And that is exactly what I thought as I read the file. The Air Force investigators don't care what the solution is as long as they find one. Bringing in the plasmas sounds good, and for Air Force officers who know nothing about plasmas (just like the majority of us) it makes sense. But when the case file is reviewed, we find, just as we have before, that the explanation makes no sense. This should be labeled as an unidentified.
January 17, 1969: The Last of the Unidentifieds
In an example of how the Air Force can't win for losing, I thought we'd take a look at the last case submitted to Project Blue Book that was labeled as an unidentified. The Project Record card showed, "The most likely stimulus was a helicopter with an unusual lighting system. However a check of the 4 airports in the area revealed that 3 definitely did not have any helo activity in the area and the other had destroyed flight records for that date and was therefore unable to say if any helicopter activity originated from their airfield that night. It is also possible that a light aircraft such as an aerial advertiser, the Goodyear Blimp, or an aircraft doing infra-red photography may have been the stimulus of the sighting. However, because it has not been definitely established that an aircraft of this type was in the area, the sighting is being carried as unidentified."
If that isn't a load of double-talk, I have never seen it. It might be a helicopter, but we can't find any records that one was flying. It might be an advertising plane, but again no records. And, of course, the time of the sighting, about four in the morning tends to rule out an advertising plane. Who is awake at four to see the thing anyway? The same goes for the Goodyear Blimp. And, finally it might have been an airplane doing infra-red photography, but again, no records.
Using the same logic, we could suggest that it was the Space Shuttle, though none had been built. Maybe it was an advanced design fighter that had a single test flight. Maybe it was one of the Apollo capsules re-entering the atmosphere though we have no records.
The record card, once again, establishes the mindset of the men who were doing the investigation. Here was a case that had no explanation that could be proven, but, we're going to speculate about what it might have been to weaken the unidentified label. It makes no difference that there is not a single shred of evidence to support any of these suggestions, they're still tossed out as if giving them the substance of a typed line will somehow make them real.
According to a statement in the Project Blue Book files, Roman K. Lupton, of Crittenden, Virginia, was awoken at 3:24 a.m. on the morning of January 17, 1969 by an unusual sound. It was like the hum of an electric motor that was about to go bad. Lupton's wife said that she could hear the same somewhat annoying sound.
According to Lupton, "I went to the bedroom window… looked in the direction of the sound for a few seconds before it came into sight… I watched this object with lights all around the bottom move slowly forward with an up and down motion which was also slow, 30 mph varying not more than 25 feet up and down. It went forward over a yard light in my neighbor's yard next door, a little further forward and started in a banking left turn with the same speed and motion as before. At this point the object seems to tilt and turn instead of changing elevation except for this banking motion it was the same as it had been previously… At this time as it was turning, the blinking light was clearest and possibly could have been the first time I saw it… At this point it went out of sight."
Lupton said that he had seen a series of windows around the bottom of the UFO that were all brightly lighted except one in the rear that blinked. The windows were rectangular and appeared translucent. They allowed the light out but Lupton couldn't see in, and each seemed to be surrounded by a glow or haze. Lupton could see the center of the craft in the light and said that it was solid, apparently metallic, and reflected some of the light.
Lupton asked his wife if she had seen the object and she said she had. Next he called the operator in Smithfield and was startled when she said that she could hear the sound in the background.
When the noise faded out, Lupton decided that he should alert someone in authority and finally asked the operator to place a call to Langley Air Force Base. He was connected to an airman who took UFO reports, and Lupton told him the same thing that he had told to the operator.
The next day, Lupton tried to find the operator that he had talked to hoping to establish some corroboration but failed to find her. Finally, on January 22, he spoke to the supervisor who told him that the only thing that the operator could have heard was some kind of aircraft. Lupton insisted, but the supervisor was equally insistent. The supervisor refused to supply the name of the operator or even let him talk to her.
Also on January 17, Lupton decided to try to find others who might have heard the noise. According to Lupton, "When I got home I started looking for someone… The wife [of his next door neighbor]… remembered her mother saying she had heard something. Sure enough the lady and her 3 year old granddaughter both had heard it. The lady [Louise Bailey] stated 'it had awakened the girl [Robin Harvill] and both were frightened', but the lady did not look out of her window to see what was making the sound… She also stated that 'it sounded as if it were coming through the roof'."
The next day, Lupton did the same thing and found another neighbor who said that she had heard the sound. Adrienne Carron (or Corron, it's spelled both ways in the Air Force file) said that "the sound was loud and varying and it was coming from almost right on the roof top" and it also frightened her four year old daughter, Evelyn.
In the letter that Lupton wrote to the Air Force about the experience, he listed all those who had heard the sound. What is interesting about the list is that the Air Force officers who reviewed the file left in all the names except a Sunday school teacher, and a hint that someone else had reported the sound to Langley.
The Air Force eventually decided to investigate the case. Almost two months afterward Lupton filed his report which included the standard AF Form 117, that is the UFO form, a NICAP form, a post card and a road map. Lieutenant Colonel Everett M. Worthington wrote, "After discussing this sighting with Mr. Lupton, I attempted to bring into focus the similarity between his UFO Sighting and a jet powered Helicopter. He was not receptive to this line of reasoning."
On April 7, after Lieutenant Colonel Everett had completed his investigation and suggested a helicopter, Lieutenant Colonel Quintanilla, wrote to a number of agencies around the Crittenden, Virginia area asking if they had any helicopter traffic flying at that time of the morning. All the agencies except one responded they had no traffic in the area. The lone exception was the FAA which reported that such records were destroyed after fifteen days. They didn't know if there was any helicopter traffic in the area because they no longer had their records.
The response from Fort Eustis was the most interesting. Not only didn't they have helicopters flying, Lurlene Martin, the flight scheduling clerk at Felker Army Airfield, said that poor weather conditions had grounded all their aircraft at 9:30 p.m. and they did not resume flying until the following morning. That would seem to suggest poor weather throughout the region that would have kept all helicopter activity on the ground.
This one note, in the files, could be quite important only because it suggests that the weather was bad. The poor weather could have been localized and therefore not apply to a larger region. Air Force investigators didn't bother to find out. They had decided that Lupton saw a helicopter and tried to convince him of it.
The other question is, if it had been a helicopter, what kind was it? There was obviously a strange lighting configuration, and it would seem to me, that an investigation could have attacked the problem from that direction. Had they been able to locate a helicopter with a strange lighting configuration on it, that would have gone a long way to solving the case. Even if they couldn't prove the aircraft was flying on the date in question, the configuration of the lights would have been persuasive evidence. However, there is no indication in the file that the Air Force investigators tried that.