And what happened whenever they came up against a case they couldn’t explain?
They just wouldn’t talk about it.
In that same summer of 1952, just about the same time as the flying saucer invasion of Washington DC, an air force jet interceptor, in another part of the country, actually fired on a UFO.
The location of the incident was kept secret by Project Blue Book’s Captain Ruppelt when he wrote about it in his classic book, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects. But still, he details the opening shots in what could have turned into exactly what all those people were warning the White House about: some kind of cataclysmic, one-sided interplanetary war.
As Ruppelt told the story, he was called to the unnamed U.S. air base and briefed on the sly by its intelligence officer about the UFO shooting incident. But he was also informed the base’s commander had decided that instead of being defined by such a weird event happening on his turf, it was better to smear the pilot involved as a “psycho.” And according to Ruppelt, that’s exactly what happened.
It all started one morning when the base’s radar picked up an unidentified flying object near the northeast part of the anonymous installation. The object was traveling at high speed — about Mach 1—when first detected. But just as suddenly, it reduced its velocity to a mere 100 miles per hour, a maneuver no aircraft in the world could do at the time.
Two of the base’s fighter planes were scrambled with orders to intercept the object. The airplanes were F-86 Sabre jets, the air force’s top fighters at the time. The base tower directed the Sabres toward the UFO, but as this was happening, the UFO began to fade off the base radar.
The control tower personnel were baffled. Had the UFO disappeared? Or was it flying so high — or so low — that it simply slipped off the radar screen?
The controllers decided the UFO was flying too high, so they instructed the F-86s to climb. Reaching 40,000 feet, the fighters found nothing — and by now the UFO had completely vanished from the base radar screens.
Perhaps the UFO had been flying too low then? The base told one of the F-86s to dive seven miles down to a tail-scraping altitude of 5,000 feet, while the other Sabre should take up station at 20,000 feet. The pilots complied.
On arriving at his prescribed altitude, the pilot who was ordered down to the deck saw a weird flash of light in front of him. Steering his F-86 in that direction, he spotted what at first looked like a weather balloon. But he knew this was impossible because the object was able to stay ahead of him — and he was flying at close to 700 miles per hour.
The pilot dove a little more, giving him additional speed but less altitude. The tactic worked, though, and he was soon just a half mile behind the mystery object. Finally, he got a close look at it and determined this was unquestionably no balloon. The pilot saw a definitive saucer shape; in his words, like a doughnut with no hole in the middle.
The pilot was soon on the UFO’s tail — and the object was obviously doing its best to stay ahead of him. The pilot tried calling his wingman on the radio, but his message wouldn’t go through. He tried calling the base’s tower, but that message didn’t get through, either. Meanwhile, he was only about 1,500 feet behind the object…
Suddenly, the object began to pick up speed. The F-86 pilot was in a quandary. What should he do? Ruppelt doesn’t say whether this happened before or after President Truman’s famous “UFO shoot down” order. But whatever the case, the pilot thought it was his duty to stop the intruder no matter what.
The F-86 was armed with six .50-caliber machine guns, firepower that could tear up another earthly aircraft with a few seconds’ burst.
So, the pilot opened up on the UFO.
But whether he even hit it is impossible to know. Because an instant after he started firing, the UFO tremendously increased its speed, went nose up and quickly disappeared.
The pilot linked up with his wingman shortly afterward, and together they returned to base. That’s when the smear campaign began.
No sooner had the two F-86s set down than the pilot in question was summoned before his direct superior, the squadron commander, and told to explain why he had fired his guns. After recounting what happened, the pilot was then called before the group commander, his overall superior officer. It was this officer, a colonel, who proceeded to trash the pilot’s story.
First, he accused the F-86 pilot of going crazy. Then he claimed the man had fired his guns only as a lark and made up the UFO chase story to cover up his actions. According to Ruppelt, other pilots came to the man’s defense, as did the base’s flight surgeon. But the group commander was not swayed. He insisted the pilot was a psycho.
Ruppelt says the base intelligence officer wrote up a UFO sighting report but was ordered by the group commander not to send it to Project Blue Book.
Ignoring whatever importance such an incident might have meant to the overall UFO situation, which in 1952 was at a fever pitch, the group commander instead ordered all copies of the report destroyed.
One of the countless advantages of aviation technology is the use of aircraft for search and rescue (SAR).
If someone is lost at sea or in a wilderness, aircraft can cover many more miles in shorter amounts of time than people searching on the water’s surface or on the ground. From a military point of view, highly trained search and rescue units are tasked with saving downed pilots or troops cut off from friendly forces.
Depending on the weather or the terrain, or who is controlling the ground below, there are a number of search patterns rescue aircraft can employ. The expanded square search, the sector search pattern, the parallel search pattern and the Williamson turn are all familiar to SAR personnel. These are proven methods of looking for something or someone from the air.
This aspect of search patterns became an interesting sidelight to yet another mysterious UFO sighting of the 1950s.
It happened over Haneda Air Force Base, a former U.S. Air Force installation that is now Tokyo International Airport. On August 5, 1952, just minutes before midnight, two air traffic control operators were walking to the base’s tower to start their shift. Suddenly they spotted an incredibly bright light northeast of Tokyo Bay.
At first the controllers thought it was just an especially luminous star. But in the next moment they knew this was not the case, because by virtue of their jobs, they’d spent many hours looking up at the night sky — they knew a star when they saw one. As if to confirm this, they realized the light was actually moving; in fact it was coming right at them.
The men were soon up in the tower and, along with the personnel already on duty, began examining the mysterious light through powerful binoculars. It seemed to be illuminating the upper portion of a large, round dark shape, something much larger than the light itself.
This object was getting closer to the air base. It was also becoming more distinct, and now the controllers could see a second, but fainter, light on the bottom of the object.
Suddenly the UFO moved east, out of view of the control tower. But just as quickly, it appeared again. It stayed in sight for a few moments and then vanished again. But then it came back again.
What was going on? Why all these strange movements?
A cargo plane was flying over Tokyo Bay nearby. The tower called the pilot and asked if he was seeing anything unusual. He replied no. But then the tower called a nearby radar station and asked if they had anything strange on their scopes. As it turned out, they did. And it was quickly determined that what the tower operators were seeing visually and the radar men were seeing electronically was the same thing.