But soon after reaching a point about 30 miles north of Bakersfield, California, something went wrong.
Later on, a person on board the C-131 recalled that it felt like the airplane had hit a brick wall. One moment they’d been flying along smoothly; the next, the plane was shaking violently from the tail right up to the nose. An instant after that, the C-131 was plummeting straight down.
The plane fell about two miles before Major Stenvers, a man with thousands of flight hours under his belt, somehow got control back. He finally managed to level off, just a few seconds away from disaster.
Stenvers immediately radioed Bakersfield airport and, among other things, urgently requested clearance to make an emergency landing. Minutes later, the plane bounced into Bakersfield and rolled to a stop. The much-relieved crew climbed off the plane only to be greeted by something inexplicable. The airplane’s tail was torn apart. Both the horizontal stabilizer and elevator were badly damaged. The tail structure itself was horribly bent. The crew was astonished. Considering the extent of the damage, that Stenvers had been able to get the plane down in one piece seemed miraculous.
The air force’s official explanation was that rivets in the plane’s tail had worked loose, causing the airstream to bend back the fuselage skin. In other words, metal fatigue. This had happened so quickly, the air force said, it led Stenvers and his crew to believe they’d hit something in midair.
But there was a problem with this. Subsequent investigation of the Convair C-131 airframe revealed no structural problems of that type. Indeed, at the time, there were hundreds of these planes flying as commercial airliners around the world. Had this been an inherent structural problem with this airframe, the plane, in all its variations, would have been grounded until a solution was found — and yet they weren’t.
So what really happened?
Again, Stenvers and his copilot were certain they’d hit something in the air. But when local authorities searched for any wreckage on the ground in the vicinity of the incident, nothing was found.
Then came a report that a UFO had been spotted in the area shortly before the incident. Witnesses had seen an oval-shaped object flashing through the skies near Fresno, trailing a greenish light in its wake. Fresno is only about 50 miles away from where the incident happened.
So had the C-131 collided with a UFO?
Later on, one of the air force officers investigating the C-131 incident sent an anonymous report to UFO investigator Major Donald Keyhoe of the U.S. Marines. According to this source, whom Keyhoe trusted implicitly, shortly after regaining control of the C-131, Major Stenvers had indeed radioed Bakersfield, urgently requesting clearance to make an emergency landing. But he also told the ground control that his plane had been hit by a flying saucer.
His comments were never entered into the official account of the incident, and no follow-up investigation was ever done.
On the night of July 17, 1957, a U.S. Air Force RB-47H jet aircraft took off from Forbes Air Force Base in Topeka, Kansas, and headed south toward the Gulf of Mexico.
The six-man crew — two pilots, a navigator and three equipment monitors — had a busy night ahead of them. First, they were scheduled to do a gunnery drill over Texas. Then they would proceed to a navigation exercise over the open waters of the gulf, and finally, do an electronic countermeasures (ECM) exercise overland on the return trip to Topeka.
The RB-47 was a variant of the B-47 heavy bomber, the little brother of the B-52 Stratofortress. Normally manned by a crew of three, this particular model carried the three additional crewmembers needed to look after its sizable array of ECM gear. Located in stations at the rear of the airplane, these men were known as EWOs, or electronic warfare officers.
The equipment jammed inside the big six-engine plane could best be described as “antiradar” gear. Designed to detect electromagnetic radiation coming from sources on the ground, the RB-47 had the means to pinpoint enemy radar stations that other U.S. aircraft could then bomb and destroy. This particular plane and crew were soon to be deployed to Germany and the front line of the Cold War, thus the need for the training mission.
By 4 A.M., the aircraft crew had finished their gunnery exercise and their open-water navigation training. The big plane was now turning back toward the coast, intent on making landfall somewhere above Gulfport, Mississippi. That’s when one of its EWOs detected a bizarre signal on his ECM equipment. It indicated something was following the airplane.
This was odd because the signal was of a type normally emitted by radar ground stations. Yet it was coming from an airborne source out over the Gulf.
The only explanation was the equipment was malfunctioning. But then as the EWO watched, the signal’s source came right up on the plane — and according to his scope, began to fly a ring around it.
The EWO was astonished. The RB-47 was traveling at 500 miles per hour, nearly as fast as the fastest jet fighters of the day. What could fly a ring around the big bomber?
It was so peculiar, the EWO became convinced something was wrong with his gear and said nothing to the rest of the crew. As the plane flew north, the signal faded from his scope.
Time passed. The plane made its uneventful preassigned turn over Mississippi. The task now was to work the aircraft’s ECM antiradar detection gear, using air force radar units on the ground as simulated targets.
Just as this part of the mission was about to begin, though, the RB-47’s pilot saw a bright light off to his left. It was flying around 34,000 feet, the same altitude as his aircraft.
Thinking it was another airplane straying into their flight path, the pilot ordered the crew to prepare for evasive action. But before the crew could react, the bright light flashed by the nose of the aircraft at tremendous speed — and then blinked out.
Recovering quickly from the near miss, the pilot hastily explained to the crew what had just happened. That’s when the EWO revealed the odd signal he’d picked up a short time before.
It was now about 4:10 A.M. CST, and the plane was somewhere over Louisiana. The EWO rechecked his equipment and discovered a signal in the same location as the pilot had seen the bright light before it blinked out. The ECM equipment was checked again, and all of it was found in good working order. This confirmed that the signal was not coming from ground-based radar.
That’s when the plane’s crew realized that the signal’s source — whatever it was — was flying alongside the RB-47, keeping pace with it, even as the plane was still flying at 500 miles per hour.
The RB-47 was soon back over Texas.
Again the pilot spotted an extremely bright light in front of the aircraft and about a mile below. Then the EWOs reported seeing two signals, and sure enough, the pilot and copilot saw red lights in those locations. The pilot contacted a radar station near Duncansville, Texas, and reported what was going on. When he gave the radar station personnel the position of the mysterious lights, they confirmed they were picking up radar blips exactly where the RB-47 crew said the blips would be.
Deciding they’d had enough of this, the RB-47 pilot requested permission from the Duncansville station to pursue the lights. Permission was granted — and the chase was on.
The RB-47 set off toward one of the lights. Just a few seconds into the pursuit, though, the light stopped in midair, causing the jet to overshoot it. Moments later, the light blinked out. When it did, it also disappeared from the RB-47’s radar, as well as that of the radar station on the ground.
The RB-47 pilot went into a steep turn, and the light suddenly blinked back on again — along with radar indications on the plane’s scope and those below. Now the RB-47 found itself only about five miles away from the UFO. But suddenly the object dropped three miles down to 15,000 feet and disappeared again, both visually and from radar.