. That might be explained by their interest in weather related phenomena that could cause UFO sightings. In a chapter called, “Optical and Radar Analysis of Field Case,” it was noted, “Very little meteorological data are available for this part of the world on the date in question, so that the presence of significant optical propagation mechanisms can be neither confirmed nor ruled out. This sighting was examined because of the ‘Mirage’ explanation. In fact, the author noted, “Nevertheless, certain facts in the case are strongly suggestive of an optical mirage phenomenon.

The Condon scientists went on to explain that the mirage might have been caused by a reflection from over the horizon. This is called superior mirage and has been reported often over the ocean. They then qualified that by writing:

The principal difficultly with this explanation, besides having to hypothesize the existence of the mirage-producing layer, is how to account for the anisotrophy [being directionally dependent] of the mirage. Anisotrophy of this sort, i.e. a mirage limited to certain viewing azimuths, is common in earthbound mirages when viewed from a single location. But a mirage layer through which a reflected image could be seen only in one, constant principal direction (plus a view smaller “satellite” images over a distance of 85 n. mil [nautical miles] is quite unusual.

What this says is that the Air Force was happy with the mirage answer, and with the suggestion that Mars was the culprit. And it says that the Condon Committee, looking at cases in which some sort of weather phenomenon is suspected, ended up not agreeing with the Air Force.

They added that there was a “slim possibility” that the aircraft itself was responsible for the “image layer through intensification (by compression induced by the shock wave of the aircraft’s passage through the air) of a barely subcritical layer, i.e. one in which the temperature gradient is just a little bit less than the value required to produce a mirage.”

But none of this is really all that important. It is the final conclusion, published in the Condon Committee’s final report which says, “This unusual sighting should therefore be assigned to the category of some almost certainly natural phenomenon, which is so rare that it apparently has never been reported before or since.”

Or, in other words, they had no real explanation for it but believed it to be natural, but they didn’t know what that would be. They just refused to say that they had failed to identify the source of the sighting which would have been the honest thing to do. After all, they didn’t identify it.

And that last paragraph from the Condon Committee report on the sighting is what demanded the mention of the case. It gives an insight into the mission of the Condon Committee, and it provides a look at the Air Force investigation. True, the Air Force relied on the observations of the crew of a ship in the region, but that doesn’t seem to be unreasonable. Had the “mirage, Mars” answer been left intact, that would be a reasonable conclusion. Since it was taken a step further, there is no reasonable conclusion. It is “Unidentified.”

The Best of Project Blue Book contains many of the reports by hundreds of witnesses that the Air Force managed to ignore. It provides a glimpse into that investigation and shows how the data were manipulated. You can find the book here:

https://www.amazon.com/Best-Project-Blue-Book-ebook/dp/B0869SRQMK/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Kevin+Randle&qid=1603479818&sr=8-1