It was a strange time for other reasons, too. Literally thousands of UFOs were reported in the United States during the 1950s. It was a decade in which jet fighters chased UFOs and UFOs chased jet fighters, of near and actual midair collisions between aircraft and UFOs, of UFOs the size of aircraft carriers and of one actual aircraft carrier being haunted by UFOs. UFOs were seen watching the United States test its latest nuclear weapons, had made at least one jet fighter disappear and had buzzed the White House and the Capitol building — twice — forcing the president to instruct U.S. fighter pilots to shoot down any UFO that couldn’t be “talked down.”
There was even a UFO sighting above the very air base where the U.S. Air Force had once studied the flying saucer phenomena.
Something was going on during the 1950s — something vastly mysterious and unknown and possibly even unknowable. The fifties might have been called a peaceful decade. But it could also be called the “Decade of the UFO.”
While there were enough UFO incidents in those ten years to fill an encyclopedia, with thanks to the extensive, if sometimes dislocated, investigative work of the late, and some would say great, Captain Edward Ruppelt, U.S. Air Force, and taken primarily from his aforementioned book, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, what follows are some of the more unusual cases.
Whether it was some kind of cosmic joke or an explicit attempt to send a message, one of the most remarkable UFO sightings of 1950 took place right over Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, the home of the U.S. Air Force’s Air Technical Intelligence Center, the same people who at one time had claimed that flying saucers were real, only to be suppressed by Pentagon higher-ups.
Wright-Patterson is located in Dayton, Ohio, not far from what was the Dayton Municipal Airport. On March 8, 1950, a TWA airliner was beginning its landing approach to Dayton when its crew spotted a bright light off to the southeast.
The TWA pilot called the Dayton tower to inquire about the light; the air traffic controllers told him they already had the mysterious object in sight. The Dayton tower then called the operations hut of an Ohio Air National Guard unit based at the airport; they immediately scrambled an F-51 Mustang.
Meanwhile, the Dayton tower operators also called the nearby ATIC and told them what was happening right outside their front door.
The people at the ATIC hurried outside and saw the extremely bright light hovering right over their heads. Many of those investigators would later say the light was much brighter than any star they’d ever seen — and because it was midmorning, the chances this was a celestial body were practically nil anyway.
Some of the ATIC researchers rushed over to the Wright-Patterson radar laboratory, where they found an object had been picked up on the lab’s radar in the same part of the sky where the mysterious light was hovering.
This blip was also showing up on the radar screen of the Ohio Air National Guard F-51, as well as another F-51 that had been scrambled from Wright-Patterson itself.
The pair of Mustangs were climbing together, and both pilots reported they could see the UFO and were intent on pursuing it. To this end, the lab’s radar operator, a veteran master sergeant, gave both fighters a vector point and also linked their radios together.
The F-51s made it to 15,000 feet but then lost the UFO in the clouds. The pilots decided to continue the search, though. They put some space between them to avoid collision and continued climbing into the cumulus. But then their wings started icing up.
The radar operator back at Wright-Patterson was telling the pilots they were right underneath the UFO. But as the pilots couldn’t see in the clouds and didn’t want to slam into whatever the object was, they decided to cancel the pursuit.
The F-51s came back down to a safer altitude; moments later, the object began fading from the radar screen.
When the clouds cleared about an hour later, the UFO was gone.
What happened next was characteristic of how the U.S. Air Force would handle most UFO sightings in the coming decade.
A meeting was held at the ATIC shortly after the UFO sighting. While some ATIC radar experts were on hand, neither the F-51 pilots nor the master sergeant who’d actually run the radar intercept was at the meeting.
After some discussion, the ATIC experts, no longer charged with solving the UFO riddle, decided the sighting was caused by two simultaneous events. First, the bright light all the witnesses initially saw was the planet Venus. This, even though it was midmorning daytime.
And the radar return also seen by so many other people? That was caused by ice-laden clouds.
This dual conclusion seemed to be the result of two things: that Venus was located in the southeast sky at the time of the sighting — even though, again, it was midmorning and not nighttime, and that the F-51 pilots had reported ice on their wings when they went up through the clouds in search of the UFO.
So, case closed.
Except… neither the man who was running the radar intercept — a veteran of radar ops since before World War II — nor the F-51 pilots agreed with the report.
The radar expert was quoted as saying he knew ice clouds on a radar screen when he saw them. They came across as fuzzy, not solid as he had read the UFO that day.
Moreover, the F-51 pilots both said that as they climbed, they’d gotten a closer look at the object. One said it looked huge and metallic.
And just to double-check, this pilot searched for Venus in the same part of the sky the next day and it wasn’t there — again, maybe because it was daytime.
But still, the air force considered the matter ended.
Just down the street from the world-famous Las Vegas Strip, you can find what might be the most unusual military installation in the world.
It is Nellis Air Force Base. In addition to being so close to Sin City’s main thoroughfare and serving as a huge installation for several air force fighter squadrons, Nellis also anchors the Nevada Test and Training Range, an enormous swath of restricted airspace larger than the state of Connecticut. Red Flag, the massive NATO simulated air warfare exercise, takes place there every year. Plus, about an hour northwest of Nellis is the infamous top secret spook base, Area 51.
Part of Nellis also serves as a major repository for nuclear weapons, and it’s Nellis’s longtime history with these kinds of armaments that resulted in one of the strangest UFO stories of the 1950s.
In 1951, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) established the Nevada Test Site. It was located 75 miles northwest of Nellis at a place called Yucca Flat. The AEC soon began detonating nuclear devices there, and airmen assigned to Nellis were routinely asked to provide security for the AEC testing site.
According to a report by Walter Webb, a consultant for MUFON, the highly respected UFO investigative network, on the morning of October 30 that same year, something very strange happened at Yucca Flat.
A group of Nellis airmen were acting as sentries for a test at the AEC site that day. The size of the explosion was to be between 10 and 20 kilotons, a substantial blast.
The airmen were in position just a few miles from ground zero. It was twenty minutes past dawn. The sun was at their backs, and the sky was clear.
Suddenly the airmen saw three silvery disks hovering close to where the bomb was about to go off.
The objects were shiny and reflected the early morning sunlight. They were described as having flat bottoms with a dome on top and were hanging in the air in a sort of triangle formation about a half mile high. They were making no sound.