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The Ellsworth UFO case occurred in 1953.
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The Ellsworth UFO case occurred in 1953.
On August 5 and August 6, 1953, the US Military investigated a UFO incident in Rapid City, South Dakota. What has become known as the Ellsworth Case is one of the most significant radar-visual cases in the annals of UFO sightings.
The event was witnessed by almost forty-five agitated citizens along with military Air Defense System personnel. The object was first sighted by Miss Killian at 8:00 P.M. on August 5. The description was of a red glowing light making long sweeping movements.
The information was transmitted to the Bismarck, North Dakota, Air Defense Filter Center. Sometime later Sergeant Harry spotted the objects from the roof. He observed, paying close attention to the irregular movement, as it danced between telephone lines. Others on duty saw the moving light which would be visible in the night sky for approximately three hours. Sergeant Harry described his observance in the following manner: It would remain stationary--then hop up several degrees very quickly--almost simultaneously. Another witness commented, It would stop...move to the left and then swerve down in a sort of slanting motion, repeating these maneuvers several times.
At midnight three additional objects appeared in the sky above Dakota. The employees of the Filter Center had a feeling like someone was watching them. Before they were seen in Bismarck, two F-84s had been vectored into the area over Blackhawk, South Dakota. The objects and the jets were monitored on radar. One pilot established visual contact for twenty to thirty seconds. His description could be heard over the intercom. It's brighter than the brightest star I've ever seen. When the pilot gave chase the light inexplicably disappeared.
Lieutenant Needham, the second pilot spotted one of the objects at 15,000 feet. It was below him and to his right. The object moved spasmodically up and down. The colors changed from white to green. In pursuit, Needham climbed to 26,000 feet. He changed course to 360 degrees. After maintaining steady on 360 degrees for a brief time, his radar lock-on-light on the A-4 gun-sight came on and remained on. The object was ahead of him. It increased speed and moved rapidly ahead and up.
The chase was being carried on the radarscope at the control room. Radar indicated that the UFO was staying five to ten miles ahead of the Lieutenant and his F-84. Finally, Needham gave up his pursuit and flew back to the military base. The object continued on and was detected by the Filter Center in Bismarck.
At 1:09 A.M. an Air Force Globemaster II flew over Bismarck. As the plane neared, the object closest to the plane appeared to emanate a signal by blinking red and green. This signaling was picked up by the other three objects. An observer reflected about this, It was as if a 'wave' passed from one to the other.
A signaling effect influenced a then-classified Air Force report filed by Dr. Hynek. He concluded, The entire incident, in my opinion, has too much of an Alice in Wonderland flavor for comfort. In the late 1970s, Hynek confirmed his conclusion, That's exactly how I felt at the time.
The Air Force offered a number of possibilities as to the cause of the sightings. In the final synopsis the objects would continue on the records as "unknowns".
An unidentified flying object (UFO) is any perceived aerial phenomenon that cannot immediately be identified or explained. Most UFOs are identified or investigated as conventional objects or phenomena. The phrase was coined as an acronym by Project Blue Book project head Edward J. Ruppelt, but today UFO is widely used as a stand-in for extraterrestrial spacecraft-aircraft claimed to be observed by various people. Many UFOs are described as being flying saucers, as is shown in the image to the right.
Project Blue Book was the code name for the systematic study of unidentified flying objects by the United States Air Force from March 1952 to its termination on December 17, 1969. The project, headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, was initially directed by Captain Edward J. Ruppelt and followed projects of a similar nature such as Project Sign established in 1947, and Project Grudge in 1948. Project Blue Book had two goals, namely, to determine if UFOs were a threat to national security, and to scientifically analyze UFO-related data.
On January 7, 1948, 25-year-old Captain Thomas F. Mantell, a Kentucky Air National Guard pilot, died in the crash of his P-51 Mustang fighter plane near Franklin, Kentucky, United States, after being sent in pursuit of an unidentified flying object (UFO). The event was among the most publicized early UFO incidents.
The Carson Sink Case is a UFO incident alleged by John L. McGinn and John R. Barton, two United States Air Force Colonels, to have taken place near Carson Sink in western Nevada in the United States while they were en route from California to Colorado in a B-25 on July 24, 1952. Both colonels worked at the Pentagon at the time with assignments that would have made them very familiar with military aircraft of the era, both domestic and foreign. The aircraft were also reported as being seen by hundreds of residents.
Josef Allen Hynek was an American astronomer, professor, and ufologist. He is perhaps best remembered for his UFO research. Hynek acted as scientific advisor to UFO studies undertaken by the U.S. Air Force under two projects: Project Sign (1947–1949) and Project Blue Book (1952–1969).
Edward James Ruppelt was a United States Air Force officer probably best known for his involvement in Project Blue Book, a formal governmental study of unidentified flying objects. He is generally credited with coining the term "unidentified flying object", to replace the terms "flying saucer" and "flying disk" - which had become widely known - because the military thought them to be "misleading when applied to objects of every conceivable shape and performance. For this reason the military prefers the more general, if less colorful, name: unidentified flying objects. UFO for short."
The National Investigations Committee On Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) was an unidentified flying object (UFO) research group most active in the United States from the 1950s to the 1980s. It remains active primarily as an informational depository on the UFO phenomenon.
The Condon Committee was the informal name of the University of Colorado UFO Project, a group funded by the United States Air Force from 1966 to 1968 at the University of Colorado to study unidentified flying objects under the direction of physicist Edward Condon. The result of its work, formally titled Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects, and known as the Condon Report, appeared in 1968.
First Lieutenant Felix Eugene Moncla Jr. was a United States Air Force (USAF) pilot who disappeared while performing an air defense intercept over Lake Superior in 1953. Moncla's disappearance is sometimes known as the Kinross Incident, after Kinross Air Force Base, where Moncla was on temporary assignment when he disappeared.
Identifying unidentified flying objects is a difficult task due to the normally poor quality of the evidence provided by those who report sighting the unknown object. Observations and subsequent reporting are often made by those untrained in astronomy, atmospheric phenomena, aeronautics, physics, and perception. Nevertheless, most officially investigated UFO sightings, such as from the U.S. Air Force's Project Blue Book, have been identified as being due to honest misidentifications of natural phenomena, aircraft, or other prosaic explanations. In early U.S. Air Force attempts to explain UFO sightings, unexplained sightings routinely numbered over one in five reports. However, in early 1953, right after the CIA's Robertson Panel, percentages of unexplained sightings dropped precipitously, usually being only a few percent in any given year. When Project Blue Book closed down in 1970, only 6% of all cases were classified as being truly unidentified.
The Levelland UFO case occurred on November 2–3, 1957, in and around the small town of Levelland, Texas. Levelland, which in 1957 had a population of about 10,000, is located west of Lubbock on the flat prairie of the Texas South Plains. The case is considered by ufologists to be one of the most impressive in UFO history, mainly because of the large number of witnesses involved over a relatively short period of time. However, both the US Air Force and UFO skeptics have described the incident as being caused by either ball lightning or a severe electrical storm.
The 1976 Tehran UFO Incident was a radar and visual sighting of an unidentified flying object (UFO) over Tehran, the capital of Iran, during the early morning hours of 19 September 1976. During the incident, two Imperial Iranian Air Force F-4 Phantom II jet interceptors reported losing instrumentation and communications as they approached the object. These were restored upon withdrawal. One of the aircraft also reported a temporary weapons systems failure while the crew was preparing to open fire.
The Chiles-Whitted UFO encounter occurred at approximately 2:45 AM on July 24, 1948, in the skies near Montgomery, Alabama, United States. Two commercial pilots, Clarence S. Chiles and John B. Whitted, claimed to have observed a "glowing object" pass by their plane before it appeared to pull up into a cloud and travel out of sight.
This is a list of notable alleged sightings of unidentified flying objects or UFOs in the United Kingdom. Many more sightings have become known since the gradual release, between 2008 and 2013, of the Ministry of Defence's UFO sighting reports by the National Archives. In recent years, there have been many sightings of groups of slowly moving lights in the night sky, which can be easily explained as Chinese lanterns. Undertaken between 1997 and 2000, Project Condign concluded that all the investigated sightings of unidentified aerial phenomena in the UK could be attributed to misidentified but explicable objects, or poorly understood natural phenomena.
The 1952 Washington, D.C. UFO incident, also known as the Washington flap, the Washington National Airport Sightings, or the Invasion of Washington, was a series of unidentified flying object reports from July 12 to July 29, 1952, over Washington, D.C. The most publicized sightings took place on consecutive weekends, July 19–20 and July 26–27. UFO historian Curtis Peebles called the incident "the climax of the 1952 (UFO) flap" - "Never before or after did Project Blue Book and the Air Force undergo such a tidal wave of (UFO) reports."
The Gorman dogfight was a widely publicized UFO incident which took place on October 1, 1948, in the skies over Fargo, North Dakota, United States. United States Air Force (USAF) Captain Edward J. Ruppelt wrote in his bestselling and influential The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects that the "dogfight" was one of three "classic" UFO incidents in 1948 that "proved to [Air Force] intelligence specialists that UFOs were real," along with the Chiles-Whitted UFO encounter and the Mantell UFO incident. However, in 1949 the USAF concluded that the Gorman dogfight had been caused by a lighted weather balloon.
The Kirtland AFB UFO sighting could suggest either of two incidents, separated by a number of years, but initially refers to an observation of an unidentified flying object at Kirtland Air Force Base, Albuquerque, New Mexico, late in 1957. The Air Force concluded the witnesses misidentified a conventional aircraft.
The Lakenheath-Bentwaters Incident was a series of radar and visual contacts with unidentified flying objects over airbases in eastern England on the night of 13–14 August 1956, involving personnel from the Royal Air Force (RAF) and the United States Air Force (USAF). The incident has since gained some prominence in the literature of ufology and the popular media.
The Sperry UFO case was a sighting of an Unidentified Flying Object by the captain, Willis Sperry, and other crew of an American Airlines DC-6 airborne near Mount Vernon, Maryland on 29 May 1950.
On 23 April 2007, captain Ray Bowyer was flying a routine passenger flight for the civilian airline company, Aurigny Air Services, when he and his passengers gained progressively clearer views of two UFOs during a 12- to 15-minute period. Bowyer had 18 years of flying experience, and the 45-minute flight was one that he had completed every working day for more than 8 years.
