The base officer-of-the-day, also a pilot, was in the flight operations office and overheard the report. He went outside and saw a light coming from the southwest. In the blink of an eye, it flew over the airfield, increasing to the size of a “golf ball at arm’s length,” looking like a “ball of fire.” The object seemed so low and close that the officer and the driver of his command car dropped to the ground and hid under the car because they were sure it was going to hit the ground nearby. But as they watched, the fireball made a 90-degree turn over the airfield and flew off to the northwest. In the control tower, the technicians saw the object make its right-angle turn and were certain it was not a meteor.
UNIDENTIFIED FLYING HAT
A photographic UFO case, in McMinnville, Oregon, has been debated since it was reported in 1950. On June 8 of that year, Paul Trent and his wife watched a dark, hat-shaped object flying over their property and some clear photos were taken. Skeptics and believers have traded insults about the case for more than 60 years, focusing on shadows on buildings in the foreground, density of the image on the negative, and so forth. There’s no question that something was captured on film, and if the witnesses were truthful, an unidentified flying object did pass over a small farm that day.
This incident was discussed during a briefing Ruppelt had some time later in the Pentagon with General Samford, the Director of Intelligence, some members of his staff, two Navy captains from the Office of Naval Intelligence, and other officials. He was describing some outstanding Unknown UFO reports he had investigated and noted they were increasing in number. Even though the reports were detailed and contained a great deal of good data, he noted they still had no proof that UFOs were “real.” An officer used the Goose Bay sighting as an example of an unexplained case, and said it, too, could not be accepted as proof of alien spacecraft. Ruppelt noted: “I said that our philosophy was that the ‘fireball’ could have been two meteors: one that buzzed the C-54 and another that streaked across the airfield at Goose AFB. Granted a meteor doesn’t come within feet of an airplane or make a 90 degree turn, but these could have been optical illusions of some kind.”
The colonel asked, “What are the chances of having two extremely spectacular meteors in the same area, traveling the same direction, only five minutes apart?”
Ruppelt’s response was that he “didn’t know the exact mathematical probability, but it was rather small ...”
The colonel went on:
Why not assume a point that is more easily proved? … Why not assume that the C-54 crew, the OD, his driver, and the tower operators did know what they were talking about? Maybe they had seen spectacular meteors during the hundreds of hours that they had flown at night and the many nights that they had been on duty in the tower. Maybe the ball of fire had made a 90 degree turn. Maybe it was some kind of an intelligently controlled craft that had streaked northeast across the Gulf of St. Lawrence and Quebec Province at 2,400 miles an hour.
“Why not just simply believe that most people know what they saw?” the colonel said with no small amount of sarcasm in his voice.
Also in 1952, on June 1, a cargo ship was anchored at Port Gentil, Gabon, when at 2:40 a.m. the first mate notified the Master Seaman that a bright object was passing directly overhead. He said he had watched it come from the shore, stop, turn and continue on its course out to sea, once again making an erratic move as it flew near the ship. The Master held up his binoculars and saw a bright, “phosphorescent orange light, circular in shape and moving at great speed in a seemingly straight-line course.” He followed the light for three minutes as it headed out to sea and was lost to sight. He confirmed that there were no planes in the air near there at the time.
Far to the north but only a handful of weeks later on July 15, 1952, two bakers in Boukanefis, Algeria, were outside their shop at 11:00 p.m. when they saw an object shaped like a “plate,” flying through the sky and giving off a greenish smoke. It kept a constant course as it headed south across the desert and out of sight. That year, UFOs were reported in many towns across Algeria and Oran, including Lamorciere, Mostaganem, Algiers and Marrakech, but also far to the south in the Belgian Congo near its uranium mines.
On June 19, 1952, yet another radar and visual saucer-sighting occurred at Goose Bay AFB. It was described in a number of sources with slightly differing details, but the substance of the case remains interesting throughout the varying citations.
At 2:37 a.m. that morning, Second Lieutenant Agostino and an unidentified radar operator saw a red light that turned white and seemed to wobble. Radar tracked a stationary target that quickly grew then returned to its previous size, possibly a disc rotating to present a wider reflective surface.
DID YOU KNOW?
The United States Air Force began using the term UFO instead of Flying Saucer in 1952, because they didn’t want people to assume that aliens were piloting the craft.
Journalist Donald Keyhoe had his own version of the story:
On the night of June 19, 1952, Goose Bay Air Force Base, in Labrador, came in for a brief observation. Just as radar men picked up a UFO track, ground men outside saw a strange, red-lighted object come in over the field. The radar blip suddenly enlarged, as if the device had banked, exposing a larger surface to the radar beam. At the same moment the watching airmen saw the red light wobble or flutter. After a moment the light turned white and quickly disappeared. Apparently the unknown craft had gone into a steep climb ...
Keyhoe noted his source was a USAF intelligence report, although which one is unclear. He commented on this case again in an article in True Magazine:
On June 19, 1952, a new incident occurred at Goose Bay Air Force Base — the fourth to date. Just after midnight, a weird red light appeared, holding a southwest course. At the same time, tower radar men caught it on their scope. After hovering briefly at 4,000 feet, the light suddenly turned white. At about this instant, the blip on the scope “brightened.” This effect, familiar to operators, is seen when a plane banks, the larger surface exposed to the radar beam causing a sharper return.
There are some obvious inconsistencies in the stories, however. Was the radar blip stationary or moving? If it was stationary, it could not have been the red object that “came in” over the airfield.
However, this meagre information perhaps does not give justice to what actually happened. In a fascinating account published on the Internet, a former radar operator related the situation in a fascinating narrative style, his memory vague about the date but full of details surrounding the incident. He posted the information on a website devoted to military reminiscences, hoping to find answers to some of his questions from more than half a century ago.
Bob Jones was stationed at Goose Bay AFB during 1952–53, and was the radar maintenance technician on duty at the American radar site when the encounter occurred. He said that in late December 1952 or early January 1953, a severe winter storm was raging and winds were gusting up to 110 kilometres per hour. The storm was so intense that all of the F-94 jet interceptors were tied down to prevent them from being damaged by the high winds. No air traffic had been detected by the radar through the storm, which brought heavy snow and reduced visibility to less than 23 metres. Jones noted the radar at Goose Bay was manufactured during the Second World War and could not cancel out ground clutter, preventing the accurate tracking of objects within about 32 to 64 kilometres from the antenna.
Around 11:00 p.m. a target appeared on the radar screen, about 145 kilometres to the north and approaching the base at about 145 kilometres per hour, and the radar could not determine its altitude. Jones noted that “the fact that the target was approaching from due north (0 degrees on the radar screen) was very unusual since no military or civilian airfields were located in that direction. Its slow speed of travel was equally strange. Most aircraft that approached Goose Bay from a northerly direction were flights coming in from Thule, Greenland, where the United States was building an air base and radar site.”