Project Blue Book Episode 8 - Lights in Korea

Episode Eight had virally nothing to do with Project Blue Book. Oh, they paid lip service to it and both Hynek and Quinn were there, but the case was not from the Blue Book files, the Soviets are still spying, and Hynek lost the keen little thing he had stolen from a classified area. But in the end, there was no real relation to anything in the Blue Book files.

As for the military exercise in the beginning, it provided nothing more than typical Hollywood speculation. In such an exercise, the soldiers would not have been carrying live ammunition for the very reason that they showed. Surprised by lights flashing around they didn’t understand, they opened fire with no regard to impact sites

The general who tells
Quinn, "That's an order."

or where other soldiers involved might be. They just shot up the area using high power rifles (M-1s, which are .30 caliber). The rounds could be deadly up to a mile away, but the soldiers were firing into the woods indiscriminately.

Since this was an exercise, there was no reason for them to have live ammunition. The real-life event that this was modeled after took place in Korea in 1951 and that is a whole different issue. Of course, the soldiers had live ammunition and probably a lot of it. In Iraq we were issued a basic load, which meant that everyone of us had 210 rounds for the M-16, though given the circumstances, we might be carrying only 30 to 60 rounds, and yes, the weapons were often loaded and a round chambered. But that was a combat environment.

Oh, in my entire military career, I don’t remember hearing superior who gave an order to a subordinate saying, “That’s an order.” We all know what an order is and we just don’t punctuate the command by saying, “That’s an order.” Hollywood loves to underscore these orders by telling us all that it’s an order.

Spoilers: We learn, in the end, that this was not a display of alien craft, but some sort of experiment that not even the two generals in charge knew about. It was to test the soldiers’ reactions as they were exposed to some sort of psychotropic drugs or gas or something. They failed the experiment but we did glimpse some sort of oversight committee… or rather their meeting room, which, BTW, was pretty fancy. But when you’re dealing with the top of the military chain of command, you do get fancy.

So, what was the case that they based this episode on? It took place in May 1951, in Korea but wasn’t reported for more than 30 years when John Timmerman, learned of it from one of the soldiers who had been there at the time. This comes from the NICAP website which can be found at:

https://www.nicap.org/springkor.htm

This text is an edited transcript of an interview between Mr. Francis P. Wall, a private first class (PFC) in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, and John Timmerman, an associate of the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) in Chicago, Illinois. The interview took place in January, 1987. Noted UFO researcher Richard F. Haines checked military records and found Mr. Wall listed as a Korean combatant in the infantry unit he names below. Haines also requested and received from Mr. Wall a drawing of the aerial object he claims to have seen. The drawing depicts a very typical "flying saucer." CNI News thanks John Timmerman for permission to reprint this text. Mr. Wall recounts his experience as follows: 

This event that I am about to relate to you is the truth, so help me God. It happened in the early Spring of 1951 in Korea. We were in the Army infantry, 25th Division, 27th Regiment, 2nd Battalion, 'Easy' Company. We were in what is known on the military maps as the Iron Triangle, near Chorwon. 

It is night. We are located on the slopes of a mountain, below [which] there is a Korean village. Previously we have sent our men into this village to warn the populace that we are going to bombard it with artillery. On this night, we were doing just that. We had aerial artillery bursts coming in. 

We suddenly noticed on our right-hand side what appeared to be a jack-o-lantern come wafting down across the mountain. And at first no one thought anything about it. So, we noticed that this thing continued on down to the village to where, indeed, the artillery air bursts were exploding. It had an orange glow in the beginning. We further noticed that this object was [so] quick that it could get into the center of an airburst of artillery and yet remain unharmed. 

[The] time element on this, I would say, [was] anywhere from, oh, forty-five minutes to an hour all told. 

But then this object approached us. And it turned a blue-green brilliant light. It's hard to distinguish the size of it; there's no way to compare it. The light was pulsating. This object approached us. 

I asked for and received permission from Lt. Evans, our company commander at that time, to fire upon this object, which I did with an M-1 rifle with armor-piercing bullets. And I did hit it. It must have been metallic because you could hear when the projectile slammed into it. 

Now why would that bullet damage this craft if the artillery rounds didn't? I don't know, unless they had dropped their protective field around them, or whatever. But the object went wild, and the light was going on and off. It went off completely once, briefly. And it was moving erratically from side to side as though it might crash to the ground. Then, a sound -- we had heard no sound previous to this -- the sound of, like, diesel locomotives revving up. That's the way this thing sounded. 

And then, we were attacked. We were swept by some form of a ray that was emitted in pulses, in waves that you could visually see only when it was aiming directly at you. That is to say, like a searchlight sweeps around and... you would see it coming at you. Now you would feel a burning, tingling sensation all over your body, as though something were penetrating you. 

So, the company commander, Lt. Evans, hauled us into our bunkers. We didn't know what was going to happen. We were scared. These are underground dugouts where you have peep holes to look out to fire at the enemy. So, I'm in my bunker with another man. We're peeping out at this thing. It hovered over us for a while, lit up the whole area with its light, and then I saw it shoot off at a 45-degree angle, that quick, just there and gone. That quick. And it was as though that was the end of it. 

But, three days later the entire company of men had to be evacuated by ambulance. They had to cut roads in there and haul them out. They were too weak to walk. They had dysentery. Then subsequently, when the doctors did see them, they had an extremely high white blood cell count which the doctors could not account for. 

Now in the military, especially the Army, each day you file a company report. We had a confab about that. Do we file it in the report or not? And the consensus was 'No.' Because they'd lock every one of us up and think we were crazy. At that time, no such thing as a UFO had ever been heard of, and we didn't know what it was. 

I still don't know what it was. But I do know that since that time I have periods of disorientation, memory loss, and I dropped from 180 pounds to 138 pounds after I got back to this country. And I've had great difficulty keeping my weight up. Indeed, I'm retired and disabled today." 

The one thing that I take away from this, is that we have another episode in which they deal with lights in the sky. Not a solid craft. And the real tales on which these episodes are based seem to have the same sort of observations. Lights in the sky, or as the real Allen Hynek labeled them, “nocturnal lights.” I’m sure they are building to something… and that might be the Washington Nationals in which the observations were lights in the sky, though these were tracked by radar.