Oxnard UFO Sighting - 22/23 March 1957

Sometimes I chase footnotes and sometimes I’m just following up on a case and sometimes I just stumble into something that is important. This time I was researching a case from 1957, which is something we all should do… take a long look at some of the old reports to see if we can learn anything new about them not

Dick Hall

just look at cases from 1957.

This particular sighting, one that Dick Hall included in his The UFO Evidence, and one that was prominently featured in NICAP’s The U.F.O. Investigator in July 1957. Hall wrote:

Confidential report obtained from CAA (now FAA) radar operator confirming visual sightings at Oxnard AFB and vicinity. Report certified by NICAP board members…

At 9:55 p.m., Mr. K. E. Jefferson, Pasadena, saw a brilliant flashing object moving over Downey. Between that time and midnight, police switchboards throughout the Los Angeles area were flooded with hundreds of calls reporting a UFO. The reports poured into the Pasadena Filter Center.

According to Capt. Joseph Fry, commanding officer of the Center, the first official report came in at 11:10 p.m.; at which time Capt. Fry notified Air Defense Radar.

“Between 2310 (11:10 p.m.) and 2350,” Capt. Fry said in a statement to newsman Russ Leadabrand, “we had many reports. We had reports that indicated the UFO was orange-red, flashing a bright white light. Some of the callers claimed they heard the ‘sound of reports’ when the light flashed from the object.”

At the Filter Center itself, Air Force T/Sgt. Dewey Crow and newsman Les Wagner watched the UFO maneuver slowly around the area for over an hour. Just after midnight, Mrs. Robert Beaudoin [I have never found a reference to her first name in all the documentation that I have reviewed], wife of an Oxnard AFB Captain [would this be known as credibility by marriage], telephoned the base tower to report sighting the UFO. It was described as a large, silent object, flashing brilliant red light, and maneuvering above the Santa Rose Valley.

An F-89 interceptor [actually there were two] attempted to locate the object but the Air Force denied it was able to make contact, although at the same time witnesses on the ground could see the UFO plainly near one of the Oxnard runways.

Reports continued into early morning hours, with witnesses in various locations describing objects which sometimes hovered, and sometimes moved swiftly.

The CAA radar report, obtained later, virtually proved that unexplained objects were operating over Los Angeles. The radar operator’s report:

“At 2350 (11:50 p.m.) I was watching the radar scope when noticed a target about 15 miles northwest and moving northwest. At first I thought it was a jet, then I noticed it was moving much faster than anything I had ever seen on the scope. About 40 miles northwest it came to an abrupt stop and reversed course, all within a period of about three seconds. It then traveled back along its course for about 20 miles, reversed course again and disappeared off the scope at 50 miles (our radar reaches out only 50 miles).

“Approximately 5 minutes later 2 more targets appeared and disappeared off the scope in the same direction as the first; and these we had time to clock. They traveled 20 miles [the actual letter said 30 miles] in 30 seconds which figured out to 3600 mph. A minute or so later a forth target appeared in the same area as the other 3, 10 or 15 miles northwest, and went off the scope to the northwest at 3600 mph.

“Our radar does not give height of aircraft so I couldn’t give you the height, however they had to be about 10,000 feet or lower because our radar’s maximum height is about 10,000 feet.”

This case is not nearly as strong as it seems here. The timeline is inaccurate. This happened, I believe because of the timing of the sightings, which is to say that they started late in the evening of March 22 and carried over into the early morning of March 23. A second series of sightings started in the Los Angeles area late in the evening on March 23, or about 22 hours after the first report.

To clarify, Beaudoin’s sighting was made on March 22, at 11:50 p.m., and lasted into the early morning of March 23. Please notice here that Beaudoin’s sighting began on March 22. Hall, suggested the series of sightings began with Jefferson’s sighting at 9:55 p.m. on March 23. In other words, Jefferson’s sighting was made some 22 hours after Beaudoin and isn’t part of the same series, though they are in the same general area of southern California.

The radar contact at the Long Beach tower was in keeping with Beaudoin’s sighting, but none of the fighters’ on-board radars detected the target and according to the Blue Book file, there were no radar reports from Oxnard AFB. That makes the radar confirmation somewhat problematic.* Sure, it can be argued

No, not UFOs. Venus (ironically the larger of
the lights) and Jupiter. Photo copyright by
Kevin Randle

that the Air Force lied about the lack of radar confirmation, but there is no evidence to support that.

What we have here is a case that began on the evening of March 22 and carried over into the morning of March 23. Although Beaudoin’s sighting was corroborated by her daughter (though no one seemed to have interviewed her), the sheriff’s deputies who were on the seen reported nothing to confirm the sighting. They believed they were seeing stars.

The next day’s sightings from the Los Angeles area do not seem to be part of the Oxnard sighting of the night before. When separated, the Oxnard sighting loses much of its importance because it is basically single witness since the daughter was not interviewed and the sheriff’s deputies on the scene said they didn’t see anything extraordinary. This is a case that should be removed from the files, or, at the very least, marked as “astronomical phenomenon.”

*Although it might be irrelevant, the Long Beach Tower radar reported a failure some 17 minutes after the sighting. That might be coincidence, or it might have caused the radar returns. There is no evidence to support either contention.

Chasing Footnotes Again

When not bogged down in the Roswell Slides controversy, I sometimes engage in what I think of as chasing footnotes. One of the purposes of a footnote is to tell where the information originated so that the reader or others interested can review that source for reliability, competence, and any additional information that might be relevant. Too often I find that the footnotes do none of that leaving us with questions about how good that information might be.

Although I don’t mean to pick on Dick Hall and his The UFO Evidence, I find that sometimes the footnotes just don’t add much to our knowledge. On page 121 of that book, Hall wrote:

Venezuela also has a history of sightings by airline pilots and other experienced observers. An orange light closed in on a Venezuelan airliner at 6:45 p.m., January 2, 1955, in the vicinity of Punta San Juan. When the UFO was at close range, the bright light from it shone into the cockpit of the plane intermittently.

According to the footnote, the information came from The APRO Bulletin of April 1955. That entry said:

An orange-tinted light closed in an [sic] a commercial airliner in the vicinity of Punta San Juan, Venezuela at 6:45 p.m. January 2, 1955. The pilot, co-pilot and two other crew members watched the thing until, at close range, it focused some kind of bright light into the cockpit of the plane, at intervals of a few seconds.

And that is all the information that is available. There are no crew member names associated with this, no airline name, it assumes there is a “thing” close by and there is nothing to help us find out what might have happened. There is no way to verify the information, which makes the footnote provided by Dick Hall worthless. It doesn’t provide additional information other than a source that contains the same information and nothing more.

In today’s world, if I was writing the book which was supposed to provide solid evidence for UFOs, I would leave this case out. The only reason it is interesting is the alleged flight crew involvement. If it wasn’t for that, this would case would be ignored. In fact, had it been reported to Project Blue Book (which it wasn’t according to the Blue Book Master Index), it would have been stamped “Insufficient Data for a Scientific Analysis,” and rightly so.

There is another issue with footnotes as well. Richard Dolan, in his UFOs and the National Security State, reported on what Bill Brazel had said about finding some small pieces of debris on the infamous ranch in the Roswell region (page 21). The footnote credits Don Berliner and Stan Friedman for the data (page 84 – 85) of their book, Crash at Corona. They provide some long quotes attributed to Bill Brazel, but there is nothing to tell when or where the interview was conducted. The implication is that they had conducted the interview themselves at some point probably in Brazel’s home, but that isn’t the case.

The interview in question was conducted on February 19, 1989 in Carrizozo, New Mexico by Don Schmitt and me. I created the transcript of the taped interview, and that was shared with Berliner and Friedman. Dolan’s footnote takes you to one source but not the other, original source. You might disagree with the information provided by Brazel, but the tape of that interview does exist so it can be proven that the information as outlined in UFO Crash at Roswell by Schmitt and me contains an accurate transcription of the interview. This gets you to the original source for the quotes which are the point of this exercise.

The problem with the Berliner and Friedman version is that they have altered the interview so that it tends to corroborate the tales told by Gerald Anderson. They added, in brackets, the word “black” in front of the word “sergeant” who had come to interview Brazel much later. There is nothing in the transcript or in the later interviews with Brazel to suggest that any of the soldiers who visited him were of African-American ancestry. In fact, he flat out denied it and that he never said it.

In fact that point came up several years later when another researcher asked me about the discrepancy. Although it had been suggested that Brazel used another derogatory word for the sergeant, that wasn’t true. The racial makeup of that team never came up because they were all Caucasian.

These two footnotes illustrate the importance of proper collection of data and providing that data to the reader… oh hell, I know, I could point a finger at myself for that. I have used footnotes that referenced other work that failed to take it to its ultimate conclusion. Sometimes that just isn’t possible, but in other cases, especially in the world of the Internet, it is extremely simple.