"At about this time a missile maintenance man called in and reported sighting a bright orangish-red object. The object was hovering at about 1000 ft or so, and had a sound similar to a jet engine. The observer had stopped his car, but he then started it up again. As he started to move the object followed him then accelerated and appeared to stop at about 6 — 8 miles away. The observer shortly afterward lost sight of it.
"In response to the maintenance man's call the B-52, which had continued its penetration run, was vectored toward the visual which was about 10 mile northwest of the base. The B-52 confirmed having sighted a bright light of some type that appeared to be hovering just over or on the ground."
Now comes one of the most interesting parts, and one that seemed to have slipped by the Air Force investigators at Blue Book. "Fourteen other people in separate locations also reported sighting a similar object. Also, at this approximate time, security alarm for one of the sites was activated. This was an alarm for both the outer and inner ring. When guards arrived at the scene they found that the outer door was open and the combination lock on the inner door had been moved."
With command emphasis on the sightings, and with more than one general officer interested in the case, it was "investigated" by Blue Book. I use the quotation marks because of a line in one of the "memos for the record." On October 30, 1968, Quintanilla, now a lieutenant colonel himself, had a telephone conversation with Colonel Pullen at SAC Headquarters. Asked if he had "sent anybody up to investigate the sighting," Quintanilla replied, "We did not send anybody up because I only have four people on my staff: myself, an assistant, a secretary and an admin sergeant. I talked to Col. Werlich for over thirty minutes and since this didn't appear unusual I didn't send anyone up."
What we have is a sighting that involved both ground and airborne radars. We have visual sightings to corroborate those returns from both the aircraft and people on the ground. In fact, there are people at separate locations who reported seeing the UFO, but according to Quintanilla, there was nothing unusual about the case. Just let the local boys look into it and then write it off.
This is in stark contrast to the way Ruppelt, during his tenure as the chief of Blue Book operated. He'd fly around the country making personal investigations. A look at the files showed that he was in Lubbock to investigate the Lubbock lights, he was in Florida to investigate the case of the burned scout master, and had he been able to convince the Air Force bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. that he needed to stay overnight, he would have personally investigated the Washington National sightings in the days that followed them.
But now, fifteen years later, the case of a radar sighting, an airborne sighting with radar confirmation, wasn't unusual. Quintanilla, with his small staff, couldn't go to Minot to interrogate the various military witnesses himself. Instead, he sat in his office at Wright-Patterson, read the reports written by others, made a telephone call or two, and then made his determination about the sighting.
In a November 1 "memo for the record," Lieutenant Marano noted, "Colonel Werlich, the Minot officer in charge of the investigation, said that he had already had the people fill out AF Forms 117," which were the long forms the Air Force used to gather UFO data. Werlich told Lieutenant Marano, "I monitored them while they filled them out, but I can't see where the navigator can help…"
Later, in that same "memo" Lieutenant Marano noted, "The one we are mainly interested is the one that cannot be identified. The one of radar and the aircraft correlated pretty well."
Using maps, they attempted to identify the low-flying light that could have been on the ground. According to the report, "There is nothing there that would produce this type of light. The same for O'Conner and Nicely from November 7 [that is, two of the maintenance men from the silo designated N or rather November Seven] which is near Greno."
Later, in response to a question about the object on the ground, Marano was told, "They were able to see a light source while the 52 got in real close then it disappeared."
The account, in the files, and the memos for record are somewhat confusing. It seemed that they were suggesting that the men on the ground who saw the lights and then heard a roar like that of jet engines had seen the B-52. "Almost 80 percent were looking at the B-52. If you would look at an aircraft at 20,000 ft, then you wouldn't see much but I'm am (sic) to place logic in that it was there and what they saw was there. There is enough there that it is worth looking at. Nobody can definitely say that these people definitely saw the aircraft, but within reason they probably saw it."
What this seems to be suggesting is that the officers at Minot think the ground sightings might be of the B-52, but they're not sure. It's almost as if they are trying to convince themselves of the answer. But it also seems that they realize they are suggesting that the men stationed at Minot are incapable of identifying a huge bomber that is assigned to SAC, remembering, of course, that Minot is a SAC base. How could that many men, some of whom had been around SAC and B-52s for years suddenly be incapable of recognizing the aircraft. It is an explanation that is ridiculous. The men, had they been looking at a B-52, would have identified it as such.
There is another factor here. Once again we don't have a highly charged environment where everyone has been talking about flying saucers for weeks. We have a number of men who look into the night sky and see something they can't identify. Had the answer been the B-52, it seems quite reasonable that the men would have identified it as such at the time of the sighting. Just how clever would they have to be to find that answer?
The Air Force investigators, having disposed of the ground visual sightings, after a fashion, began to attack the radar aspect of the case. But there is an interesting statement in one of the "memos for the record" which, not surprisingly, is somewhat confusing. Apparently Colonel Werlich, in a telephone communication with Blue Book officers, said, "I only stated one radar in the message because there was only one radar set. The ECM [electric counter measures] equipment hadn't been used. RAPCOM [radar facility] was painting [meaning operating], IFF [identification friend or foe transponder] was operating in the airplane. It's a fairly good size blip. The object would have been covered by the blip. There is a Sage site [another radar facility] to the south. They do not remember any unidentified paints. The only one that I have is the one on the plane. The unusual part is the B-52 was in the middle of a sentence and the voice just quit transmitting right in the middle of the word…"
Werlich seems to be suggesting here that only one radar picked up the UFO, yet he also suggests that if it was close to the bomber, then the IFF equipment, which emits a signal so that the blip on the radar is huge and stands out for easy identification by the radar operator, would have covered the UFO. He also suggests that another site's radar operators don't remember any unidentified blips which is a fairly weak statement.
But going back through the case file, there is a mention of the weathers radar but there is no identification of this site. In fact, someone added a penciled question mark above the notation for the weathers radar. If, as suggested in the file, the "weathers" radar picked up the blip, and we know that the B-52's radar had it for a number of minutes, then two different radar sets had "painted" it. One was on the ground and the other was airborne at the time.