It is no secret that in the last years of its existence, Project Blue Book’s role had been significantly reduced, and it was little more than a public relations gimmick to fool people into believing the Air Force was investigating flying saucers. The Project Blue Book files contain multiple examples of the war to strip the investigation of its prestige by moving it from the intelligence arena at the Air Technical Intelligence Center into the Office of Public Information, where it would have less prestige. Although that didn’t happen, it was one of many plans.1
By the mid-1960s, around the time of the Socorro landing, the investigations were haphazard, often conducted by telephone with explanations seemingly plucked from midair. One the best examples of this was a series of sightings made at the Minot Air Force Base. The sightings took place on October 24, 1968, and were a combination of ground and air observations, radio failure, and radar returns.2
The initial sighting began about 30 minutes after midnight when an airman, only identified as Airman Isley in the Blue Book files, saw a bright light east of the base that appeared to be hovering.
At about 2:30 that same morning two others reported seeing bright lights. These included Airman First Class O’Connor and Staff Sergeant Smith. About 38 minutes later—that is, at 3:08—a series of additional sightings began by the various maintenance teams on the base. O’Connor, the maintenance team chief, reported that every member of the team saw an object that was reddish-orange. O’Connor said that it was a large object that was flashing green and white lights. The official report said that the object had passed over them with a roar like that of jet engines.3
At 3:29, Staff Sergeant Wagla, Airman First Class Allis, and Airman First Class Deer sighted a UFO. A minute after that, at another location, three others made a similar report.
At this stage, it is unclear if those making the reports had been aware of others making similar reports. If all were men at those various locations and were independently reporting the UFO or UFOs, then a terrestrial explanation becomes much more difficult. However, these various teams would have had radios with them and might have heard others talking about UFOs. It is a question that is never clarified in the official documents.
As all of this was transpiring, the pilots on a B-52 on a training flight reported there was a UFO 24 miles to the northwest. In communication with the tower about that mission, the controller asked the pilots to look out to their one o’clock position to see if there were any orange glows out there.
The pilot responded, “Someone is seeing flying saucers again,” which tells us that there had been some discussion about UFOs made at some point. More importantly, it suggests that there had been other reports of the strange lights in the area in the weeks leading up to this.
Not long after that, the controller said that the UFO was being picked up by weather radar. The comment is confusing because it is not clear if that is the name of a radar installation near Minot or weather radar either on the ground or in another airplane. That confusion is contained in the Blue Book file on the case as well.
At 3:58, the pilot had made a request for a TACAN approach and then the radio on the aircraft failed. Two minutes later the radio began working but only periodically. By 4:02 they were able to communicate reliably.
But, they had seen the UFO out the windows of the aircraft, and as the UFO closed on them, the radio trouble began. The UFO was about a mile and a half from the aircraft for a short period of time.
At 4:13, it seems that all those who had been seeing the glowing, orange object had lost sight of it. A few minutes later the controllers told the aircrew that they needed to stop by Base Operations after they landed. The implication was that there would be some sort of debriefing about the UFO sighting.
Those, briefly, are the sightings from Minot on that one occasion: multiple witness in multiple locations, including radar confirmation, and an aircraft that experienced radio failure. And, 14 people in other locations had also made similar sightings. It wasn’t just the Air Force people seeing the flying saucers, but civilians as well.
The next day, Project Blue Book became involved. Lieutenant Carmon Marano began to receive telephone calls and wrote a Memo for the Record about those calls. He learned that the commander at Minot Air Force Base and Major General Nichols at 15th Air Force Headquarters were interested in the sightings. With a general involved, others began to take the sightings more seriously.4
On October 30, Hector Quintanilla was asked by a colonel at SAC Headquarters in Omaha if he had sent anyone to Minot to investigate but Quintanilla said, according to the Memo for the Record, “We did not send anyone up because I only have four people on my staff.”
The investigation staggered along. According to a Memo for the Record, “Colonel Werlich, the Minot officer in charge of the investigation, said that he had the people fill out the AF Form 117.... I monitored them while they filled them out.”
Later in that same memo, Marano wrote, “The one we are mainly interested in is the one that cannot be identified. The one of radar and the aircraft correlated pretty well.”
The Air Force eventually handed down an explanation for the sightings. It identified the ground/visual sightings as “Probable (Aircraft) (B-52).” Second, it noted “Probably Astro (Sirius).” For the radar sighting it suggested Possible (PLASMA) and finally the Air/Visual as “Possible (PLASMA).”5
On the project card, there were additional comments. The ground visual sightings appear to be of the star Sirius and the B-52 that was flying the area. The B-52 radar contact and the temporary loss of UHF transmission could be attributed to plasma, similar to ball lightning. The air-visual from the B-52 could be the star Vega, which was on the horizon at the time, or it could be a light on the ground, or possibly a plasma.
What the Air Force was suggesting was that its personnel were unable to identify a B-52 when they saw it at night and that they were fooled by bright stars. But where it slipped off the rails was in suggesting that a plasma was responsible for some of these sightings.
This plasma theory was one that had been floated by Phil Klass in the mid-1960s as an explanation for other sightings. He seemed to believe that these plasmas, which are basically ionized air, would glow, especially near high power lines, and would take on a circular or disc shape as they spun.6
This, to me, didn’t seem quite right, and I called a friend who taught physics at the university level. I didn’t quite understand what he was saying until I realized that, though the ionized air could exist, it wouldn’t glow. It would be like looking through glass—frosty glass to be sure, but glass. There had to be some other mechanism to cause it to glow, and in the sightings in and around Minot, there simply wasn’t anything to make that happen.
In other words, the plasma answer simply did not work for some of the sightings. No evidence of these plasmas, glowing or otherwise, had been provided. Although it is conceivable that some of the airmen at Minot had been fooled by the bright stars, it seems unlikely that so many could have been.
The trouble here is that during that time (October 1968), the Air Force had commissioned the University of Colorado to investigate UFOs. Dr. Edward U. Condon was the man in charge, and it is clear from the documentation that the real purpose was to end Project Blue Book. The Air Force wanted Condon to say some good things about the Air Force investigation, determine that there was no threat to national security, and recommend that Project Blue Book be closed.
This wasn’t the first time that this had been attempted. The closure and dissatisfaction with it goes back nearly to its inception.
Although it can be argued that the military interest in UFOs began in 1946 with the investigation of the Scandinavian Ghost Rockets, it did not begin officially until 1948. At the end of 1946, Colonel Howard McCoy was tasked with an unofficial investigation of the reports of things in the sky. He and another officer commandeered an office at Wright Field, locked the doors, and quietly began studying the reports they were receiving. But before they reached the point of finding a solution, that unofficial investigation became official with the publicity surrounding the Kenneth Arnold sighting. Once the newspapers began publishing stories about the flying saucers and the flying discs, the Army Air Forces—which is to say those at the Air Materiel Command at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio—moved from the locked office that few could enter into larger quarters with a larger staff and a real interest in what was happening around the country.7
During summer 1947, Brigadier General George Schulgen, working with Lieutenant Colonel George Garrett and tasked with investigation into the strange aerial phenomena, sent an estimate of the situation forward to General Nathan F. Twining, listing 18 flying disc reports and requesting specific analysis of that information. History seemed to suggest that Schulgen and Garrett would be told that the flying discs were actually a highly classified U.S. government project and not to worry about them. Instead Twining answered in September 1947 that the phenomena was something real and should be investigated. He wanted a project, with a relatively high priority, to be created for that investigation.8
This was a transition period for the Army Air Forces. It was being separated into a new service just called the United States Air Force. During this period of transition, there were many changes, but while that was going on, some top officers at Wright Field were working to design the first of the UFO investigations. The name of this project was Sign, which was classified. The newspapers and the public was told that it was called Project Saucer.9
Although it was taken seriously at first, within months the prestige had eroded, and the final collapse came with an Estimate of the Situation. This was an intelligence concept in which the information was gathered, evidence presented, and conclusions drawn. According to Captain Edward Ruppelt, who would one day lead Project Blue Book, the estimate was relayed up the chain of command to General Twining. The conclusion was that the flying saucers were interplanetary craft.
Twining, according to Ruppelt, was not impressed with the evidence presented and rejected the estimate. To make it worse, nearly everyone associated with the project was fired. Those on the outside of the project, but who had seen the results of displeasing the general, were quick to adopt an attitude that suggested they didn’t believe the flying saucers were alien craft, either. The irony here is that Twining had initiated the project and then, about a year later, had wrecked it.10
Sign limped along; nothing was being accomplished but no one really cared. Then, according to some, the name, which had been classified, was compromised. With that, Sign issued a final report and the Air Force announced the end of Sign, which suggested the end of the UFO investigations.
But that didn’t mean the Air Force had quit investigating UFOs. The name was changed to Grudge, and the Air Force continued on. But without the command emphasis that had been in place for the beginning of the Project Sign, no one cared much about it. Nothing was being done other than a gathering of reports.
Then one of the generals who had been interested in UFOs asked what was happening with the investigation. Unhappy with the response, he placed command emphasis on it and brought in Ed Ruppelt to run it. Ruppelt had been a bombardier during World War II and was apparently called back to active duty during the Korean War. Rather than getting combat assignment, he was tasked with rebuilding the UFO program.11 That might have had something to do with his degree in aeronautical engineering rather than his training as a bombardier.
Once again, there was a real interest in learning just what the flying saucers were. For about 18 months in the early 1950s, the investigation attempted to find answers and treated the subject with a degree of respect. During that time, another huge report was prepared about the UFOs. It was then announced that Grudge had been closed, but, in reality, it was just another name change. The investigation continued as Project Blue Book.
In 1953, after a panel chaired by Dr. H.P. Robertson concluded that the problem wasn’t alien spacecraft but misidentifications, delusions, and hoaxes, Blue Book again fell into disfavor. There was no reason to continue to study them, though a program of education was suggested to strip flying saucers of their mystery, and an effort was made to debunk them so the public would lose interest in them. Ruppelt, who had left the project for some months, was brought back for a short time and then was replaced again. A new officer who was rabidly anti-saucer was appointed to lead Blue Book, and the tone of the investigation changed with the change. Sightings were to be identified. An “Unidentified” label was unacceptable.12
For most of the next decade and a half, the official UFO investigation was guided by the concept that there were no extraterrestrial craft and any case that suggested otherwise was somehow flawed. The numbers of new cases that were labeled as “Unidentified” plummeted. Another category, “Insufficient Data for a Scientific Analysis,” skyrocketed. Though those cases remained unexplained, they weren’t grouped into that all important “Unidentified” category.13
While the Air Force was trying to find a university that would conduct an “independent” investigation that would meet its requirements, there were sighting reports being made, some with interaction with the environment leaving behind a variety of evidence that was always questioned in some fashion. Some of these cases would be labeled as “Unidentified,” but most of them received little or no public attention and the interest in UFOs ebbed and flowed.
But at the same time, according to the NICAP’s The U.F.O Investigator for March 1965, the Air Force had tried to intimidate UFO witnesses, suggesting that various unpleasant things would happen to them as a result of seeing a flying saucer. NICAP reported that on January 12, 1965, a witness, identified only as an officer for a federal law enforcement agency, was driving toward Blaine Air Force Base when a disc, some 30 feet in diameter swooped down at him but then shot upward. The witness leaped from his car and saw the object hovering overhead only 50 feet away. He thought it was going to collide with his car. He said that it was omitting a bright white light with a black spot in the middle.
While it hovered overhead he heard nothing but then, as it shot up into the clouds, there was the sound of rushing air. It moved horizontally for about a quarter mile before disappearing into the clouds.
He wasn’t the only one to see the UFO. Others in the area reported that a UFO had landed, though given the circumstances and the object’s low approach, they had probably seen the same thing. The law enforcement officer reported the sighting and was told by the Air Force not to talk about it, especially not to the newspapers. This, the Air Force claimed, was for his own good, which is reminiscent of what was told to Zamora in New Mexico. Because he wasn’t in the Air Force, and with the permission of his superiors at his law enforcement agency, he told NICAP about it on the condition they would not release his name.
In that same issue, NICAP reported that George W. Monk, Jr., who had been a radar operator in the Air Force and who was a private pilot, said that while operating the radar he spotted an object moving west to east. He said that it was flying at 2,600 miles an hour at 60,000 feet. He said that they didn’t scramble any fighters because they couldn’t have caught the UFO anyway. Monk said, “We in the operator’s room were told not to mention the incident to anyone. No reason given.”14
Without a date on the sighting, I wondered if what they had seen might not have been a flight of an SR-71 Blackbird. This aircraft, whose performance characteristics are still hard to find, had the altitude capability and the speed to have been the object seen by radar, which would have been a very good reason for the Air Force to tell Monk and the others not to talk about it. This is, of course, speculation on my part.
But that’s not the only example cited by NICAP. In the same issue of their The U.F.O. Investigator , they report that a former Navy fighter pilot, who had logged more than six thousand hours of flight time, provided information on his sighting of August 13, 1959.15
The pilot told researchers that he had been flying from Hobbs, New Mexico, to Albuquerque when his electric compass began to spin wildly. He looked at the magnetic compass and, according to him, it was spinning so wildly that he couldn’t read it.
In seconds, he spotted three oval-shaped objects in an echelon formation pass in front of his aircraft. He said they were gray and looked like two bowls glued rim to rim but with the bottoms rounded rather than flat. He thought they were about 8 feet in diameter but also said they might have been larger. The only other thing he noticed was that they left a short, wispy trail.
They circled the aircraft two or three times and then passed to the rear. When the objects flew away, the electric compass settled to its original readings and the magnetic compass stopped spinning as well.
When he arrived in Albuquerque, landing at Kirtland Air Force Base, he was taken to an office and “interrogated for about two hours” by an Air Force major who was apparently the UFO officer for the base.
He wasn’t told, specifically, not to talk about the sighting, and he said that he was given a warning: If he had any unusual illnesses in the next six months, get to an Air Force hospital as quickly as he could. They would take care of him there. He said that he relaxed once the six months had passed.16
During that time—the late 1950s through the mid-1960s—the Air Force was denying that UFOs existed but were classifying the reports that had no good explanation. Even if it didn’t tell witnesses not to talk to keep them silent, it was attacking their credibility to reduce the importance of their sightings or to convince others not to listen. In one case, several witnesses, including members of the Army Security Agency, reported to NICAP that 12 to 15 oval-shaped objects were seen near the capital, chased by two fighters in early 1965. One of those men, Paul Dickey, identified as their spokesman, had six years in Naval Intelligence and had a degree in electrical engineering.
The Air Force response? “There was no such incident. It just didn’t happen.”17
That attitude and Air Force Regulations prevented many witnesses from talking about their sightings, and the more interesting the sightings, the more pressure was applied. It might be said that the Air Force was doing one of its jobs with the suppression of UFO data.
Nothing is done in the military without a regulation to control it. High-ranking commanders often say that regulations are for the guidance of the commander; others suggest that they be followed carefully without deviation. Over the course of history, the Air Force issued two regulations about UFOs. One simply upgraded and revised the early versions, but both did the same thing: kept military witnesses and military investigators from talking about certain UFO sightings.
Originally, the Air Force operated under AFR (Air Force Regulation) 200-2. In the 1960s, the regulation was revised and renumbered. It became AFR 87-17. Both regulations covered the reporting requirements—that is, what was seen by whom, along with the definitions used in the regulation such as UFOB (Unidentified Flying Object), who held the responsibility for reporting and investigation of the sightings, and finally, what facts were releasable to the general public.
Air Force Regulation, or rather one of the copies now available online, was published on August 12, 1954. Paragraph nine, Releasable Facts, laid out who had what authority. It said:
Headquarters USAF will release summaries of evaluated data which will inform the public on this subject. In response to local inquiries, it is permissible to in form (sic) news media representatives on UFOB’s when the object is positively identified as a familiar object (see paragraph 2b), except that the following types of data warrants protection and should not be revealed: Names of principles (sic), intercept and investigation procedures, and classified radar data. For those objects which are not explainable, only the fact that ATIC will analyze the data is worthy of release, due to the many unknowns involved.18
Although not spelled out exactly, the intention is clear: If there is a solution for a sighting, one that is readily available and acceptable, then the information can be released to the news media. If, however, there is no solution—meaning it was “Unidentified”—then the news media is only told that a higher-level organization is now responsible for analyzing the data. In other words, though not saying so expressly, the unidentified sightings are classified while those that are not, are unclassified.
Air Force Regulation 87-17, dated September 19, 1966, replaced the earlier regulation and the tone of its “Releasable Information” was more detailed. Some of it details instructions when dealing with Congress or other high-level officials. Information is now released by SAF-OI (Secretary of the Air Force, Office of Information) rather than the Air Technical Intelligence Center, which was much more prestigious. Releasing the information through the Office of Information instead of an intelligence function suggested that it wasn’t worth the time and energy of intelligence officers to investigate. In other words, UFOs just weren’t very important.
The regulation ordered SAF-OI to “respond to correspondence from individuals requesting information on UFO programs and evaluations of sightings.” But what is interesting, at least in this context, is the paragraph label “Exceptions.” It says:
In response to local inquiries regarding UFOs reported in the vicinity of an Air Force Base, the base commander may release information to the news media or public after the sighting has been positively identified. If the stimulus for the sighting is difficult to identify at the base level, the commander may state that the sighting is under investigation and conclusions will be released by SAF-OI after the investigation is completed. The commander may also state that the Air Force will review and analyze the results of the investigation. Any further inquiries will be directed to SAF-OI.
In other words, the buck is passed up the chain of command—not to any of the intelligence functions but to the public affairs people. It is a way of stalling the inquiries, a way to avoid answering the questions and a way of burying the UFO information under a mound of paper. And finally, if an answer is received, it is of little real value because the officer answering the question might not have all the facts.
Below is an example of this found in the Project Blue Book files. A civilian was interested in the story of a UFO crash near Las Vegas on April 18, 1962. The query had to do with jet interceptors being scrambled from of the Air Force bases in the area. On September 21, 1962, Major C.R. Hart of the Public Information Office (SAF-OI) responded by writing:
The official records of the Air Force list the 18 April 1962 Nevada sighting to which you refer as “unidentified, insufficient data.” There is an additional note to the effect that “the reported track is characteristic of that registered by a U-2 or a high balloon but there is insufficient data to fully support such an evaluation.” The phenomena reported was not intercepted or fired upon.19
However, the Blue Book files clearly show that an intercept was attempted. The conclusion to be drawn here is that Hart did not have access to the Blue Book files, or he did not have access to all of them. His answer was probably accurate as far as he knew it, but it was not the reality of the situation.
This, however, was probably the theory behind the regulation. SAF-OI could honestly answer the question because, as far as they knew, it was the truth. At that time, no one expected the Blue Book files to be opened to the general public for close scrutiny, though most of the cases were not classified. They did not expect them to be declassified and sent to the National Archives, where the public could review them, and certainly never envisioned the Internet, which put all the documents online for all to see with a couple of clicks of the mouse.
Not all that long ago, I had the opportunity to speak with one of the officers who had been at Project Blue Book at the end. What he said was surprising because of the somewhat cavalier way the information was treated at the end. Lieutenant Carmon Marano, who had written those memos for the record about the Minot UFO sightings, was the guest on the radio show A Different Perspective on the X-Zone Broadcast Network.20
When asked what he had thought of the Minot case, he said that he found it confusing and that there were so many people involved both on the ground and in the air. One of the things he remembered was that the ground had been foggy, which might have made it difficult for the witnesses to confuse stars with UFOs. He also said that there had been a temperature inversion that night, and that can cause light to bend so that objects beyond the horizon that would have been impossible to see under normal conditions would be visible.
We never did clear up the confusion about the radars. According to Marano, the B-52 had a weather radar in the nose and a fire control system radar in the rear that aimed and fired the air defense cannons. He thought that the mention of Weathers Radar might have been a mistake about the weather radar. This was a point that was never cleared up by the official investigation and was a point that probably should have been resolved in the 1960s.
The other point that he made was that he hadn’t gone to Minot, but had been talking to the people there on the telephone. The case, when it first was reported to Blue Book, was classified, which was in keeping with the instructions about unidentified cases. According to Marano, Quintanilla handled the evaluation that did slide off into a fantasy about atmospheric ionization.
While Marano was at Blue Book, the University of Colorado was also doing its study for the Air Force. He said that there had been “a lot of sightings reported to the Air Force that never made it to Blue Book” and added that those reported to other Air Force bases might have never been forwarded to them.21 That was left to the discretion of the officer who investigated. He or she might decide there was a solution, that it wasn’t all that spectacular, or that it didn’t have enough information for any sort of a scientific analysis so there was no point in passing the information on to Blue Book.
He made another point that was interesting and something that I had suspected for a very long time: He said they “weren’t allowed to investigate unless they [UFOs] were officially reported to the Air Force.... We investigated if they were directly reported to us and had completed the form [Air Force Form 117].”22
He said, “Once Dr. Condon issued his report and then the Air Force decided to close us down, it took several weeks, at least, to pack up all the files.” They then shipped them off to Maxwell Air Force, which was the home of the Air Force archives. Though Marano didn’t say it, those files were eventually sent to the National Archives in Washington, D.C.23
One of the points of controversy that surrounded the Socorro landing was that Marano had a thick file of material that eventually ended up in the hands of veteran UFO researcher Rob Mercer. I asked about that file and Marano said, “It had never been part of the official case files. I had inherited the desk and the materials from the guy who had the desk before me and he inherited from the guy before him.… So, I had all this stuff in my desk and I had my choice basically I could throw it away or I could pack it up and keep it.”24
He said that he had intended to read through it at some point but never did. He said that when he arrived at Blue Book he had a mild interest in the extraterrestrial but it wasn’t anything overpowering. When Mercer tracked him down, Marano just said he would send it on to Mercer. That material had never been part of the official file on Socorro, but it was all based on the material in the official file and the various newspaper and magazine articles about it that were published in the years that followed.25
The purpose of those unofficial files, or at least part of them, was for the benefit of the press. Marano said that very little of the Blue Book material was classified. The unclassified files were open to the public and a number of reporters went through them. Marano said that he had created a binder that had some of the more interesting material, including photographs, it in. If a reporter had a question about a specific case, they would pull the whole file for him or her.
The impact of the discussion, then, was the information about the Socorro case file that Marano had saved was that it was not part of the official documentation of the case. The one major problem that came from that file was the suggestion that the real symbol seen by Zamora was an inverted “V” with three bars through it. The two handwritten cards that had that symbol on it were not in the official file. The symbol in the official file was the one that had the arc over the top and the arrow pointing up into it. This was the symbol that Zamora told the first investigators that he had seen, it was the one that he had drawn within minutes of the craft lifting off, it was the one that he drew later and signed for Captain Holder and FBI agent Byrnes, and it was the one that was drawn on the illustration of the craft that Rick Baca drew.
If nothing else, Marano was able to clear up the difference between what was in the official file and what was in that other unofficial one. (The complete analysis of the symbol in its various incarnations can be found in Chapter 11.)