So we watched it for a while, drifting to the right of it. Our heading was 222 degrees, 225 degrees; our altitude at ten thousand feet. When we were about 25 or 30 miles away we could see clearly defined lights and there was a pattern on the water. It was a circular pattern… and it was very large.
Maybe the Navy was doing something that was highly classified, recovering something down in the ocean or something of this nature?
So I sent the crew chief back to get Al Jones, the other plane commander, because they wanted to land at Argentia. There were thirty-one passengers on board plus two VIP crews that had pilots, and our patrol plane pilots.
Standing behind me was the navigator, the radioman, and also the plane captain―the cockpit was full. At the time that they came forward, the lights went out on the water… we were now surrounded by complete darkness.
And then a very small yellow halo appeared about fifteen miles out. Suddenly, within a fraction of a second, it had rushed up 10,000 feet at us―I thought that it was going to go right through us! So I disengaged the autopilot, pushed the nose over, because I was going to go under it at the angle that it was coming toward me.
The moment I did that I could see nothing outside of the cockpit but this craft… I didn’t know which way to go. And then I heard a racket. I yelled out, “Fred, what the hell was that?” He looked around and he said everyone was ducking in the back, scrambling on deck.
I looked back and it wasn’t there. And he said, “It’s over here on the right-hand side.”
The object was now about a mile or so away. It kind of drifted forward to a position five miles out, and it stayed there with us for quite some time. It was still above the horizon and you could see the side of the craft and its dome and you could see the color around the perimeter of the vehicle.
By then we knew that it was a friendly encounter. We knew that it knew that we were there. We knew that it came out to see us. What we never thought about at the time was the reason they did this was because they wanted to show us what the Icelanders were talking about.
We watched it for a while and then Al relieved me in the seat. He immediately disengaged the autopilot and was going to chase it. Now we had a head wind of about 60-knots, so our ground speed was only maybe 120 or 130-knots. Al wasn’t going to go too far in chasing this thing.
While Al chased after the UFO, I went back to see how the passengers were doing. I spoke to the physician first and asked him about what he had just seen. He looked me straight in the eye and said, “It was a flying saucer. I didn’t look at it because I don’t believe in such things.”
Well, it took me a couple of seconds to realize what he was saying. Being a psychiatrist, he was forbidden to believe in these things. So I went back forward and I said, “Al, whatever you do, don’t tell anybody we saw anything, they will lock us up as soon as we get on the ground.” He said, “It’s too late. I just called Gander control to see if they could track this by radar.”
When we landed at Argentia, the Air Force was there to interrogate us. The captain who did the interrogation… you could tell this wasn’t his first time that he had ever interrogated anybody as far as this type of encounter was concerned. He made a good report, which went to the headquarters of the Air Force in Washington, D.C.
Initially the color of the UFO was yellow. Since then I’ve learned from the boys upstairs why we saw different colors as it was coming toward us. The colors were around the perimeter―it turned from a yellow to an orange to almost a fiery red, and then almost a purplish red. And they said that that had to do with the amount of energy being used or dissipated… with the power so to speak. So when it slowed down close to us, in a fraction of a second, it was back to the yellow range. And it was foggy around it to where it was like a plasma mist or something of this nature.
When we were asked about the craft’s size, 300 feet came to my mind. Years later, when I got the report out of the archives everyone said it was anywhere from 250 to 350 feet in diameter.
Now the velocity when it left us was estimated from between 1,000 and 2,000 miles an hour. When I looked at the report, Al Jones had estimated 1,800 miles an hour. Mine was 1,000 miles an hour, another’s was 1,500 miles an hour… all in that range. The radar report said it was 1,800 miles an hour.
At the time we had nothing that would go that fast. And of course I was at the naval air test center. This is where we had our test pilot training school. This is where we did all the highly classified tests of aircraft. And to my knowledge we had nothing anywhere near that speed or anything that was circular.
This craft had covered 15 miles in about a second or two. When you calculate how fast it came toward us and suddenly stopped in front of us… you take something 300 feet in diameter, and you don’t see much out of your cockpit window.
When I went to set the automatic pilot back, the magnetic compass, which was in the center of the panel, was swinging back and forth. I said to Fred, “Did you see that?” He said, “You should have seen it when the craft was close; it was spinning.”
We looked at the other compasses when the craft was sitting out maybe five miles from us. We had what we called Bird Dogs―low frequency radio components that will point to the station when you tune in the station. These two Bird Dogs were pointing toward the craft. We had two other compasses. We had a remote compass, which is out in the wing; it was reacting. There were a total of five different directional gyros in that airplane. Out of the five, three of them were acting up.
I was told that the UFO was tracked by radar and that the radar report was sent in to the Air Force Headquarters in Washington, D.C. It usually goes from there to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. But my boss found the report in the archives in Wright-Patterson in Project Blue Book after talking to Colonel Watson, and he confirmed the speed of 1,800 miles [per hour]. I said, “Where did you find that out?” He said, “Well, it was a radar report and it said that.” So something happened to the radar report before they microfilmed it. Because what I have on microfilm I got from the archives [and the radar report is missing].
I was told by a friend of mine at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base who I’ve known for years that they had allowed Steven Spielberg to see the microfilm and the Blue Book records on this for Close Encounters of the Third Kind. So he [Spielberg] had a pretty high clearance. He had to be associated with some of the… well, you know who, as far as the control group is concerned.
The document that I found [See Appendix 4 for supporting document] was the official document that the Air Force had put together. And it was originally filed under Project Grudge. But on the front page it says Project Twinkle where they put a lot of reports that they had to get rid of somehow.
There were eighteen pages according to the archives. At that time, Admiral McCormick, who had relieved Eisenhower, was the NATO Commander, the Supreme Allied Commander. His aides had approached me. Everybody seemed to know about this event. Like Admiral Radford, who became the first Joint Chief of Staff, his aides knew about it because he had talked to me about it. So there were quite a few who knew about this.
Later in May, I had an intelligence officer come to the house and he showed me UFO crash photos… the first that I had ever seen. There was nothing, absolutely nothing there that looked close to it. There was one that was 100 feet in diameter. It didn’t look like it was damaged too much.
I asked him what happens to these reports. He told me, “There is a joint intelligence committee and they make the decision as to where it goes.”