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:
Hi Kevin, I would like to know more about the “inland hurricane” that you have mentioned. It obviously did tremendous damage. How much warning did your area have? What meteorological conditions created it? Can you direct myself and others to a website that documents and discusses the event? How long did the storm last? Did it include lightning and hail as well as wind? Very curious. Might even be a good topic for one of your shows. Thank you for your help, Tom Whitmore 210-260-2447
ReplyDeleteTom -
ReplyDeleteWell, since the show is about UFOs, I'm not sure that a discussion of the derecho (the name for the inland hurricane) is appropriate.
We knew that there was a line of thunderstorms coming, and had watched them on weather radar on my iPad. The local weather people were saying there was a possibility of winds of 100 mph, but the ultimate size of the storm was not well communicated... I don't think they expected the somewhat sudden increase in intensity.
There was rain associated with it but we only received something like a half inch. No hail in this area but the winds weren't gusting to 100 mph, they were pretty much steady with gusts, according to the instruments of 112 and later measured to 145 mph. I watched the trees bending nearly double and many did not survive. Thousands of trees were down in the city when the storm was over, thousands of buildings damaged and many homes destroyed.
The storm lasted for about an hour. We lost power early on and I was unable to reconnect to the radar to find out what was going on... the cable went out, and of course, without power my WiFi was down.
You might be able to find specific information about our city's problems at KCRG-TV or KGAN-TV or the Cedar Rapids Gazette. As I said, I was more nervous with this than during mortar attacks because I didn't know what to expect.