Oskar Linke - Update

The thing about the Internet is that it allows you to communicate with people all over the country and all over the world which helps us get at the truth. For example, J. Allen Hynek said the Oskar Linke UFO landing story was in the Project Blue Book files, so I looked for it. Hynek dated the case as July 9, 1952, but other sources said the sighting was June 17, 1950. I searched the Blue Book index around those dates. July 1952 was a period of intense activity and while, at other times in other years, the index might feature all the sightings received during two or three months on a single page, in July 1952, single dates sometimes took up two pages. In other words, there were a lot of sightings in July 1952. I found nothing in June, July or August of that year that mentioned Linke and his UFO.

There was nothing for the sighting around its correct date in 1950 either. I checked for several months on either side of the date. Some of the sources, other than Hynek, also suggested a report in Project Blue Book, which others said wasn’t there.

As those of you who read comments know, Ralf Buelow, left a comment about this and a link about Linke (I just couldn’t avoid doing that) that showed it was in the Blue Book file. If you haven’t seen that link, here it is:

http://www.bluebookarchive.org/page.aspx?PageCode=MAXW-PBB9-1194

That, of course, took me to Fold3 and their Blue Book file which was a single page entry. I looked at the entries before it and after it, which allowed me to find the entry in the Blue Book index. It is on the page for 1 – 31 March 1952 in the section labeled “Additional Reported Sightings (Not Cases).” It is entry number 1087. It is grouped with a March 15 sighting in Iran and another from Greenfield, Massachusetts. Linke’s sighting (Hasselback, Saxsoni) is from a retyped news clipping and the one from Massachusetts is from the newspaper. The source of the Linke news clipping, which is to say the newspaper, is not identified in the Blue Book file. It is not the same clipping as the one quoted by Hynek in his book, The Hynek UFO Report. Hynek’s report was from a Greek newspaper and the source is listed as I. Kathimerini. No source is provided for the Iran case.

For those of you interested in such things, the report that directly precedes it is from California, and is from either March 31 or April 1, according to Blue Book and therefore has nothing to do with Linke.

The Iran case is a single page that describes a luminous object traveling at great speed that probably wasn’t a meteor, according to the file. The sighting was representative of a number of sightings over the Iranian/Soviet border at the time.

The Massachusetts sighting is an actual newspaper clipping as opposed to a retyped version and it covers some sightings in that state. There is nothing about Linke in that either.

Here’s where we are on this, which says nothing about the sighting itself, but on the reporting of it. Hynek claimed that it came from the CIA, but the Blue Book file does not bear that out. He said it was one of the “unidentifieds” in Blue Book, but the index and the case file do not bear that out. His quotes, apparently from the Greek newspaper, do not match the quotes from the Blue Book file, though the information does match, which of course it would since both reports comes from Oskar Linke. I see nothing on the Blue Book report that identifies a newspaper which is why I say it is not the one Hynek quoted.

I thank Ralf Buelow for the information and the link.