REPORT ON THE
UFO WAVE OF 1947
By
Ted Bloecher
Introduction
By Dr. James E. McDonald
Senior Physicist
Institute of Atmospheric Physics
University of
ArizonaInstitute of Atmospheric Physics
©
Copyright 1967
By Ted Bloecher
All Rights Reserved
This book was reproduced (2005) by Jean Waskiewicz,
and Francis Ridge with
exclusive permission from the author and is presented here in its updated
form as an ongoing project. Working closely on this project is author Ted
Bloecher and Project 1947's Jan Aldrich. We welcome any additional
information or corrections on erroneous information already contained in
the report, as part of this updated version.
exclusive permission from the author and is presented here in its updated
form as an ongoing project. Working closely on this project is author Ted
Bloecher and Project 1947's Jan Aldrich. We welcome any additional
information or corrections on erroneous information already contained in
the report, as part of this updated version.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
SECTION
PAGE
( i )
-----------------------------------------------
Section V - Chronology and References (88 pages) Cross References to Section/Page Number New addition (1) Cross Reference by Case Number (2) Cross Reference by Sighting Date Terms Methods and Conventions Used 1 Case Chronology (Seperate pdf file) [NOT HAVE IT] 2-76 References Listed by Case Number 77-88 Credits 88 New addition Section VI - UFO Cases Not in the Original Report New addition Appendix 1 to 14 Additional Data on Sightings 1 Listing of Newspapers Consulted, by States 7 Listing of Books and Magazines Consulted 10 Map of United States Time Zones for 1947 11 Time Zone Chart 12 Localities that Observed Daylight Saving Time 13 Statistical Chart, by States, for June and July, 1947 14 Index 1 to 7 Maps Map #1 (June 1 - 15) Facing I - 2 Map #2 (June 16 - 20) Facing I - 2 Map #3 (June 21 - 23) Facing I - 3 Map #4 (June 24) Facing I - 3 Map #5 (June 25 - 26) Facing I - 4 Map #6 (June 27 - 28) Facing I - 4 Map #7 (June 29 - 30) Facing I - 5 Map #8 (July 1 - 2) Facing I - 5 Map #9 (July 3) Facing I - 6 Map #10 (July 4) Facing I - 7 Local Map A Portland, Oregon, July 4 Facing I - 8 Local Map B Bay Area, California, July 5 Facing I - 8 Map #11 (July 5) Facing I - 9 Map #12 (July 6) Facing I - 10 Local Map C Bay Area, California, July 6 Facing I - 11 Local Map D Birmingham, Alabama, July 6 Facing I - 11 Map #13 (July 7) Facing I - 12 Local Map E Chicago, Illinois, July 7 Facing I - 13 Local Map F Seattle, Washington, July 7 Facing I - 13 Map #14 (July 8) Facing I - 14 Map #15 (July 9 – 10) Facing I - 15 Map #16 (July 11 – 15) Facing I - 16 Map #17 (July 20 – 30) Facing II - 1 Drawings [THERE ARE ALL IN THE TEXT] Chart Illustrating Number of Cases Daily Frontispiece Case 39 - June 24, near Mt. Rainier, Washington I - 3 Case 306 - July 5, Bethesda, Maryland II - 15 Case 84 - June 27, Seattle, Washington II - 20 Case 46 - June 24, Seattle, Washington II - 20 Case 838 - July 13, Gardner, Massachusetts III - 1 Case 352 - About July 5, Seattle, Washington III - 19 Case 675 - July 7, Phoenix, Arizona (1) (2) IV - 5 Case 790 - July 9 or 10, Morristown, New Jersey IV – 6 Photographs [THERE ARE ALL IN THE TEXT] Case 257 - July 4, Lake City, Washington Facing IV - 2 Case 651 - July 7, near Pontiac, Michigan Facing IV - 3 Case 683 - July 7, Louisville, Kentucky Facing IV - 4 Case 675 - July 7, Phoenix, Arizona (1) (2) IV – 5
Abstract
The Report on the UFO Wave of 1947 discusses the first contemporary wave of UFO sightings in this country, which reached its peak on July 6 - 7, 1947. It includes a detailed chronology of more than 850 UFO cases for June and July with complete references, primarily from 140 newspapers in 90 cities in the United States and Canada, but also from the files of NICAP and Project Blue Book, as well as references from a number of publications on UFOs.About 250 of these reports are discussed in detail, with reference to patterns of appearance and behavior of the objects reported, to special types of witnesses, and to other special features. A summary of the period, the pattern of press coverage, and its effects on the subject, are discussed. Maps are provided to illustrate the daily distribution of sightings for the period.
© Copyright 1967By Ted BloecherAll Rights ReservedThe little harlots will caper, and freaks will distract attention, and the clowns will break the rhythm of the whole with their buffooneries -- but the solidity of the procession as a whole: the impressiveness of things that pass and pass, and keep on and keep on and keep on coming.The irresistibleness of things that neither threaten nor jeer nor defy, but arrange themselves in mass-formations that pass and pass and keep on passing.So, by the damned, I mean the excluded.Charles Fort, from The Book of the Damned
Chart Illustrating Number of Cases Daily, June 15 - July 15
-------------------------------------------------------
I N T R O D U C T I O N
Just over twenty years ago, the problem of the
Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) burst into public attention. In a single
two-week period in the summer of 1947, the UFO problem was laid in confusing
disorder before the American public by means of banner headlines and
wire-stories in profusion. In retrospect, it seems clear that the visible record
of 1947 emergence of the UFO problem is primarily a journalistic record.
Although scientists, the military, and a few governmental spokesmen took minor
parts in the dramatic entry of UFOs onto the modern scene, newspapermen wrote
and delivered the key lines that made the journalists role in the
drama preeminent.
Hence, to reconstruct that eventful public
emergence of the UFO problem, one must turn to the nation's newspapers and
review the day-by-day (sometimes hour-by-hour) unfolding of the evidence --
evidence that something of truly unusual nature was occurring.
A few writers have already nibbled at the edge of a journalistic review of that
curtain-raising two-week episode in late June and early July, 1947. In the
present book, Bloecher gives us what will probably come to be regarded as the
definitive analysis of that important episode in UFO and journalistic history.
His approach was straightforward: Because his professional work takes him to
many parts of the country, he began several years ago to devote maximum possible
time to digging into local library files of newspapers, in order to extract
original 1947 press material reporting the UFO problem in all its dimensions. As
his files grew he turned to other sources, including Air Force Project Blue Book
files and files of independent investigatory groups. From all this, he has
assembled and put into far clearer order than could have been apparent to 1947
readers a systematic recounting of the 1947 birth of the UFO problem. This book
is the result of his studies. I commend it to the attention of all serious
students of the UFO problem.
(
iii )
Doubtless, most other readers will be as stunned as I was to realize that
already in the first two weeks after Kenneth Arnold's Mt. Rainier report of June
24, 1947, press reports of other American sightings of
highly unconventional aerial objects numbered not the dozen or so that most of
us might recall, but many hundreds. Since Bloecher is careful to
concede that his own searching cannot possibly have gleaned every last report
from the 1947 press files, we can safely round upwards his collection of about
800 reports to an estimate that at least some thousand sightings of
unidentified objects probably occurred within the United States in midsummer
1947, the bulk of these coming within a rather sharply defined wavecrest
centered on about July 7. As Bloecher properly emphasizes, this clearly marks
the episode as one of the outstanding sighting-waves on record.
(It would be most unwise to draw the conclusion
that a thousand reports in about two weeks earns this episode the
distinction
of being the outstanding wave on record; unfortunately no other UFO
researcher
has done for other American waves the same kind of diligent searching
that Bloecher has accomplished for the 1947 episode. Thus, the November
1957,
episode might well outstrip the 1947 summer episode, if only there
were
reasonably full documentation at hand. And then, there are foreign waves
in the
running, too; September-October, 1954, as Michel's work has shown,
constituted a
most remarkable UFO sighting-wave in France and nearby parts of
Europe.)
In the two decades that have passed since 1947,
there has been distressingly little progress made towards elucidating the true
nature of the unidentified flying objects. But, elucidated or not, they have
refused to go away. Press fun-poking and curiously fallacious official
"explanations" have most assuredly held up real scientific progress by conveying
the distinct impression that the UFO problem has been only a nonsense problem.
But ridicule and snide comments notwithstanding, citizens in all walks of life
have continued to report, often in the deepest puzzlement and often in a state
of suddenly-enhanced concern, that they have witnessed objects fitting no
conventional natural or technological categories -- unidentifiable aerial objects
of craft-like nature. This being so, it seems long overdue for the scientific
community to put aside arrogance and prejudgment, to overlook preconceptions and
past glib comments about all the unbalanced persons who just don't know what
they are seeing, and to dig into the facts. That those "facts" are, today, not
objective instrumental meter-readings but anecdotal accounts of things seen by
persons other than Nobelists, is unfortunate. If only science had not been so
casual back in 1947, so ready to believe what so many feature-writers and
ill-informed official spokesmen had to say about UFOs, we might today have an
abundance of meter-readings with which to work. But 1947 began a two-decade
period of misinformation, so we are still hardly at the start of an adequate
scientific examination of UFOs.
(
iv )
To
understand how that lamentable situation came about, one must begin by reviewing
the manner in which various patterns of reaction to the UFO problem became
established almost within days of the Arnold report. Bloecher’s work lays before
us a fascinating summary of those crucial days of initial journalistic
confrontation of the UFO puzzle.
To keep the record entirely clear, it is necessary
that I draw special attention to the adjective "journalistic" in that last
sentence. Bloecher does not here purport to present results of his own
investigative reporting of UFO sightings in mid-1947. Nor is he able to vouch,
on the basis of independent checking, for the reportorial accuracy of the
hundreds of press accounts whose rise and fall he explores. Since we all know
that standard press reporting falls well short of 100 per cent accuracy, we
must not here equate press reports to scientific accounts.
To form my own estimates of the probable order of
reliability of these 1947 reports, I undertook a search for witnesses in
several dozen of the more intriguing 1947 cases discussed in the text. The
results of this sampling were interesting; they were also encouraging in the
sense that they pointed to the generally correct impression one draws
from reading all these press accounts: Even after reportorial errors and the
like are allowed for, the mid-1947 episode seems to constitute a period of
remarkable sightings by many level-headed persons.
In the course of my cross-checks, I found that the
UFO problem has been with us so long that some key witnesses of the 1947 period
are already dead. Others have moved away from the locales of their 1947
sightings and are not any longer to be found by the type of telephone-searching
to which my own check had to be limited. A few, but only very few, have
forgotten key details of what they saw and reported; but most emphasized the
vividness with which they can still recall the unusual objects they saw, or the
unprecedented performance characteristics that stunned them, back there twenty
years ago.
In my search, I found one outright hoax that was exposed within a day of the
initial press report. The victim gave full details to the same reporters that
put the hoax on the wires; they weren't interested in clearing up the hoax, and
it stood uncorrected in the files for Bloecher to add to his initial collection.
( v )
And in the search I found many cases in which details of the
sightings were erroneously reported, both in local and in wire stories.
Newspaper reporting, to repeat, leaves a great deal to be desired in the way of accuracy -- whether
journalists care to admit it or not. But what I found to be true from the checks
I was able to make on about twenty-five more or less randomly selected 1947
cases for which I was able to locate one or more key witnesses was this: Even
after one corrected the reporters' errors (wrong times, wrong directions, wrong
shapes, wrong names, etc.), one still had left a high percentage of exceedingly
interesting and basically unexplainable accounts of unconventional aerial
objects. And frequently I found by telephone-interviewing of the witnesses that
there was much more significance to the full sighting account than the original
reporter had been able to put into his own press story.
Hence, I feel justified in asserting that
Bloecher's account is much more than a journalistic review per se; I
believe the picture that takes shape as one reads his account is a generally
quite correct picture, the random defects of which are admittedly unfortunate
but do not spoil the over-all image of an episode of great scientific
significance.
I believe that it is important that many more such studies now be undertaken --
with resources that permit a full recheck of the type that I was able to conduct
merely on a small-sample basis. Many physical scientists (unlike their
confreres in the social sciences) scorn interview methods of acquiring data. I
share their strong preference for meter-readings; but I deplore their
unwillingness to look at anecdotal data when that's all there is immediately at
hand. To escalate concern for the UFO problem to the level where funds and
energies will he poured into the design of objective techniques of
data-gathering (electromagnetic sensors, improved radar reporting, etc.) will
require that science begin by carefully sifting anecdotal data. A first step
therein is that of assembling reports; and for the mid-1947 episode Bloecher has done just that for us.
The point I stress is that my own sample-check convinces me that the bulk of
these 1947 reports must be viewed as reasonably well reported. This, in itself,
carries very important implications. For it implies that within about two weeks
hundreds and hundreds of American citizens saw phenomena for which science has
no ready explanations. Venus, fireballs, sundogs, and the rest of the
"misidentified natural phenomena" of which we have subsequently heard so much
in official disclaimers, must be suspected in many more than a few of those
reports. But then, as now, one has a large residue of quite inexplicable
phenomena reported by persons who appear to be entirely sane, reliable, and
often very articulate. And here and there, one finds true gems of the world of
reports, cases where highly experienced persons saw objects which they could
describe in no other terms than "machines" or "craft" or "vehicles" -- UFOs,
briefly.
(
vi )
What I see in all this as primarily important is the abundance of good
case-material scattered through a dross of less reliable reports -- an abundance
that official agencies should have recognized by late 1947 as constituting a
problem of the utmost scientific importance. No such recognition appears to have
occurred. The U. S. Army Air Force (which became the U. S. Air Force in
January, 1948) quite naturally acquired official responsibility for the UFO
problem before 1947 was over; there was understandable concern that these
supersonic discs might be weapons of some hostile foreign power. They were
maneuvering in our airspace, so our air force received and retained (or, as some
subsequent developments suggest, couldn't get rid of) the responsibility for
clarifying the mystery of the UFOs. Project Sign was created formally within
the new U. S. Air Force on January 22, 1948, seven short days after USAF
acquired its separate status within our Department of Defense. Project Sign,
followed by Project Grudge and Project Blue Book, became the administrative
vehicles in which headway was supposed to be made towards the goal of explaining
the UFOs. In fact, those vehicles made almost no net progress; so one now looks
back on twenty years of confusion and ineptitude, and one asks how it was ever
possible that this bulk of evidence that burst out in mid-1947 became, itself,
the greatest body of officially "misinterpreted phenomena" in scientific
history. One must, I believe, read Bloecher's work with that question clearly in
mind. How could so much evidence be brushed aside, ignored, and made fun of? How
was the significance of the UFO reports widely ignored already in 1947?
Historians of science are, I believe, doomed to incredulity that so much
evidence got lost in an administrative shuffle and became only a first stratum
underlying twenty-years-later deposits of more such startling evidence for the
existence of a new scientific problem of extraordinary interest.
I write these introductory comments at a moment when I have behind me about
eighteen months of intensive examination of the UFO problem. That examination
has convinced me that, far from being a nonsense problem, the UFO problem is
perhaps the outstanding scientific problem confronting mankind. Those are
strong words, and I intend them to be; they are not lightly written. I believe
we must radically reorient scientific attitudes towards this steadily-growing
body of UFO reports and that we must enlist the aid of really top-notch
scientific talent in the difficult task of bringing ultimate order out of the
chaos into which twenty years of ridicule have brought the subject.
( vii )
Bloecher's study has, for me, brought out at least
one very significant insight into the "ridicule-lid" that has so long kept the
bulk of the UFO evidence from open scrutiny. The populace itself has
well-imprinted patterns of rejection of observations that do not seem to fit
within the established world scientific picture.
I shall enlarge a bit on this. I have seen so much press and official ridicule
of UFO witnesses in the course of my recent study that I have evidently
overlooked somewhat the ingrained tendency for even untrained laymen to be
reluctant to report openly something they have seen with their own eyes when it
flies in the face of familiar experience. Bloecher's material shows, on close
inspection, that even before any Air Force pronouncements, before any
press-reported scientific scoffing in early July, 1947, witnesses were
exhibiting quite definite reluctance to report the unprecedented aerial
phenomena they had seen. This, for social scientists, deserves bold
underscoring as an index of the scientific attitudes of our times. I smiled to
hear an eminent American physicist deplore, on a recent television program, the
public's credulity as evidenced by its willingness to take seriously the "flying
saucer" reports. He shook his head in dismay that years of scientific education
of the public had produced so little effect. In fact, he need have little worry
on that score. Anyone who has done a substantial amount of direct
witness-interviewing in UFO cases knows all too well how unwilling most persons
(even those with no formal scientific training) have become with respect
to open reporting of UFO sightings. But what I see in Bloecher's early press
material is surprising evidence that this reluctance predates official and
journalistic fun-poking concerning "flying saucers." Science has built into our
population a very definite resistance towards acceptance of the odd and unusual,
the bewildering and inexplicable. Exceptions there are, needless to say, but the
bulk of the populace tends to be quite close-mouthed about observations of
unexplainable phenomena. This disposition was quickly and powerfully enhanced
by official scoffing, by scientific pronouncements made ex cathedra by
the end of the first week of July, 1947, and since repeated over and over. But
that disposition, Bloecher's studies reveal, was not created by those
pronouncements. This I find exceedingly interesting, exceedingly significant,
and rather surprising.
It might be pertinent, if space permitted, for me
to give a summary of the roughly two dozen 1947 cases which I succeeded in
checking in my sampling. I found it especially interesting to speak with a
number of police and sheriff's deputies in the Portland, Oregon, area
concerning the unusual July 4, 1947, sightings.
( viii )
This
episode is officially explained in Air Force files as "radar chaff"(aluminum strips
dropped to confuse enemy radar), yet it involved repeated sightings of numerous
disc-shaped objects moving rapidly across the daytime sky over Portland. To
listen to those officers retell what they saw, how they reacted, and how their
colleagues ribbed them was more than amusing. But to try to square all those
sightings with "radar chaff" is simply annoying; the evidence bears absolutely
no resemblance to observations of falling radar chaff. And so it has gone, over
the ensuing years.
One 1947 case that does warrant more than
passing mention here is a report that is not in Bloecher's material because it
was never reported to press or official agencies. (One comes to realize that
there must be a very large volume of other such reports that still lie fully
covered by the ridicule lid.) The report came directly to me from a Tucson woman
who happened to read a Time article on UFOs (Aug. 4, 1967) that
made passing mention of Arnold’s report of "seeing nine disc-like objects
erratically moving through the air near Mount Rainier in 1947." Thinking
that here, at last, must be a confirmatory report of what she and a friend had
seen in early 1947 in Tucson, and noting my name in the same article, she
telephoned me, thinking that I might be interested to know that she had seen
"the same nine objects." But by the time we had gone over details, it was not
obvious that she had seen the same objects as Arnold; but it was clear that her
report must be entered into the UFO record.
Here is a brief summary: Mrs. H. G. Olavick and
Mrs. William Down were the witnesses, and the date was Tuesday, April 29, 1947,
according to Mrs. Olavick's reconstruction of related events and dates.
(there is a possibility that this date is one week off, she pointed out; but
that it was a Tuesday in late April or early May she regards as quite definite.)
Mrs. Olavick was in her kitchen at 2101 East Hawthorne Street, Tucson, while
Mrs. Down was out in the backyard patio. Suddenly Mrs. Down called her out
excitedly, and both proceeded to observe what had caught Mrs. Down's eye. The
time was just after the noon hour; Tucson's skies were completely cloudless.
Somewhat north of their zenith lay an unusual, isolated, "steamy-fleecy" cloud
at an altitude which Mrs. Olavick found difficult to estimate, though she
recalled that it seemed lower than average for that time of year (thus, perhaps
at or below 10,000 feet, say). No other cloud was to be seen in the sky. In and
out of the cloud moved a number of dull-white disc-like objects that rose and
fell in an erratic manner, occasionally disappearing into or above the
unnatural cloud. She said that these objects were round in planform but were not
spherical, for they frequently tipped a bit, exposing a flattened-sphere form.
She estimates that they watched these objects cavorting near the cloud for
perhaps five or six minutes before the entire group suddenly disappeared within
the cloud or perhaps above it.
( ix )
After a minute or so, as she now recalls it, a new object, perhaps three or four
times as large as the little objects, came out of the cloud on its east side.
After it emerged, the small objects began to emerge also, taking up a
V-formation pattern behind it. The V comprised a line of four-abreast just to
the rear of the large object, then a line of three-abreast behind that, and
finally two-abreast in the rear. Thus, the point of the V was to the rear (in
the sense of the emergent and subsequent motion). This formation permitted the
first accurate count of the small objects, nine in all. No sooner had the last
pair emerged than all ten objects shot off to the northeast, climbing out of
sight in a time that she thought was probably two to three seconds. She does
not recall what happened to the cloud after the ten objects departed.
I have spoken with Mrs. Olavick several additional
times, following her first call. Her account was presented in an unembellished
manner, and her descriptions were carefully framed, specifying just which parts
had become less distinct in her memory. But the basic vividness of her memory
of this observation she stressed repeatedly. I had to explain that it was by no
means clear that the objects she saw were identical with those reported by
Kenneth Arnold two months later. When I queried her as to why she had not
reported them, she pointed out that she and Mrs. Down were entirely convinced
that they had been fortunate enough to witness some new American military
vehicles about which the general public had not yet been informed. Later she
heard of the "flying saucers," and she and Mrs. Down, when they rejoined their
husbands in mid-summer in Iowa, told them about their own observation. The
husbands, she recalled, made such a joke of it that they ceased mentioning it.
Here was a pre-Arnold sighting never reported
officially. It was quite clearly not an observation of "new American
military
vehicles," nor can one readily square this with any phenomenon of
atmospheric
physics or astronomy. It is a UFO observation, and a rather interesting
one.
Bloecher's search has led to several other pre-Arnold 1947 sightings.
Just a
matter of days before this writing, I spoke on the telephone with Walter
A. Minczewski, the U. S. Weather Bureau observer whose April, 1947,
theodolite-tracking
case is cited in the text. Minczewski emphasized that he had never
reported it
to other than his Weather Bureau superiors and hence was surprised to be
called
about it twenty years later. Yet his recollection of the details of the
whitish
disc-like object he had tracked one clear morning in Richmond, Virginia,
was
still distinct in his mind.
(
x )
But time is slipping on, and those 1947 witnesses
ought to be interviewed in far more depth than anyone has ever done -- lest we
lose their reports forever. The same is true of the innumerable observers of
subsequent UFO incidents. Detailed case-studies and thorough episode-studies are
sorely needed. Bloecher has given here the raw material for an episode-study of
the initial 1947 wave of sightings; he has woven it into an orderly account of
what was happening when UFOs first became public knowledge. I find this account
absorbing reading and regard it as a substantial contribution to the study of
the baffling problem of the unidentified flying objects.
James F. McDonald
Institute of Atmospheric Physics University of
Arizona
Tucson, Arizona
October 23, 1967
------------------------------------------------------
PrefaceDuring the past five years, while on several extended tours of the country, I had the opportunity to examine the back newspaper files of many local libraries in search of news reports of unidentified flying objects. I was particularly interested in obtaining information on the wave of sightings that had taken place during the summer of 1947, since few records of newspaper reports for that period are available. My search began in Portland, Oregon, where I knew that many sightings had been made. Not until I had consulted the local papers for the period, however, did I realize just how numerous those sightings had been. Intrigued by these preliminary data, I continued to examine old newspaper reports in the libraries of other cities I visited. In city after city I discovered the same extraordinary fact: that UFOs had been seen and reported in incredible numbers in June and July of 1947. I was completely unprepared for the vast amount of descriptive detail that lay buried in local papers. That this material had gone unnoticed for so many years was not really surprising, however, since in 1947 the subject was a novel one and few had any reason to believe it would persist, as it has. Therefore, no records were kept, other than the Air Force's file of investigated reports. The public -- and many officials -- assumed that flying saucers were merely some sort of transitory phenomenon and would soon go away. While interest was high at the time of the sightings, it died out not long after the wave had subsided and was not revitalized until the following year, when a new flurry of reports was made. By that time, the 1947 reports were old hat and lay buried in the newspaper morgues of libraries around the country.On subsequent trips and, particularly, during the period from July 1966 to June 1967, I searched for material from areas I had not visited before; I discovered that my earlier efforts had been just a beginning. I began sending copies of my notes to the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, in Washington, D.C., having been a member of that organization from its beginning early in 1957. These notes subsequently came to the attention of several people who felt, as I was beginning to, that the data were important enough to be made available to others involved in research on the subject. The material presented a vivid picture, and a far more complete one than had previously been available, of an important period of UFO activity -- a period that had hitherto been given little more than passing attention in the extensive literature on the subject. A special report was suggested as an appropriate means of making the data available. Fortunately, it was possible to write the report at an appropriate time -- the twentieth anniversary of the earlier events.To supplement the information I collected as I traveled, the newspaper files at the Library of Congress were consulted to fill in areas I had not visited on tour. In all, more than 140 newspapers were examined, representing over 90 cities and towns in 49 states, the District of Columbia, and Canada. Newspapers in Montana could not be consulted as I neither traveled there nor could find papers for that state at the Library of Congress. There are, however, references to several sightings in Montana that were carried by the wire services in other papers.Two other sources for references were also consulted. The Air Force's Project Blue Book, at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, has in its files approximately 60 official reports of sightings through the end of July 1947, and notes were made on about two-thirds of these; lack of time prevented a complete coverage of this material. NICAP files also include a number of first-hand reports of sightings from the 1947 period; some of these came from the files of the now defunct Civilian Saucer Investigations of Los Angeles, which were turned over to NICAP after that organization discontinued its operations. A number of these reports are included. A few references have come from UFO publications and magazine articles as well.The completed report provides a chronological listing of more than 850 sightings made during June and July 1947. The sightings were made in 48 states, the District of Columbia, and Canada. This is basically a reference work and does not attempt to make a critical evaluation of every individual report, although certain cases have been selected as representing special aspects of UFO phenomena; these cases are given in more detail in Sections II, III, and IV. Newspapers have provided the basic source of information, Anyone who reads the papers regularly has few illusions about the reliability of news reports; if an account is not distorted it is as often pitiably short of hard-core facts. But these news accounts serve to demonstrate, if only as quantitative evidence, the extraordinarily widespread character of the 1947 UFO sightings. In a number of cases, Dr. James McDonald, senior physicist at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, University of Arizona, has been able to contact the original witnesses and has thereby provided some indication of the general reliability of these news accounts. Most important, it is evident in these newspaper references that among the early sightings certain patterns of UFO appearance and behavior, usually thought of as a later development, were in fact first observed and reported in the summer of 1947.Although a great amount of material was found by this research, there remains even more; without having access to local newspapers where many sightings occurred, it was impossible to obtain essential facts about these incidents. If a thorough search could be made of all newspapers throughout the country for this period, the total number of published sighting reports would, at a conservative estimate, be more than doubled. It would be enormously helpful if future readers of this report would consult their local libraries to supplement the material already collected, and send additional information to NICAP.( xiii )One other significant fact points to the magnitude of the 1947 wave: again and again in news accounts reference is made to the hundreds of calls newspapers received, whereas only a fraction of these reports later appeared in the news accounts.In order to avoid confusion over certain terms, the following definitions may be helpful to the reader. As used in this report, the term "wave" is any sudden and pronounced increase of UFO sightings on a national scale, above what is ordinarily considered an average daily rate. According to an interview in the Christian Science Monitor for September 3, 1965, Dr. J. Allen Hynek, chief scientific consultant to the Air Force's Project Blue Book, said that in the official files the average daily rate of sightings for the first 18 years of reports was one to two sightings per day. (Both the Air Force files and NICAP's indicate that this rate has risen in the past two years). If an increase in sightings has apparently resulted from an undue amount of publicity over one or two reports, and on careful examination shows a large proportion of misidentifications of natural phenomena, it cannot be termed a genuine wave.The 1947 wave, which was unquestionably genuine, was not the first or last wave in this country, nor have UFO waves been confined to the United States. A major wave occurred here in 1897, when large numbers of citizens reported seeing what were then called "airships;" and just one year before the 1947 wave another had taken place in northern Europe, when hundreds of observations of "ghost rockets" were made. In this country other major waves occurred in March and April, 1950; July and August, 1952; November, 1957; August, 1965; March and April, 1966; and possibly in February, 1967 -- but without the amount of news coverage usually associated with waves. All of these major increases in sightings should be examined in depth for similarities and differences as part of the over-all study of the UFO phenomenon.There have been increases of sightings in geographically isolated areas on numerous occasions, many times as part off a major wave but at other times independent of it. These are called "concentrations." Notable domestic concentrations were reported in the Carolinas in February, 1953; the Ohio area, August, 1955; the Dakotas and Minnesota, November, 1956; northern California, August, 1960; New Mexico, April, 1964; Maryland and Virginia, January, 1965; New Hampshire, in September and October, 1965; and in Michigan and eastern Long Island, as part of the major national wave of spring, 1966.When a wave of UFO sightings takes place, there is simultaneously a marked increase in news coverage of the subject. The degree of news space allotted to "flying saucers" appears to be commensurate with the intensity of the wave. The resulting condition, called a "flap," was defined succinctly by the late Edward J. Ruppelt, former head of Project Blue Book, in The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects (Doubleday and Company, 1956, p. l89): "In Air Force terminology a 'flap' is a condition, or a situation, or a state of being of a group of people characterized by an advanced state of confusion that has not quite yet reached panic proportions." The marked confusion, experienced by a very great number of people in the summer of 1947, unquestionably puts the UFO wave of that period into the category of a flap.A "sighting" is any observation of some unexplained aerial phenomenon. A "report" is the oral or written record of a sighting. A "case" refers to a report, plus other elements that are associated with it, such as information about the observer, an account of the investigation, references to the report, or conclusions drawn from the information gathered. For the purposes of brief reference in this report, each sighting is assigned a Case Number in the Chronology (Section V). In reports of sightings that may be independent observations of the same phenomenon, each independent report has been assigned a separate case number; and in reports in which several different sightings are made at different time intervals, or in different locations, but by the same witnesses, each independent sighting has a case number. Though this system tends somewhat to increase the statistical records, it does simplify the procedure of referring to specific sightings.I would like to express my appreciation to all who assisted me in the preparation of this report: to Dr. James F. McDonald for his encouragement and helpful suggestions, as well as for valuable additional data on a number of cases; to Major Donald E. Keyhoe and Mr. Richard Hall, who kindly made NICAP's facilities available to me; to the NICAP staff, especially Miss Beau Sinkler, who prepared the maps; to Miss Lynn Catoe, of the Library of Congress, for her generous assistance in library research; to Mr. Thomas E. Pyne of the Interstate Commerce Commission, now retired, who supplied essential information on time zones for 1947; to Lt. Colonel George P. Freeman, Jr., who arranged my visit to Project Blue Book in January, 1967, and to Major Hector Quintanilla and his staff for their courteous assistance; to those NICAP members who provided useful data, including Miss Judi Anne Hatcher, of Los Angeles, Mr. Dudley Robb, of Montreal, and Mr. Jerry Rice, of New York City; and, particularly, to Miss Isabel L. Davis, of Washington, D.C., for all her helpful suggestions and practical assistance.Ted Bloecher
Washington, D.C.
October 1967
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Section I - Summary of the Period
During the summer of 1947 a bizarre and
inexplicable situation developed in North America for which, up to the time of
the writing of this report, twenty years later, no satisfactory
explanation has been forthcoming. Beginning in the latter part of June, people
in widely separated places and from all walks of life began to report having
seen shining, high-speed, strangely maneuvering objects in the sky. In most of
these reports the objects were described as round or disc-shaped. For more
than a week sightings were made in continuously increasing numbers. On July
4th the reports rose sharply and spontaneously, and for five days there was
scarcely any part of the United States that had not been visited by these
strangely elusive aerial objects. Reports came from many points in Canada as
well. The number of sightings crested on July 7th, and during the next few
days reports began to diminish until, about a week later, only a handful were
being made from scattered sections of the country. Although the objects
themselves had all but vanished, interest and speculation about them continued
for some time after. A wave of sightings of unidentified flying objects had
occurred. Flying saucers had become part of the language and the subject of
fickle interest and ever-increasing confusion.
As most people familiar with the history of the UFO
phenomenon are aware, the events of 1947 seemed to begin on June
24th, the date
of the sighting made by Kenneth Arnold, while flying a plane over the
Cascade
Mountains of Washington. The date is partly justified, for it was the
report
made by this Boise, Idaho pilot and businessman, who sold fire-fighting
equipment throughout the northwest, that opened the first chapter in the
modern
record of UFO activity. But Arnold's was not the first sighting of the
period. For weeks before that people had been seeing unidentified
objects in the sky and
keeping the matter to themselves. An important result of Arnold's report
was to
elicit from these earlier witnesses their accounts of those previously
unreported observations.
Reports Before June 1947
As early as the middle of April 1947, at the Weather Bureau in Richmond,
Virginia, a U. S. Government meteorologist named Walter A. Minczewski and his
staff had released a pibal balloon and were tracking its east-to-west course at
15,000 feet when they noticed silver, ellipsoidal object just below it. Larger
than the balloon, this object appeared to be flat on bottom, and when observed
through the theodolite used to track the balloon, was seen to have a dome on its
upper side. Minczewski and his assistants watched the object for fifteen seconds
as it traveled rapidly in level flight on a westerly course, before disappearing
from view. In the official report on file at the Air Force's Project Blue Book,
at Wright-Patterson Field, in Dayton, Ohio, this sighting is listed as
Unidentified.
Another early sighting in the official files is the
report by Byron Savage of Oklahoma City -- like Arnold, a businessman and private
pilot. He had seen an object about six weeks before Arnold, on May 17th or
18th, and his report was one of the first to receive
widespread attention in the
newspapers immediately after Arnold's report had appeared. The Oklahoma
City
Times gave it prominent space on June 26th. At the time of his sighting,
Savage had been out in his yard it was dusk, and the sky was still
light, when
he saw an object “come across the city from just a little east of south
… its
altitude was very high somewhere around 10,000 feet, I couldn’t be
sure. Funny
thing about it, it made no noise. I don't think it had kind of internal
combustion engine. But I did notice that right after it went out of
sight, I
heard the sound of rushing wind and air. I told my wife right away, but
she
thought I must have seen lightning.“ He further described the object as
being of “a
shiny, silvery color,” and very large -- “bigger than any aircraft we
have.” He
said it was “perfectly round and flat.” In the Blue Book file he
described the
object as appearing ellipsoidal in shape as it approached, and
completely
circular while passing directly overhead, on a course toward the
northwest. In this account he said that it appeared “frosty
white,” and that its
speed was about three times as fast as a jet. It disappeared from view
in about fifteen to twenty seconds. Although the sighting details
provided by
Savage are far more complete than those given for many of the official
cases
listed by Blue Book as “explained,” this report falls in the category
of Insufficient Information.
Another case in the Air Force Blue Book files
occurred on May 19th, sometime between twelve thirty and one p.m., at Manitou
Springs, Colorado. Seven employees of the Pikes Peak Railway, including Navy
veteran Dean A. Hauser, mechanics Ted Weigand and Marion Hisshouse, and T. J.
Smith and L. D. Jamison, were having lunch when Weigand noticed a bright,
silver-colored object approaching rapidly from the
northeast. It stopped almost
directly overhead and the group of men watched it perform wild gyrations for a
number of minutes. Hauser said that the object, after having approached in a
straight line, “began to move erratically in wide circles. All this time it
reflected light, like metal, but intermittently, as though the angle of
reflection might be changing from time to time.” It was difficult to get a clear
idea of its shape, and even viewing it through binoculars did not appear to
“bring it any closer.” They estimated its height at one thousand feet. For
twenty minutes they watched it climb, dive, reverse its flight course, and
finally move off into the wind in a westerly direction. “It disappeared in a
straight line in the west-northwest in a clear blue sky,” Hauser reported. At
no time did anyone hear any noise. An account of the sighting appeared in the
Denver Post of June 28. The next day the Post reported that the
witnesses had been interviewed by representatives of the 15th Air Force
headquarters and the results of the investigation would be sent on to Washington. The results,
perhaps unknown to the witnesses even to this day, were “possible birds.”
(
I – 1 )
Unlisted in the official AF files, but no less interesting than the
preceding case, is Dr. Colden R. Battey’s sighting in the last week of
May. Dr. Battey, a physician in Augusta, Georgia,
had been fishing ten miles off St.
Helena Sound, near Beaufort, South Carolina. At about eleven o’clock
that
morning he noticed a formation of four disc-like objects flying overhead
in a
southeasterly direction at a terrific rate of speed. The discs appeared
to be
spinning on their axes and were at an estimated altitude of about 20,000
feet. They were silvery and appeared “highly polished,” and on their
undersides, Dr. Battey could see a “circular rim, or projection, about
one-quarter of the way
from the edges.” No sound was heard as they flew overhead. The formation
sped out of view in less than twenty seconds. Dr. Battey’s report of the
sighting did not appear in print until July 6th, when the Augusta Chronicle
gave it prominent front-page coverage. INS sent it out on the wires, where it
was picked up by numerous newspapers around the country.
Other May sightings reported nearly two months
after they had been made include several reports by housewives. Mrs. W. C.
Clark, of Memphis, Tennessee, reported in the Commercial-Appeal of July
7th, that she had seen two objects “like tennis balls” fly over her yard around
the first of May; and in Newark, New Jersey, Mrs. Rose Slawuta described in the
Newark Star-Ledger of the same date how she had seen a “shining
elliptical object” with a gold band around it, approaching from the west, on May
10th. The Air Force files contain a sighting from Milford, Iowa, on May 29th,
which is listed as a “possible meteor.”
The Importance of Arnold’s Sighting
If Kenneth
Arnold, while flying on business from Chehalis to Yakima on June 24th, had
decided not to assist in the search for a C-46 Marine transport that had crashed
on the slopes of Mount Rainier, the introduction to the modern period of UFO
activity would have been quite different. He chose to make this side-trip,
however, and as a consequence he became one of those persons who are in the
right place at the right time. Shortly before three p.m. he was approaching the
mountain from the west side, and as he began a turn of a hundred and eighty
degrees toward the south, his eye was caught by a flash, as if “a mirror were
reflecting sunlight at me.” Alert for other aircraft, he looked around and
saw, to his left and north of Mount Rainier, a chain-like formation of nine
brightly scintillating objects rapidly approaching the mountain on a roughly
southern heading. As they came closer, passing between him and the summit of
the mountain, he could see they were nine flat, discoid objects arranged in a
diagonally stepped-down, echelon formation, stretched out over a distance that
he later calculated to be five miles. They were evenly spaced but for a wider
gap between the fourth and fifth objects. As they crossed the snow-covered
summit of Rainier and approached a peak to the south of it, he decided to clock
their speed; since they were headed toward Mount Adams, the two mountains would
make excellent reference points.
He began to time them as the first object reappeared from behind the outlier
peak on the southwest flank of Mount Rainier. (He later identified this peak as
Goat Rocks, but he may be in error as Goat Rocks is approximately halfway
between Mount Rainier and Mount Adams.)The objects followed the hogback that
stretches to the south, flying erratically and swerving in and out of the lesser
peaks "like the tail of a kite.” He noticed that the objects would flip from
side to side, in unison, flashing brightly as they did so. He also noticed
something else -- a detail he did not mention in his official report: as the
objects flipped from side to side, they presented their lateral surfaces and
Arnold saw that one of the objects appeared to be different from the rest, in
the shape of a crescent. He hadn’t attached much importance to it at first for,
as he wrote of it later in The Coming of the Saucers (pp. 22-23), “I
thought it was the angle from which I observed this particular one which made it
look different and I wasn’t completely positive about it.”
The objects covered the fifty-mile distance between the two mountains in just
one minute and forty-two seconds. Amazed, Arnold began making some rapid
calculations as he flew over the area to measure the distance. The results were
astonishing: the discs had been flying at a speed of 1,700 miles an hour! To
allow for miscalculation he reduced this figure by five hundred but even twelve
hundred miles an hour was an amazing speed!
When he landed at Yakima an hour later he went
straight to Al Baxter, general manager of Central Aircraft, to tell of
his
experience. The story quickly spread around the airport, and his
descriptions
and calculations were discussed with great interest by the pilots and
mechanics
there. And when Arnold later flew on to Pendleton, word of his strange
experiences had preceded him, for on his arrival he found a platoon of
incredulous newsmen, looking for a good silly-season story. They had
only to
meet the originator of this preposterous tale, however -- a pilot with
more than
four thousand hours of flying experience over some of the most
mountainous
territory in the United States; a reputable salesman of fire-control
equipment
over a wide area, who did much of his business by air; a deputy sheriff
with the Ada County, Idaho, Sheriffs Aerial Posse department and
hear his careful
recounting of what had happened, to change their initial skepticism to
keen
interest. They went over and over his calculations of speed and the
figure kept
coming out the same. Nothing but rockets went that fast in 1947, and no
one
knew of any rockets being sent up over Mount Rainier.
(
I – 2 )
As a result of his meeting with newsmen in Pendleton, Kenneth
Arnold's story was filed in a
reasonably serious, straightforward manner, and appeared in newspapers all over the country
the next day. In the more than one hundred and fifty newspapers examined for
this report, a wire service account appeared in nearly every one, most often as
a front-page feature.
In the Air Force files the sighting is explained as
a "mirage," although it has often been referred to as an "unknown." Even the
intelligence officers assigned to investigate the case, Lt. Frank
Brown and Captain William Davidson, of Hamilton Field, California, were
impressed with Arnold's sighting, for their report, in part, says: "It is the
personal opinion of the interviewer that Mr. Arnold actually saw what he stated
he saw. It is difficult to believe that a man of [his] character and apparent
integrity would state that he saw objects and write up a report to the extent
that he did if he did not see them."
Dr. J. Allen Hynek, scientific consultant of the
Air Forces investigation of UFOs, was said to have found "inconsistencies" in
Arnold's report when reviewing the case for Project Sign in late 1948 or early
1949. According to the Project "Saucer" Press Summary, released in April 1949,
the problem lay in reconciling Arnold's estimate of speed and distance with his
estimate of the objects size. Edward J. Ruppelt, in his book, The Report on
Unidentified Flying Objects, describes this question of estimates in more
detail (p. 33). Arnold reported that the objects had been seen at an estimated
distance of twenty to twenty-five miles, and estimated their size to be about
"two-thirds the size of a DC-4," or from forty-five to fifty feet in length. The
objection raised was that an object that size cannot be resolved by the human
eye at that distance; therefore, Arnold's estimate of distance was said to be in
error, the objects having been much closer and traveling at subsonic speeds well
within the range of normal aircraft. This argument ignored the fact that Arnold
had established the distance with fixed reference points, and that it was his
estimate of size that must have been in error, the discs probably being a great
deal larger than he guessed. In view of Dr. Hynek’s opinion that the
objects were
probably some kind of conventional aircraft, it is curious that the
case is listed as a “mirage” rather than as “possible aircraft.”
Within just days of the publication of Arnold's
report, other accounts began to appear. At least twenty people from
more than a
dozen widely separated places reported that they, too, had seen similar
objects. Some of these sightings had occurred before June 24th, some had
been
made on the same day as Arnold's, and a few were made on the days
following. Most of the reports came from the northwest. The floodgates
were now open for
the rush of reports that were soon to follow. But it had taken a man of
Kenneth
Arnold’s character and forthright conviction to open them by making
public his
own report. If it had not been for Arnold, which witness, and which
report,
might have been the first? It is not possible to single out any of the
early
witnesses, or cases, for not enough information about them is
available. One
point is certain, however: it is difficult to imagine that the
sightings of
strange aerial objects would have
remained "hidden" much after June 25th.
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( I – 3 )Other Reports, June 1 - 24
At least two-dozen sightings were reported to have been made before June 24th. As far as can be determined, none of them appeared in newspapers before that date. There are six reports in the Air Force files for the period June 1-23. One of these, a foreign report describing objects seen over Budapest on June 10, is not included in this report. The first official case for June describes an air-to-air observation by pilot Forrest Wenyon on June 2nd, near Lewes, Delaware (AF files have his name as Horace P. Wenyon). Wenyon reported seeing an object shaped like a mayonnaise jar as it flew across the nose of his plane (see Section III, p. 9, for details). Another pilot's report was made by stunt pilot Richard Rankin, who saw two flights of a group of objects at Bakersfield, California, on June 23rd (see II-3). (The Air Force lists the date of this sighting as June 14th, although the press accounts, published on July 1st, give it as June 23rd.) None of the official sightings for this period are classified as “unknowns.”Of twenty-nine sightings occurring between June 1st and June 23rd, nearly two-thirds were made in the west, and nine in the northeast; about half the sightings were of a single object, while the rest describe two or more objects. Thirteen of these reports involved a single witness.On June 24th, the day that Arnold saw his formation of nine discs, there was a sharp increase in the number of UFO sightings, from six on the previous day, to twenty. Of these reports, all but two occurred in the Pacific Northwest. Over half these reports appeared in the papers within several days of Arnold's account and one (Case 40) may be a ground confirmation of his sighting, although the reported directions are at odds with Arnold's. Most of the June 24th sightings are daylight reports; five occurred at night. About half of the reports are, like Arnold's, of multiple objects. The Air Force files list three sightings for that day: besides the Arnold report, one describes objects seen in the Oregon Cascades by a prospector, who noted electromagnetic effects on his compass while the objects were overhead (see IV-3); it is considered unidentified by the Air Force. The other, by the Lt. Governor of Idaho, was made in Boise, Idaho, and is considered to be "astronomical," although the sighting was made at three thirty in the afternoon (see III-16).Published records have referred to a total of forty-nine UFO reports for the period June 1st through June 24th, by more than seventy-five witnesses, two thirds of whom have been fully identified. These figures raise an interesting question: why did none of these seventy-five witnesses report their unusual observations until after Arnolds story had been published? In a number of those reports, the witnesses tried to account for their initial silence. Richard L. Bitters, editor of the Wapakoneta (Ohio) Daily News, reportedly felt that his sighting of June 23rd was simply not a news story, and did not publish it until two weeks later when he changed his mind at the height of the wave (III-6); on the same night, two other Ohio residents made a similar sighting but delayed reporting it "until others had told of seeing them" (Case 28); E. B. Parks, of Hazel Green, Alabama, felt that the phenomenon he observed about the same time was "so unusual that it was not reported for fear others would disbelieve the account of it" (Case 29). Richard Rankin, who had not attached any "otherworldly" significance to his sighting of June 23rd (or 14th) at Bakersfield, California, assumed that he was observing the Navy’s experimental "Flying Flapjack," the XF5U-1, even though "I couldn’t make out the number or location of the propellers, and I couldn’t distinguish any wings or tail" (II-3) so he hesitated to describe what he had seen "until others were reporting the same thing." And so it went: if the reason for not reporting these earlier sightings at the time they occurred is not exactly stated in every case, it is at least implicitly apparent the witnesses were afraid to report them because they were so unusual.The Element of Fear
The 1947 UFO wave is perhaps the most fascinating of any to examine because of its unique position at the very beginning of the contemporary period of UFO activity in this country. There were no "attitudes" about UFOs in June 1947. There were no preconceptions, no misconceptions, no "policies" by either press or public, or by any official agencies, and certainly no pattern existed concerning the phenomenon by which comparisons might be made. Few people recalled the reports of "ghost rockets" over Sweden during the summer of 1946, and it was only during the crest of the 1947 wave, on July 6th and 7th, that any connection was made with those earlier phenomena. A few World War II veterans, who had observed "foo fighters" over Germany and in the South Pacific during the war, were now reminded of those earlier incidents by the widespread reports of flying saucers. But for most witnesses, the experience of observing strange aerial manifestations was completely without precedent and profoundly baffling.We now know that after 1947 it could be expected that a UFO witness might be afraid to report a sighting publicly for fear of ensuing ridicule and intimidation. This is a reaction we have come to expect, one of the many psychological complexities of the UFO phenomenon that has developed out of prevailing public and official attitudes over a long period of time. But in 1947 there were no such precedents to create this type of fear; these witnesses had seen something unaccountable and their fear was of the unknown, a reaction to something totally new and unexpected. There was no place, outside of science fiction, for this kind of inexplicable experience: the appearance of some new phenomenon was not just frightening, it was against all common sense, and if something in someone’s experience does not make any sense, it is not likely that this experience is going to be made public, at least not until it is discovered that others have shared the same baffling experience. And so to many, it must have come as something of a relief to read of Kenneth Arnold's sighting, and to discover that they had not taken leave of their senses and were not the only ones to have come face to face with something they were quite unable to explain or understand.( I – 4 )
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Sightings After June 24th
Arnold's report appeared in the afternoon and evening papers in the
northwest on June 25th. On the 26th, morning papers were already carrying new
reports. The first two to appear were those of Byron
Savage, in Oklahoma City (see
I-1), and W. I. Davenport, in Kansas City (see
II-1). Savage, a businessman and private pilot, like
Arnold, must have felt a special bond with the Boise observer, for he is quoted
as saying, "I know that boy up there really saw them."
The Davenport sighting had occurred on June 25th and he, like Arnold,
reported having seen nine objects, but with some major
dissimilarities: the objects traveled in a loose formation,
made noise, and left vapor trails. The only thing they had in common with
Arnold’s objects was their number, and their great speed.
So soon did Savage and Davenport file their reports
that these two cases appeared simultaneously with Arnold's on the morning of June
26th as front-page, banner-headline stories in the Portland Oregon Journal.
Later that same day, other reports began to appear.
There are thirteen reported
sightings on record for June 25th, five of which were reported by the
end of
June. (Several of these cases are of uncertain dates, based on the
newspaper
data that were available.) Most of the sightings took place in western
states,
but New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois and Missouri also are also
represented. Three of these sightings occurred after dark. Six are
multiple object
reports, four of which described two UFOs. At least nineteen people were
involved in the reports, most of whom were identified.
On
the following day, June 26th, the number of sighting dropped to eight, six of
them, from the Utah-Arizona area, and one each in Oklahoma and Illinois. All
were daylight observations except the one in Illinois, which is the only
multiple-object report in the group. In this report, the witness, Mrs. J. M.
Harrison, of Chicago, described watching a large fireball pass over at two
a.m.; as it moved toward the northwest it diminished in size and broke up into
two dozen small discs which whirled around so rapidly she was unable to make
an accurate count of them (Case 64). The
sightings of June 26th involved a total of thirteen witnesses, eleven of whom
were identified by name.
On June 27th, the number of sightings rose again to at least
nineteen. (Several other sightings reported in the Montreal Star a few weeks
later may have been confirmations of the fireball meteor recorded by the
American Meteor Society and described in Popular Astronomy,
January,
1948, pp. 39-40; it was reported seen at 8:56 P.M. EST over upper New
York
state, moving roughly from the area near Albany toward Watertown,
according to
the astronomer, Dr. Charles P. Olivier.) Eight of the June 27th reports
were
from New Mexico, and three came from Washington state; one of the
latter, from a
town near the Columbia River called Woodland, was a most unusual and
well-reported multiple-object sighting (see II-2). Three reports were
made in Texas, but two of these, in El Paso, lack even the
barest of details, including definite dates. Two reports were made in
Arizona
and one each came from Arkansas, British Columbia, and Vermont. (The
Vermont
report, Case 86, might also be a confirmation of the New York meteor
reports.) Four of these nineteen sightings
occurred at night, although the two El Paso
reports are uncertain; the remainder of the sightings were made by day.
For June 28th through the 30th, sightings averaged
about a dozen per day; thirteen for June 28th (including two of uncertain date),
twelve for June 29th, and fourteen for June 30th. The low percentage of
after-dark reports remained about the same as earlier during these three
days: thirty daylight sightings, seven after dark, and two uncertain. Over half of
these reports came from the west. Other reports came from Arkansas, Missouri,
Iowa, Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, Ontario, New Hampshire, South
Carolina, Alabama, and Tennessee. Fifteen were multiple object reports, and of
a total of nearly eighty witnesses involved during these three days, about sixty
of them were identified in news accounts.
The
Air Force files include seven reports from the period of June 28th through the
30th, none of them being classified as unidentified. Among the more interesting
of these cases is a sighting by Carl J. Zohn, a Naval Research Laboratory
missile expert, made at White Sands, New Mexico on June 29th (see
III-18), and an air-to-air sighting made near Grand Canyon by a Navy
pilot of two objects plummeting to earth on June 30th (II-12).
Few of the thirty-nine reports for this period received headline attention when
they were printed, and by June 30th newspaper coverage was not quite as
widespread as it had been several days earlier. But UFO sightings would very
shortly pick again as the July 4th holiday approached.
Explaining the Inexplicable
It can be expected that when people are confronted
with some novel experience, they will try to account for it in some rational
way. The more bizarre the experience, however, the less rational the
explanations become. Flying saucers were about as bizarre an experience as one
could imagine, so it is therefore not surprising to find that by the end of
June, opinions and "explanations," as well as flying saucer reports, were on the
increase.
The San Francisco
Chronicle for
June 27 printed a roundup of opinion regarding Arnold's sighting from assorted
"experts." Captain Al Smith, a United Air Lines pilot, believed that what Arnold
had seen were "reflections of his instrument panel," presumably in the Plexiglas
canopy of his plane, although this is not stated. Elmer Fisher, Portland,
Oregon meteorologist, suggested that Arnold had encountered "a slight touch of
snow blindness from the mountain peaks."
(
I – 5 )
Dr. J.
Hugh Pruett, University of Oregon astronomer and meteorologist, said that
"persistent vision," often experienced after looking at objects such as the sun,
"could have kept such reflections before him as they passed." Getting back on
safer ground, Dr. Pruett added that the objects "were not of meteoric origin, for
meteors do not dip and sway."
In his syndicated column on the same
day, AP Science Writer Howard W. Blakeslee also tackled the Arnold report,
stating that "in clear air the flash of sunlight from a plane can easily be seen
for fifty miles. This flash is round, the shape of the sun. Any other
reflection at a great distance is also likely to be round, coming from a small
area on the plane." He also grappled with the problem of the high speeds: if
these objects had been jet planes, "their speeds probably would be noticeable and
could fit into the estimates, where sight gave the impression of something
traveling at 1,000 miles an hour." He secured his grasp on this assessment by
explaining that the eye rarely makes an accurate estimate of speed through the
sky. To be fair to Blakeslee, perhaps he did not know that Arnold had
established the distance between him and the objects based on familiar
landmarks; on the other hand, perhaps he chose to ignore it.
Another
"explanation" was offered on the
same day by Lt. Colonel Harold R. Turner, at White Sands, New Mexico. In an AP
account carried in many papers, Turner maintained, like Blakeslee, that Arnold
had seen jet planes. "The White Sands Proving Ground commandant said that jet
planes have circular exhaust pipes and that these, when heated, might give an
illusion of discs." He, too, may have been ignorant of the facts: for example,
that Arnold saw the objects first as they were approaching, north of Mount
Rainier, in which position their "circular jet exhausts" would not have been
visible. On the next day, following a series of reports from New Mexico,
Colonel Turner rejected jet exhausts in favor of "meteorites," explaining that
"they appear much larger and apparently are coming closer to earth than usual" (see
III-9). It is perfectly clear that Colonel Turner did not know what
a meteorite was, let alone flying saucers.
But someone who did know the
difference between meteors and meteorites made a statement that was printed in
the Denver Post of June 28. Dr. H. H. Nininger, an expert in the field
of meteoritics, declared that the object observed by Byron Savage may have been
a meteor; and in commenting on another New Mexico sighting of the previous day,
this one reported near Shiprock by an associate, Dr. R. L. Hopkins (Case
81), Nininger said he believed that what Dr. Hopkins saw "could have
been a meteorite falling somewhere in southeast Arizona." Dr. Hopkins, of
Maitland, Florida, had been visiting Nininger at his laboratory in Winslow and
had been near Shiprock, New Mexico, when the sighting was made. Regarding the
objects Arnold had seen, however, Dr. Nininger said that those could not have
been meteors; the descriptions of them sounded to him more like "mechanical
objects."
Some explanations were as bizarre as the UFO reports themselves. One
of the most original and imaginative explanations came the same day (June
28th) from the operator of a bottle-capping plant in Everett, Washington, and
was carried widely by the wire services. Offered with apparent seriousness, this
solution proposed that the little aluminum discs inside the bottle caps were set
free when the bottle caps were melted down, rose up the chimneys on columns of
hot air, and were then carried aloft by the winds to be reported as flying discs
by numerous people throughout the country.
On
June 30th another Army official spoke out. AP reported that Colonel Alfred F.
Kilberer, intelligence officer of the Eighth Air Force, in commenting upon
recent reports made in Texas, said bluntly that "the reports might be true, but I
doubt it." Two days later he, like his colleagues in White Sands, had further
thoughts on the subject: in the Houston Post, AP quoted him as saying flying
saucer reports were nothing more than "an interesting study in human psychology."
June Roundup
By June 30th
sightings for that month had been made in at least thirty states and in
two Canadian provinces. The largest number of sightings (twenty) had
been made in Washington; runners-up were Oregon and New Mexico (thirteen
each); Utah, Arizona and Texas (eight each); California and Idaho (six
each); and the remaining states accounted for four or less, making a
total of 128 sightings for the month. Daylight sightings predominated,
totaling ninety; night sightings came to twenty-eight and ten were of
undetermined times. Most people had reported seeing “round objects” or
“discs;” some described the objects as “oval.” Witnesses numbered more
than 220 persons, representing a wide cross-section of professions,
including pilots, scientists, police, public officials, physicians,
teachers, students, forest rangers, newspaper men, railroad engineers,
military men, housewives, a barber, a dentist, and a postmaster.
Observations were made from planes in the air, from moving automobiles,
from the inside of homes, through windows, but mostly from open areas
outdoors. Instruments that had been used to observe UFOs included
binoculars and theodolites, and in one report (Case 13) a photograph was
said to have been taken (IV-3).
The
vantage point of time allows us to view past events with an objectivity that was
impossible as those events were taking place. Looking back today on the UFO
sightings of June, 1947, it appears to be unmistakably evident that by the end
of the month there was already enough evidence to justify a thorough scientific
investigation into these unexplained appearances. It is understandable that
such an idea occurred to scarcely anyone in mid-1947. What is so
difficult to understand is why it took another nineteen years of continued
observations and reports to get such an investigation underway.
(
I – 6 )
 |
 |
The Buildup of Sightings, July 1 - 3
Although June had been a month of numerous and unusual UFO
observations, the best was still to come. July began with an upsurge in the
number of reports on the very first day of the month twenty-four reports, an
increase of ten over the previous day. The following day produced only one
less. (These figures, it must be reminded, are based only on the references
examined for the purposes of this report.) Except for the southeast, the
sightings for these two days appeared to be spread throughout the country fairly
evenly, with about half coming from the western states. There are no reports in
the Air Force files for July 1st and 2nd. Almost two hundred witnesses, nearly
as many as for the entire month of June, were involved in these sightings, but
half of them in one sighting alone: over a hundred spectators at an amateur
ball game in Cincinnati saw two of the discs move slowly over the field on the
evening of July 2nd (Case 161). In
twenty of these forty-seven sightings more than one object was seen. It was
several days before these observations were carried by the wire services, and
comment in the press for those two days is almost nil.
On July 3rd the number of sightings
rose again, with references to thirty-three UFO observations found for that date
(including one of uncertain date). Distribution was still fairly general, but
indications of a concentration in California that had begun the previous day,
with eight sightings, continued on July 3rd, with five more. Among the more
interesting reports for that date was the one made by John
Cole, at Harborside, Maine, who is
described in the Air Force files as an astronomer: a group of objects milling
within a loose formation like a swarm of bees (III-18). It
is considered unidentified by the Air Force. Another interesting report describes the landing,
seen by a family of ten in Northern Idaho, of eight huge objects (II-12). This report
should have been among those in the Air Force files because it had
been reported to intelligence officers from the Spokane Army Air Base, and an
intensive air search was carried out by two missions of the National Guards
116th Fighter Group. Local sheriffs deputies also made a ground search, but
since no apparent trace of the objects was found, a report was probably never
forwarded to Wright Field in Dayton.
Of the July 3rd sightings, twenty were
made by daylight, ten by night, and for three the time is uncertain. There were
fourteen multiple object reports, six of which describe formations of three
objects. At least sixty-five witnesses were involved, of which fifty were
identified by name.
During the five weeks from
June 1st through July 3rd, sightings had
been made in at least thirty-six states and three Canadian
provinces; yet a UP
story from Chicago, date-lined July 3rd and found in many morning papers
for
July 4th, headlined a rundown of reports, “Flying Saucers Seen Over 8
States.” An AP account from Washington on the same date was a little
closer to the
truth: it reported that sightings had been made in ten states.
With the
increase in sightings from July 1 to 3 came the expected increase in
editorial comment and official statements. On July 2nd the Portland
Oregonian
headlined an editorial, “Er -- Quack, Quack.” The headline accurately
condensed the substance of what followed.
On
the following day, July 4th, official statements were forthcoming from Wright
Field, where reports were being received and examined, and from elsewhere. In
a July 3rd dispatch from Chicago, Major Paul Gaynor was quoted as saying that a
preliminary investigation of reports had dropped "because of lack of concrete
evidence." And from Washington, AP quoted an unidentified spokesman as saying
that "the Air Force people are inclined to believe either that the observers just
imagined they saw something or that there is some meteorological explanation for
the phenomenon." Among the meteorological possibilities was a fanciful one
involving icing conditions in high clouds that "produced large hailstones, which
might have flattened out and glided a bit." The Washington spokesman added that
a preliminary study of the reports "has not produced enough fact to warrant
further investigation." Conversely, a report by INS from Wright Field, at the same time,
stated that "officers of the Army Air Forces Air Material Command at Wright Field
were asked by General Carl Spaatz, the Army’s air commander, to check on the
reports and try to ascertain what the discs are." Lt. William C. Anderson, public
relations officer at the field, said: "So far we haven’t found anything to
confirm that the discs exist. We don’t think they are guided missiles. As
things stand right now, it appears to be either a phenomenon or a figment of
someone’s imagination." According to these spokesmen, the investigation at
Wright Field was continuing, in spite of what spokesmen in Washington were
telling the press.
These
contradictory official statements established the ground rules and set the tone
that would characterize the Air Force handling of the subject for the next
twenty years, demonstrating clearly that its primary concern was not one of
scientific investigation, but rather one of public relations.
The July 4th Deluge
Within twenty four hours after the release of these official statements events
would begin to take place that would leave everybody civilians and military
personnel alike in a state closely approximating Ruppelt’s description of a
flap. Reports of sightings, coming almost simultaneously from hundreds of
bewildered citizens, were made to newspapers and police stations all over the country,
and adjacent areas as well, from Southern California to New Brunswick,
and from Louisiana to North Dakota. People everywhere were experiencing the beginning of
one of the most massive waves of UFO sightings on record. Reports came from all
kinds of observers: from picnickers and holiday crowds, from policemen and
public officials, and from pilots, farmers, professional men, housewives and bus
drivers.
(
I – 7 )
At Twin Falls, Idaho, sixty picnickers watched three formations of
more than thirty-five objects flying overhead (II-5); and
later in the evening, at Hauser Lake, near Spokane, more than two hundred
persons saw a lone disc in the sky overhead (II-6); the
entire crew of a United Airline flight watched two groups of discs near the
Idaho-Oregon border at dusk (III-10); dozens
of police and scores of citizens reported seeing numerous discs flying over
Portland, Oregon, early in the afternoon (III-15); air-to-air sightings were made by two private pilots, one in Idaho and the
other in California (III-10); in
Seattle, a Coast-guardsman took the first widely-publicized photograph of a
flying disc overhead (IV-3); in Boise a
UP newsman and friends watched a single disc fly directly overhead at a
tremendous speed and disappear over the horizon in a matter of seconds (III-6).
But reports were not confined to the
west: in New Orleans, a salesgirl saw a speeding disc fly over Lake Pontchartrain (Case 223); a group of
people in Port Huron, Michigan, counted an assortment of almost twenty discs
flying in various directions after dark (Case 276); a
blazing ball of fire was seen hovering near the home of an Alexandria, Virginia
woman early in the morning of the 4th (II-6); and a physician at the Pennsylvania Hospital for Mental Diseases saw an
object with whirling jets, or wings, similar to an object reported seen several
hours earlier by a Saint Louis mechanic and his family (II-14);
and in Fayetteville, Arkansas, a farmer's livestock bolted when objects swooped
overhead (IV-1).
Sightings continued into the evening hours with
numerous after-dark reports of fast-moving lights and illuminated discs coming
from many areas. The total number of reports through midnight on July 4th was
more than double the number for the previous day. References to no less than
eighty-eight specific sightings were found, spread over an area comprising
twenty-four states and one Canadian province. Well over four hundred people
from all walks of life witnessed the phenomena. Approximately two-thirds of all
these observations took place within the daylight hours or dusk, and almost all
of the daylight reports described discs, or round, or oval objects; included
with the night reports were several accounts of fireballs. More than half of
the sightings described a single object; the rest involved two or more, with
some groups flying in V-formations. Most of the sightings were, as in earlier
reports, very brief, describing objects flying in a straight course at tremendous
rates of speed; reports of longer duration were also made, however, like the
United Air Lines sighting in which the crew watched two formations of objects
for a period of nearly fifteen minutes (III-10,11). A number of slow-moving and hovering
objects were also described.
The effect of all these celestial displays was
extraordinary. The next day, July 5th, newspapers all over the country gave
front-page, banner-headline coverage to the sightings. Local papers featured
reports of sightings coming from nearby areas, but the wire services carried
more than thirty specific sightings from various locations. The Portland,
Oregon reports and the United Air Lines sighting was by far
the most publicized, given in a detailed and straightforward
manner. As the Portland ("Er --
Quack, Quack") Oregonian remarked of the UAL case: "Their report, detailed enough
to shake the most incredulous, left them (the observers) equally shaken." The
photograph taken near Seattle by Coast-guardsman Frank Ryman was also given "top
billing" in many newspapers as graphic evidence of the reality of the reported
objects.
Sightings on July 5th continued at a high rate,
although the references examined turned up eleven fewer sightings than on the
previous day for a total of seventy-seven specific observations. These appear to be
distributed over an even wider area than on July 4th, with reports from thirty
states and one province. The number of witnesses again totaled in the several
hundreds and covered the same broad spectrum of occupations as on the previous
day. There are other similar features to the previous days reports: two-thirds
of the sightings occurred during daylight hours or dusk; a little more than half
of these reports described single objects; and discs remained the most
predominate shape reported, with several notable exceptions, such as the object
described by two TWA pilots while flying over Neapolis, Ohio: the UFO had the
shape of a propeller. (This is remarkably similar to a report from Spokane,
Washington, on July 6th; (see II-17 for
details.) On July 4th Oregon had the greatest number of reports, with
sixteen; California was second, with ten. On July 5th, California led with
fifteen, while Washington followed, with seven.
Generally speaking, newspaper coverage
for these two days was matter-of-fact, reasonably detailed, and notably free of
ridicule and innuendo. The sudden wide-scale nature of the phenomenon, the
graphic vividness of the descriptions, and the undisputed character of the
witnesses resulted in a serious-minded handling of the reports by the press.
Unfortunately it was not possible for the press to sustain an objective attitude
after July 6th, for a number of reasons. The single most important factor in
stifling objective news coverage was the
unprecedented outpouring of absurd
"explanations," personal opinion, and outright invective against UFO observers,
all of which served no other purpose than to confuse the issue and cast a pall
of suspicion on all witnesses. And by July 7th, when cranks and practical
jokers got into full swing, an aura of ridicule descended upon the subject that
has lingered for twenty years. For this the press must bear a major
responsibility, since it freely gave over its obligation of presenting the facts
in favor of currying to the voices of irresponsibility and confusion.
(
I – 8 )
 |
The Voice of Confusion
Hard
on the heels of the July 4th reports came the claims and disclaimers of the
experts invariably persons who had not seen UFOs, but spoke with some assumed
authority for those who had. These so-called experts knew what the witnesses
had seen, even if the witnesses themselves did not. Among the more
irresponsible statements that appeared on July 5th was the one that originated
in the Los Angeles Herald-Express, and was carried widely by
AP. The
story quoted an "unidentified" scientist, allegedly a nuclear physicist
at the
California Institute of Technology, who proposed the theory that the
discs
were the result of "transmutation of atomic energy" experiments that
were being
conducted at Muroc Air Base, White Sands, and some unspecified location
near
Portland, Oregon, as well as elsewhere. "These saucers so-called are
capable of
high speeds but can be controlled from the ground. They are twenty
feet in the
center and are partially rocket-propelled on the take-off." He
maintained that "people are seeing things. Such flying discs actually
are in
experimental existence." Dr. Harold Urey, in Chicago, immediately
threw cold
water on this claptrap: "Transmutation of atomic energy sounds like
gibberish. You can transmute metals, not energy." Another disclaimer
came almost as soon
from Colonel F. J. Clark, commanding officer of the Hanford Engineering
Works of
the Atomic Energy Project in Richland, Washington, who said he knew of
no
connection between atomic energy experiments at Hanford and "flying
saucers."
Another "authority" on secret government devices was national commander-in-chief
of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Louis E. Starr, of Portland, Oregon. AP
reports that in Columbus on July 5th, in a speech to Ohio VFW members, Starr
stated that he was "momentarily expecting word from Washington" concerning the
"fleets of flying saucers," which would "help explain the discs." A telegram
containing the information, said Starr, "was due here at three p.m. (EST)" and he
promised to read it to his listeners. It seems never to have arrived. Whatever
Starr’s sources were he wasn’t telling, but he did say he felt "too little is
being told to the people of this country." AP does not mention how long VFW
members waited around for that telegram.
In
Detroit, INS quoted another "expert" -- this one an unidentified meteorologist
-- who
proposed that UFOs were from Mars; not spaceships, but merely "signals." With a
freewheeling logic he asked, "why should it not be as logical for Mars to try to
contact earth as for earth to contact Mars?" Admitting that it was an "unusual"
theory, he offered no clues as to how these signals were converted into
seemingly physical objects, nor did he specify what earthly experiments were
currently being carried out in an attempt to contact Mars. His decision to
remain anonymous was most judicious.
The
Portland Oregonian ("Er -- Quack, Quack") of July 6th quoted several
professional men and their various professional theories. Dr. Frederick A.
Courts, assistant professor of psychology at Reed College said: "There may be
some mass psychological explanation to the sudden rash of 'flying saucer'
reports. When people expect to see something they frequently do
. . . The
whole thing could be the result of a general semi-hysteria due to the
nervousness of the public over reports of atomic warfare and guided
missiles." Disagreeing with his colleague was Dr. A. A. Knowlton,
physics professor at the
same college, who said: "In view of the persistence of these reports,
we cannot
dismiss the 'flying disc' matter as simply another instance of mass
hysteria." He
went on to cite the impressiveness of the United Air Lines report, and
suggested
that the objects were "the result of secret experiments with guided
missiles,
either by our own or by foreign countries."
Colonel E. S. Ellison, head of the Portland Weather Bureau, remarked that a
great number of balloons were sent aloft each day by meteorologists and at high
altitudes these balloons frequently reflect the rays of the sun like
metal; "balloons, however, could not reach the great speed attributed to the
'saucers' because even above the atmosphere, wind currents seldom exceed one
hundred miles an hour." Dr. J. Hugh Pruett, Eugene meteorologist, who had
earlier suggested that "persistent vision" might explain the objects that Arnold
had seen, now observed more prudently that "I don’t know what on earth these
mysterious objects can be." He was certain, however, that they were not
meteorites, for if they were, "someone would have found traces on the ground by
now."
By
Sunday, July 6th, a number of other astronomers had made their opinions
known. Significantly, not one of their utterances indicated even the
slightest degree
of scientific curiosity about what this new phenomenon being seen in the
sky
might be. UFO reports were summarily dismissed by most of these
scientists.
At a convention for astronomers held at the Franklin Institute in
Philadelphia, diligent newsman polled the "experts" for their opinions. Dr.
Harlow Shapley, director of Harvard College Observatory, said that unless he saw
a disc himself, he had absolutely nothing to say. Dr. Charles P. Olivier,
president of the American Meteor Society, (who later became a NICAP Board
Member), told reporters that none of the astronomical observers with whom he was
in touch around the country had seen anything resembling such objects, and added
that while reports did not appear to resemble meteors, sightings might be
expected to increase toward the end of July, when the Delta Aquarids made their
annual appearance. Dr. Roy Marshall, of the Fels Planetarium in Philadelphia,
wrote off all reports as "plain hysteria;" unless he saw one himself, he
commented, he wouldn’t comment.
In
Chicago, two of the country’s leading astronomers agreed that the reported discs
"couldn’t be meteors." Dr. Gerard Kuiper, head of the University of Chicago’s
Yerkes Observatory at Williams Bay, Wisconsin, agreed with Dr. Oliver Lee, head
of Northwestern University’s Dearborn Observatory at Evanston, when the latter
proposed that the objects
were "man-made" and probably "radio-controlled." Lee said that "the Army, Navy and
Air Force are working secretly on all sorts of things." He exhorted inquisitive
newsmen to "remember the A-bomb, and radar signals to the moon."
(
I – 9 )
Judging from statements such as these, the "spirit of scientific inquiry" had no
relevance when it came to UFOs, as far as the scientific fraternity itself was
concerned. In twenty years the situation remains much the same, to the
discredit of the American scientific community.
U. S.
Government scientists and military officials were no less disdainful, according
to a July 5th AP dispatch from Washington. Ivan B. Tannehill, chief of the U.
S. Weather Bureaus division of synoptic reports and forecasts, said: "I’d like
to see one first before I make a guess." An Atomic Energy Commission scientist echoed his
statement: he’d be glad to guess what the saucers were
"if someone will bring
one in."
Dr. Newborn Smith, of the National Bureau of Standards, likened flying
saucer reports to those of the Loch Ness monster: "Once the report gets around
that someone said they saw something, a lot of people think they saw it too." He
didn’t think the discs were "natural phenomena," but suggested sightings may have
been due to the "reflections of a distant plane." If he saw a good picture of
one, "he might be able to tell what it is."
A spokesman at the Naval Observatory in Washington
said only that from descriptions given so far, the discs "did not seem to be
astronomical phenomena." A CAA spokesman said that all he knows "is what I read
in the papers."
In an AP item from Sacramento on July 5th, public relations officer
Major Duncan Annam, of McClelland Field, said there was no cause for undue alarm
about the objects. "Lots of people are worried to heck about the things," he said,
"but there’s nothing to get excited about. If there were anything to them the
Army would have notified us." He was inclined to believe they might be some
"Army
training experiment," but he admitted that this was just a personal opinion. He
added that there had been no radar confirmation of reports around the Sacramento
area.
And
in Circleville, Ohio, residents got in an uproar over a strange device that was
found on a farm. Attached to it were the remains of a balloon, and while it was
evident that it was a meteorological device used to measure wind velocities, the
seeds of confusion had been sown throughout the land and objectivity was in
short supply. But the situation would worsen, and the sightings would
increase.
Crest of the Wave, July 6th - 7th
While the Sunday papers of July 6th were giving front-page coverage
to the reports of the previous two days, the number of sightings for that day
soared to more than double those of July 5th. A total of one hundred and
fifty-seven sighting references were found for observations made in thirty-seven
states, three provinces and the District of Columbia. California again led with
the highest number, a total of twenty-one sightings; Alabama was next with
nineteen an increase due to a concentration of multiple-object reports by
hundreds of residents during the evening hours. Another concentration of
sightings occurred in Missouri, where a total of eleven observations were made.
Over half of the reports for July 6th describe single objects, and witnesses
numbered at least five hundred. Once again about two-thirds of the sightings
were made during the daylight hours, or dusk. One photograph was taken, in
Birmingham, Alabama, but little is known of it other than the brief mention in
the local press accounts (IV-4).
Of the four reports found in the Air
Force files for July 6th, three involved military personnel. One report, from
Birmingham, was made by an Army sergeant and several of his neighbors (III-3).
Nothing in the official report indicates the widespread nature of UFO activity
over Birmingham that night, but local newspapers provide what may be independent
corroboration of the sergeant’s report. This case is officially explained as
"fireworks."
The
second official report was made by a Fairfield-Suisan Air Base Captain who, with
his wife, saw an oscillating disc fly over their home at an unspecified time
during the day; while no time has been mentioned, there were a number of reports
of single objects during the afternoon of July 6th in the northern Bay region of
California; without reference to a specific time, however, it is impossible to
correlate any of these sightings with the Captain's report. It is officially
listed as Unidentified (III-3).
The third military case is an air-to-air observation made by a B-25
pilot and his crew over Clay Center, Kansas, while flying from Ogden, Utah, to
Kansas City. The object --
a bright disc --
reportedly paced his plane off the left
wing until the pilot tried to close in for a better look, when it flew off at
high speed. This object, seen at 1:45 p.m. (CST) in the afternoon, was listed
by Dr. Hynek as "astronomical" (III-11).
The
fourth official case, which was non-military, described the landing and ascent
of a small disc near Tempe, Arizona, during the afternoon. For reasons unknown,
the folder containing this report at Project Blue Book was empty, when examined
for purposes of this report. It is listed as "insufficient information" in the
official files (II-13). Another landing
report, not among those in the Air Force files, describes a brief landing and
ascent of another small disc seen near Pocatello, Idaho, at dawn. This object
remained in an upright attitude, like a wheel, as it touched down and then took
off (II-12).
(
I – 10 )
 |
Among other unusual reports
for July 6th
is one that describes a power outage at dawn in Acampo, California (near
Lodi),
which was associated with a "red glow" in the sky (IV-3). It is
unfortunate that local newspaper accounts could not be consulted for
more
precise details.
On
July 7th, the peak of the wave, the number of UFO reports reached a new high,
with references found for one hundred and sixty-two sightings from thirty-seven
states, a geographical distribution similar to
the previous day. Washington led
with twenty-two sightings; California, still an area of concentrated UFO
activity, followed with twenty. Further east, Illinois became an area of
heavy
activity, producing seventeen reports. Daylight sightings once again
outnumbered night reports by about two-to-one. As in the previous four
days,
single-object sightings exceeded the multiple-object reports, by about
twenty on
July 7th. Once again the total number of witnesses for that day was
about five
hundred. Three photographs have been referred to: the widely publicized
Hixenbaugh photograph taken in Louisville, Kentucky; a photo taken near
Pontiac,
Michigan, of two objects, by tool-maker Albert Weaver; and two photos
taken of a
single object by William Rhodes, in Phoenix, Arizona. (See Section IV,
on photographs.) The Phoenix case is in
the Air Force files and is termed "possible hoax," although Kenneth
Arnold
describes, in The Coming of the Saucers (p. 52), how Intelligence
Officers Frank Brown and William Davidson regarded the Rhodes photographs as
among the several "we consider to be authentic."
Among
the more interesting reports for July 7th was a sighting by five Ohio State
University students in Columbus of three objects in triangular formation (II-6);
a sighting by a Reno newspaper editor and his wife of a single disc seen flying
over that city (III-7); a report of three
oddly maneuvering objects seen at Rome, Maine (II-10); a
report from the Air Force files describing the analysis of the fragments of a
small object that landed in an Omaha street - probably the only UFO report on
record explained as "tobacco ashes" (IV-2),
and the report of electromagnetic effects in the form of radio interference as
six discs hovered over a power line in the Hollywood, California area (IV-3).
Most
interesting of all, however, is a series of reports of a large disc accompanied
by a group of smaller objects, which were described in several cases as having
merged with, and seen emerging from, the parent object. The series began on the
evening of July 6th in Tucson, Arizona, and then moving progressively clockwise
around the circumference of the United States, with reports a few hours later at
Palmdale, California; several hours after that in Tacoma, Washington; and then,
during the next day, over Cicero, Illinois; and finally appearing over
Manchester, Maine, on the night of July 7th (II-20).
With
reports of sightings coming from all parts of the country, Air National Guard
planes were being ordered aloft to search for the objects in many areas,
particularly in the Pacific Northwest. Others stood by on the ground, ready
to take off at a moments notice. The results of the air search were negative,
which seemed to confirm the growing suspicion among many that there had been
nothing in the air to begin with. Incredulity by both press and public was
growing hourly and with each new report there was a disclaimer by some skeptic
convinced that all of the reports were completely unfounded.
The Triumph of Ridicule
By
the time the sightings for July 6th and 7th had been published, the newspapers
were no longer presenting the facts with the detail and responsibility that had
been given to the reports of July 4th and 5th. Skepticism, and in many cases
outright ridicule, dominated news coverage of UFO sightings and those who
reported them. A general attitude of "everybody’s-doing-it-now" gave many news
accounts more than a faint air of suspicion.
Some of the news reports were entirely misleading and details were
manufactured for the sake of creating a more sensational story. For example, a
perfectly "ordinary" UFO sighting made in Denver was sent out over the UP wires as
follows: "George Kuger of Denver said he saw a flying disc with an American flag
on it." There is nothing in the local account of Kuger’s report that mentions
flags, American or otherwise, but in hundreds
of newspapers across the country, Kuger was made out a fool by the
flagrant irresponsibility of the press (Case
427). Another example of its use of ridicule to not only debunk a
report but make the reporter look foolish occurred in the wire accounts
describing a Chicago woman who, on July 6th, reported that she had seen a
"flying
saucer with legs." By playing up the woman’s unfortunate expression, "I
thought
for sure it was coming down and slap me in the face," when in fact she
had
probably been scared out of her wits, the papers succeeded in turning
the report
into something patently ridiculous. Had newsmen been more responsible,
they
would have known that just the day before, several Covington, Kentucky,
women
had also reported seeing an object with legs (II-15); and
we now know that since 1947 there have been numerous reports of objects
with
similar appendages. In still another case, the woman in Palmdale,
California,
who described the satellite object case as appearing like "a mama hen
with her
baby chicks," gave newsmen a real heyday of merriment; and yet this is
probably
one of the most significant reports to come out of the entire 1947 wave
(Cases
528 & 530).
These are only isolated examples of the
way in which the press resorted to ridicule because it had prejudged the value
of a news story and no longer felt it was necessary or sufficient merely to
report the facts responsibly. News coverage during the crest of the wave
descended to regrettably low standards and established a modus operandi regarding UFO coverage that has characterized its handling of the subject ever
since. It is one of the chief reasons why, twenty years later, it is a subject
that remains damned to ridicule: the taint had been acquired at the very
outset.
(
I – 11 )
 |
Contributing significantly to the aura
of nonsense pervading the press were the columnists, such as Hal Boyle, whose
syndicated articles described in purposefully humorous fashion various wild and
imaginary escapades aboard Martian spaceships. Cranks and crackpots added to the
carnival atmosphere and proved to be irresistible to reporters looking for a
byline: one San Francisco zany garnered considerable news space by claiming to
have projected himself into outer space on an "astral plane" to discover the
origin of the saucers; by means of mental telepathy he found out that the
objects were "Nimbre A Theatos," or spaceships using the "dark side of the moon" as
a base, dropping "Metaboblons" which may be mechanisms to counteract atomic
radiation, although he wasn’t certain, as his source of information, "the Dhyanis,
rulers of Creation," were being pretty closed-mouthed --
or was it closed-minded? -- about the details. The San Francisco
Chronicle made much use of this arrant
foolishness, and the wire services gleefully passed it along to readers outside
of the Bay area.
Hoaxsters and practical jokers made matters even worse: a number of
financial rewards were offered by various individuals and organizations
for the capture of a disc; these merely encouraged
hoaxters and resulted in the exploitation of many
false reports (see section on Hoaxes).
At the same time, more and
more
confusing and uninformed "explanations" were being offered. On July 8th
UP
reported from Atlanta that airline pilots were throwing cold water on
reports: Perry Hudson, East Airlines pilot, said he’d seen "many
beautiful and strange
cloud formations in the air but nothing that ever looked like a saucer,"
so he
turned thumbs down on persistent reports, even from his pilot
colleagues; if
he couldn’t see ‘em, no one else could, either. T. P. Ball, chief pilot
for
Delta Airlines, termed all reports to be "imagination . . . . It
certainly
doesn’t seem to be the first wave of an invasion from Mars." Another
Delta
pilot, J. H. Williamson, said, “a lot of folks must have had too much
to
drink.” These opinions were echoed by many other pilots, most of whom
would not
allow that anything more unusual had been seen than "some freak cloud
formation." Aviation experts in Washington suggested that dials on
instrument panels had
been reflected in the sloping glass of the canopies -- neglecting, however, to
account for the thousands of witnesses who had not been looking through a plane's
canopy.
Other
"experts" voiced opinions barren of any basic facts. In California, Professor L.
D. Shane, director of the Lick Observatory, pointed out
-- erroneously
-- that no
objects had been sighted by any "scientific observers." In New Jersey, Newark
meteorologist William Weiner said that he could see saucers at will: "All you
need to do is to rub your eyes very hard and look up at a bright sky." He
gave no instructions for spotting them at night. Essex County psychologist Dr.
M. W. Openchowski explained that "when a strange thing is reported seen it is
reported seen again and again. It is a trait of human nature that people like
to be in the know and participate in observing the unusual."
Here and there, an occasional voice of
some reason was heard. In Syracuse, New York, Dr. H. A. Steckel, psychiatric
consultant for the Veterans Administration, said, "they have been seen by too
many people in too many different places to be dismissed so lightly." He was
persuaded that they could be the "results of experiments by some unknown
Government agencies."
On July 6th, UP reported that Captain Tom Brown,
spokesman for the Air Force's Public Relations staff in Washington, D. C., said
that the Air Forces had been investigating reports for ten days and "we still
haven’t the slightest idea what they could be. But we don’t believe anyone in
this country, or outside of this country, has developed a guided missile that
will go 1,200 miles an hour, as some reports have indicated." Other government
spokesmen repeated this disclaimer: "No such phenomenon can be explained by any
experiments being conducted by the Army Air Forces," another Army spokesman
reported on July 7th, and Rear Admiral Paul F. Lee, director of the Naval
Research Laboratory, concurred. In a statement from Washington carried by UP on
July 8th, an unidentified spokesman said the Army was certain of what the
saucers were not: they were not secret bacteriological devices of some foreign
power; they were not (again) secret Army rockets; and they were
not space
ships. He added that none of the saucer observers "were able to describe them
accurately," but the Army would continue its investigation and, meanwhile, was
"keeping an open mind."
Ruppelt reports (p. 39) that ATIC personnel at Wright Field in Dayton considered
the UFO situation to be serious -- in fact,
very serious. As with the press,
confusion surrounded the investigation, confusion almost to the point of
panic. While reassuring statements from official spokesmen were being
carried by the
press to a confused American public eager for some concrete news about
the
identification of flying saucers, the mysterious objects continued to
appear
over many areas, but in decreasing numbers.
The Crest Breaks, July 8 – 9
On
July 8th the number of sighting reports dropped sharply. References to ninety
sightings, about the same as for July 4th, were found, and the distribution was
fairly even over twenty-seven states, although California continued to be an
area of high activity, with nineteen sightings. Washington was second, with
nine; Illinois had eight, and Oregon seven. For the entire five-day period the
Pacific coast states were highest in the total number of reports: California led
with eighty-six, Washington was second with fifty, and Oregon third, with
thirty-two; following were Illinois, thirty-one; Alabama, twenty-three; and
Missouri, twenty-two.
Even though the total number of all UFO sighting reports for this
period is unknown, conclusions about geographical distribution derived from
references examined are not entirely worthless, for the trend for western states
to predominate appeared very early in the research; this trend continued
consistently with the examination of new material.
(
I – 12 )
 |
 |
 |
As with the previous four
days, daylight sightings on July 8th were approximately two-thirds of the total
number of reports. But the number of multiple-object reports went down
considerably, totaling only twenty-three, as compared to fifty-seven
single-object sightings. (For the remaining ten cases, the number of objects is
not known.) Witnesses on July 8th were again more than five hundred, but most
of this large total came from four cases, each of which was reported to have had
many witnesses: two in California (Cases 734
and 766); one in Hawaii (Case
769); and one in New Jersey (Case
756). For the remaining ten cases, the number of objects is
not known. Witnesses on July 8th were again more than five hundred, but most
of this large total came from four cases, each of which was reported to have had
many witnesses: two in California (Cases 734
and 766); one in Hawaii (Case
769); and one in New Jersey (Case
756).
Several interesting cases on
July 8th
were air-to-air sightings: a pilot flying near Pell City, Alabama, saw a
disc
about the size of an automobile wheel (III-12). The son of the governor
of New Hampshire saw an oval object below his plane as
he and a friend flew near Alton, New Hampshire (III-12). A private pilot
flying a seaplane over Puget Sound saw several discs above the
Olympic Mountains to the west (III-12). A
student pilot, employed by the Spokane Naval Supply Depot, observed a disc with
a hole in the center as he flew in the vicinity of Mount Spokane (III-12). And an F-51 pilot from Muroc Air Base observed a flat, highly reflective object
high above his plane as he flew over the Los Angeles area, south of the base (III-12).
This
last report was the climax of a series of observations involving personnel at
Muroc Air Base earlier in the day. Three separate incidents are recorded
involving several prominent officers as witnesses (III-4).
Ruppelt writes that the Muroc reports were "the first sightings that made the Air
Force take a deep interest in UFOs" (p. 37), and they are collectively Case #1 in
the files of Project Sign. The official explanation for the three sightings,
however, is "balloons" -- in spite of the fact that in each sighting the objects
were seen to move into the wind, and in one case were described as maneuvering
in "tight circles."
On
July 9th the number of sightings dropped even further, to twenty-four, about the
same as on the first two days of July. The wave had spent itself and most of
the objects had gone back to wherever it is they come from. The twenty-four
reports on the 9th were made in thirteen states, and at least fifteen of the
sightings were made during daylight hours. There were thirty-five witnesses,
and the number of single and multiple-object reports were about the same. In
California, reports dropped to a single sighting, and while there were four in
Michigan, details of three of these cases, from the northern part of the state,
were impossible to obtain. The fourth sighting, from the Air Force files,
describes a close-up observation of a ball of bright, sparkling fire, about the
size of a bushel-basket, seen hovering just above the ground by a Midland couple
as they picked berries in the late afternoon. The object left peculiar traces,
and an analysis was made of the fragments (IV-2).
There is one unidentified case in the Air Force files for July 9th,
the report of aviation editor Dave Johnson’s air-to-air observation at Boise,
Idaho (III-12). Unofficial reports
include two independent sightings of a group of about five objects, described in
one report as having domes, like "cups riding in saucers" that made a "swishing"
noise and left blue trails as they passed over Chicago in the early morning
hours (II-13); a Spokane report that
described three objects, one of which was observed to land on the banks of the
Spokane River, although no traces were able to be found later; and the report of
three teen-aged girls in Anchorage, Alaska, who saw a white disc zip across
Elmendorf Field. With the Alaskan report, forty-eight out of the fifty states
were represented by UFO sightings
Hoaxes and Mistakes
While newspapers still carried a few apparently genuine UFO reports
-- often buried among a mish-mash of superficial nonsense
-- the kind of stories that
made headlines after July 8th were the sort a reader found impossible to take
seriously. If a report wasn’t an out-and-out hoax, it was an embarrassingly
obvious mistake. One of those mistakes, given the widest possible publicity,
had its origins near Roswell, New Mexico, when a farmer named
William W. ("Mac") Brazel
discovered
the wreckage of a disc on his ranch near Corona, early in July. After hearing
news broadcasts of flying saucer reports,
Brazel, who had stored pieces of the
disc in a barn, notified the Sheriff's Office in Roswell, who, in turn, notified
Major Jesse A. Marcel, of the Roswell Army Air Field intelligence office. The
remnants of the disc were taken to Roswell Field for
examination Through a
series of clumsy blunders in public relations, and a desire by the press to
manufacture a crashed disc if none would obligingly crash of itself, the story
got blown up out of all proportions that read "Crashed Disc Found in New Mexico."
According to AP on July 8th, public information officer Lt. Walter Haught
made an announcement of the discovery: “The many rumors regarding the flying
disc became a reality yesterday when the intelligence office of the 509th Bomb
Group of the Eighth Air Force, Roswell Army Air Field, was fortunate enough to
gain possession of a disc through the cooperation of one of the local ranchers
and the sheriffs office of Chavez County.” The effect of this reckless statement
was equal to an atomic detonation; results were immediate. While newspaper
deluged the air base for additional information, a search party was sent out to
scour the landing site for additional fragments; the collected remains of
whatever it was that had crashed on Brazel’s ranch were taken to Eighth Air
Force headquarters in Fort Worth, Texas. There, Brigadier General Roger M.
Ramey tried to clarify matters by first explaining that no one had actually seen
the object in the air; that the remains were of a flimsy construction; that it
was partially composed of tinfoil; and, finally, that it was the wreckage of
"a
high altitude weather device." Warrant Office Irving Newton, a weather
forecaster at the Fort Worth Weather Station, had identified the crashed "disc" as
the remains of weather equipment used widely by weather stations
around the
country when sending balloons aloft to measure wind directions and velocity.
There remains the possibility that some super-secret upper-atmospheric
balloon experiment had crashed near Corona, which would have accounted
for all the confusion and secrecy involved in its recovery.
(
I – 13 )
Whether the pictured balloon equipment carried widely in the press
was actually a photograph of the recovered fragments remained a question, but
news editors should have been on their toes: other similar incidents had
already been reported, like the discovery several days before of the weather
device at Circleville, Ohio. The New Mexico incident created
an uproar in
Washington, and high Army Air Force officials were reported to have delivered a
blistering rebuke to Roswell Field spokesmen for having fostered the confusion.
But the damage had already been done and the next day “Another Saucer Shot Down”
was typical of the headlines found in American papers.
Hoaxes and practical jokes were taking
up just as much news space. One of the first admitted hoaxes had been created
by a Los Angeles pilot, Vernon Baird, who had reported that on July 6th that he
encountered a flock of "flying yo-yo's" while flying over Bozeman, Montana. One of
Baird’s "yo-yo's" got caught in his prop-wash and came apart like a clam, spiraling
to the earth below. The story itself came spiraling to the earth very soon
after when Baird admitted that he had made it up while "blowing the breeze around
the hangar."
Others went to considerable trouble -- more trouble than just making up
a far-fetched story: they made up the discs to go with it. One of
these ersatz platters came crashing into the yard of a Grafton,
Wisconsin, priest; it was promptly identified as a circular saw-blade.
In East St. Louis, Illinois, someone sent a number of 11-inch pressed
paper discs sailing from a roof-top; these were subsequently identified as locomotive
packing washers. More elaborate contraptions were manufactured and sent soaring
in Shreveport, Louisiana; in Black River Falls, Wisconsin; and in Clearwater,
Florida. A thirty-inch device that landed in a Hollywood back yard on the night
of July 9th was given considerable news coverage by the press when the finder
put in his claim for a thousand-dollar reward, and while the culprit who
originated the Hollywood hoax was not identified, four teen-aged boys in Twin
Falls, Idaho, readily admitted their part in a similar hoax the next day, when
the situation began to get out of control, as Army Intelligence officers
confiscated the "disc" and began an intensive investigation.
One hoax that has gone undetected for
over twenty years was uncovered by Dr. James McDonald at the time of this
writing (see Case 613 in the
Chronology; the information was received after the Chronology had been
prepared.) In checking out a number of 1947 reports, Dr. McDonald discovered
that the report of Fred Cloud, who saw an object rise up out of storm clouds
over Raleigh, North Carolina, on July 7th, was the result of a practical joke by
an unidentified "friend." Knowing Cloud had made a flight that day, this "friend"
had made up the story when he encountered a newsman he knew, and the story
appeared in numerous North Carolina newspapers the next day, much to Cloud's
embarrassment. Cloud, whose first name was actually Fayette, not Fred,
attempted to explain to the newspapers that the story was false, but they
refused to run a subsequent denial of the original report.
Ebbtide, July 10th and After
With scarcely more than a dozen sightings for July 10th, the UFO
wave of 1947 had almost completely subsided. Few if any of the reports were
carried by the wire services. Concentrations of reports had broken up,
although there were four sightings apiece for Colorado and Washington. Most of
the reports for that day still came from western states, with two in Idaho, and
one each in Arizona and New Mexico. The New Mexico sighting, made by Lincoln La
Paz, is listed in the Air Force files as Unidentified (III-19).
The
Air Force files also contain two reports of sightings, on July 10th and
11th,
from Codroy, Newfoundland. Notes were not made on these, but neither one
is
listed as Unidentified. Other July 11th reports were made in Florida and
in
Indianapolis, Indiana. On July 12th, two sightings were made in Boise,
Idaho,
and in Seattle, several Naval sentries at Sand Point Naval Air Station
reported
seeing a single object at about the same time that an independent report
of
three objects was made elsewhere in the city (III-6). Two more sightings
occurred in Seattle the next day, and a disc was reported
seen by a businessman and his wife in Gardner, Massachusetts (III-1). On
July 15th, an official of the Civil Aeronautics Board, flying over
Concord,
California, made an air-to-air sighting of three groups of yawing
objects (III-13).
After mid-July, the number of sightings dropped to an average of
about one a day. Between July 16th and 19th, there were no sighting reports
uncovered in the records that were examined. (A complete examination of the
newspaper references for the period of July 16th through the 30th was not
undertaken, so information for this period is fragmentary.)
The Air Force files contain another
Newfoundland report for July 20th, which describes a series of "reddish" flashes
seen in an overcast sky. The explanation given for this case is a "fireball,"
although there is a photograph purportedly showing a hole the object made as it
passed through the clouds. Flashing lights were seen at Meriden, Connecticut on
July 22nd, and between July 20th and 30th, Idaho was the scene of at least a
half-dozen more sighting reports. One of these, an air-to-air observation on
July 28th made by two more United Air Lines pilots over Mountain Home, was
picked up by the wire services (III-13).
On July 29th another military pilot reported seeing two discs near Hamilton
Field, California; the report by this Army Air Corps Captain was classified as
Unidentified by the Air Force (III-5).
Earlier on the same day still another
air-to-air sighting was made, this time of a large group of small discs over
Union, Oregon. The observer was Kenneth Arnold, and the UFO wave had come full
circle (III-14).
By August the 1947 UFO wave was
history. Ruppelt writes that "by the end of July 1947 the security lid was down
tight. The few members of the press who did inquire about what the Air
Force was doing got the same treatment that you
would get today if you inquired about the number of thermonuclear weapons
stock-piled "in the U.S.’s atomic arsenal (p. 39)." According to Ruppelt, no one
had any idea what was going on relative to UFOs behind the barbed wire enclosing
the Air Technical Intelligence Center at Wright Field. Suspicion-breeding
secrecy seems to have been the policy from the very beginning.
(
I – 14 )
 |
 |
During July more that seven hundred specific sightings had been made,
with more than two
hundred taking place in the three Pacific
states alone. UFOs had been seen by
thousands of North American citizens in every walk of life. (Sightings
were not
confined to North America, however; reports had appeared from such
widely
scattered locations as China, South Africa, France, South America and
Iran.) But by the end of July, no more news reports of strange aerial
visitors appeared
in the press, outside of a small item buried in a local newspaper
somewhere. To
the satisfaction of many, the objects had departed and their existence
amounted
to nothing more than a rather unsettling memory. There was but one more
flying
saucer story to gain wide attention in the press -- an elaborate hoax that ended up
in tragedy.
The Maury Island Mystery
The Maury Island Mystery allegedly
began on June 21st, three days before Kenneth Arnold's first sighting. It
subsequently involved Arnold, as well as Emil J. Smith, the United Air Lines
pilot who saw nine discs on July 4th. It culminated on August 1st in the
unfortunate deaths of two intelligence officers when their Army B-25 crashed
near Kelso, Washington, on the return trip to Hamilton Field, following their
involvement in the so-called "mystery."
About
the middle of July, Arnold received a letter from a Chicago publisher who
offered the pilot two hundred dollars to investigate an alleged sighting at
Maury Island, near Tacoma, Washington. Arnold considered the offer for several
days, and after consulting Dave Johnson, of the Boise Daily Statesman, he
decided to accept the offer. On July 29th he flew to Tacoma and, just before
making a landing at La Grande, Oregon, to refuel, he saw his second group of
UFOs. Flying on to Tacoma, he found a reservation waiting for him at the
Winthrop Hotel, which was strange, since he had told no one of his precise
plans.
Shortly after his arrival, he got in touch with one of the Maury
Island witnesses, Harold Dahl, who said he was a harbor patrolman and that he
had seen six doughnut-shaped objects on June 21st. One of these objects had
spewed out tons of metallic fragments some of which had damaged his boat and
injured his son. Dahl first discouraged Arnold from pursuing his investigation,
but the Boise pilot was not about to be put off after having come so far. Dahl
next introduced Arnold to his boss, Fred Crisman. Crisman claimed that on the
day after Dahl’s experience, while he made an investigation of the reported
sighting and the fragments, said to have been found in abundance on the Maury
Island beach, he had seen the objects himself when they made a second appearance
over the area.
Samples of the alleged saucer fragments
were displayed and Arnold, intrigued because of certain similarities to a Boise,
Idaho, report of July 8th (IV-2), decided
to ask United Air Lines pilot E. J. Smith to join him in Tacoma. Smith, who
lived in Seattle, arrived a few hours later, and Crisman and Dahl once again
told their stories, with Crisman doing most of the talking.
Following this meeting, peculiar things
began to happen. A reporter from one of the local papers phoned the two pilots
in Arnold’s room and said that an anonymous man had tipped the paper off about
everything that had transpired in the hotel room for the past two days. These
calls continued and Arnold, plainly worried, decided to call Lt. Frank Brown,
intelligence officer at Hamilton Air Base. (Brown had earlier investigated
Arnold's sighting, as well as a number of others in the northwest.) Brown's trip
to Tacoma was approved by his superiors and, with Captain William Davidson, he
flew to Tacoma on the afternoon of July 31st in a B-25.
The
intelligence officers met Arnold and Smith at the hotel, and the group was later
joined by Crisman and Dahl. The officers listened to the story but apparently
were not much impressed, for they made plans to return to Hamilton Field that
evening, and without taking any of the "saucer fragments." However, before they
left, Crisman loaded a box full of the material in Brown's car. On the flight
back to Hamilton Field, a fire broke out in one of the bomber's engines. Two
passengers parachuted to safety, but Brown and Davidson were killed when the
plane crashed near Kelso, Washington, in the early morning hours of August 1st.
The unfortunate crash of the B-25, as well as the anonymous phone
calls to the paper, combined to create a sinister air of mystery in the press,
deepened by the reluctance of both Arnold and Smith to elaborate on their
reasons for being in Tacoma. The mysterious informer told the paper that the
B-25 had been carrying "saucer fragments," and even divulged the names of the
two intelligence officers before the names had been
released by the Army.
Arnold and Smith now found themselves
in an awkward position, because they had summoned the two officers in the belief
that they had come upon something important. Smith
contacted intelligence
officers at nearby McChord Air Base, to explain their part in the
events. Intelligence officers began an intensive investigation, the
results of which
were made public about a week later.
In a statement released on August 8th,
Fourth Air Force spokesman Lt. Colonel Donald L. Springer announced that the
Maury Island sighting by the "harbor patrolmen" was unfounded, and “did not
occur.” Colonel Springer had investigated the
boat that was supposed to have been damaged by the fragments and
"found it intact." (This was confirmed by both Arnold’s and Smith’s
examination of the alleged "damage.") The "fragments" were molten metal slag, said
by Colonel Springer to be found "in great quantity in both that area and in other
areas" where there were smelters located. "In view of this, headquarters will not
pursue this particular Tacoma investigation any further."
(
I – 15 )
In
addition to this, Ruppelt writes that it was learned that Crisman and Dahl had
sent rock fragments to the Chicago publisher as a joke, stating that the rock
"could have been" part of a saucer. "He (Dahl) said the rock came from a flying
saucer because that’s what [the publisher] wanted him to say" (p. 44). The
publisher was the same man, of course, who had offered Arnold the two hundred
dollars to investigate the report.
According to the San Francisco
News of August 4th,
"Mr. Dahl
went to the United Press Bureau at Tacoma and denied he had any parts of a
flying disc. He exhibited metallic stones, which he said he picked up on the
beach at Murray (sic) Island shortly before the flying saucer craze swept the
country."
The official report,
according to
Ruppelt, identified "one of the two men" as the anonymous informer who
had been
calling the Tacoma paper. (This was probably Crisman, as some of the
calls were
made to the paper while Dahl was in Arnold’s hotel room.) Furthermore,
neither Crisman nor Dahl were "harbor patrolmen: " they owned a couple
of boats they used
to salvage floating lumber in Puget Sound. Crisman, according to
Arnold’s own
account in The Coming of the Saucers (p. 68), disappeared understandably
soon after the crash of the B-25. Ruppelt reports that the government seriously
considered prosecuting the two men but decided against it, as the story
originated as a "harmless joke that had mushroomed, and the loss of two lives and
a B-25 could not be blamed directly on the two men."
Arnold and Smith had been caught up in
one of the most embarrassing and tragic hoaxes in the history of UFOs. The
Maury Island "mystery" was a most unfortunate conclusion to the events of the 1947
UFO wave. It left a permanent impression in the minds of many that chicanery of
this sort was typical of the entire subject of UFO phenomena. It is not
surprising that people remembered this type of story and promptly forgot the
hundreds of genuine sightings that had taken place.
Aftermath
In spite of the many negative aspects of the 1947 wave, there
remains a substantial body of data that calls for serious consideration. Much
of this 1947 material has not been readily available before. The events
described in this report, taking place as they did at the beginning of the
contemporary period of UFO phenomena in this country, have historical
significance, in that many patterns of appearance and behavior can be traced
back to 1947. Reports of UFOs in formation, UFOs buzzing cars, UFOs with
satellite objects, and landings by UFOs, give additional weight to similar
reports received in later years.
Three branches of the Establishment
share the responsibility for preventing any serious investigation of the UFO
problem: the press, the government -- primarily, but not exclusively, the Air
Force -- and the scientific fraternity. Until these three influential groups
unequivocally discard their long-standing bias against considering UFOs worthy
of serious attention, the subject is bound to remain in limbo.
Since
1965, the press has displayed a somewhat more objective editorial policy
with
regard to the UFO problem; wire service coverage of UFO sightings,
however, has
not matched this editorial policy. For example, during February and
March 1967, NICAP had received hundreds of first-hand reports of
sightings, as well as many
local newspaper accounts weekly, indicating that a UFO wave of
considerable
proportions was taking place. Yet this increase in sighting reports was
not
reflected either in the general press or by the wire services.
The extent to which government agencies, other than the Air Force,
have been involved in the UFO problem is by no means clear at present; it
appears certain, however, that the CIA has had a strong influence on the
situation - at least since 1953. As for the Air Force itself, its role during the
past fifteen years, apart from collecting UFO data, has been that of a public
relations organization engaged in a determined program of statistical
flummery. It has contributed little significant knowledge to the subject, nor
is this its basic concern. Its primary responsibility is national defense, and
since it has repeatedly stated that UFOs do not constitute a threat to national
security, it would seem appropriate for it to terminate its connection with the
subject as soon as possible.
Up
until 1966, the scientific fraternity has made no real effort to shed
light on
the UFO mystery, although a few individual scientists have collected and
investigated reports privately. The vacuum created by this dismissive
attitude
was temporarily filled in October 1966, with the selection of the
University of
Colorado as the recipient of a $300,000 grant from the Air Force (later
increased to $500,000), to initiate a thorough investigation of the
subject. Under the direction of Dr. Edward U. Condon, the Colorado
Project, as it has
been called, is scheduled to conclude its probe in mid-1968, with a
report of
its findings and recommendations to the National Academy of Sciences for
review. Results of their inquiry will be made public at that time. Until
these
results are made known, whether negative or positive, the situation will
undoubtedly remain the same as it is at present. But whatever those results may
be, they will have a profound effect on the future status of UFOs.
(
I – 16 )
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