2206 My UFO

Saturday, January 10, 2009

I have mentioned before that in 1964 and into 1965 my father was on several month's temporary duty at Wright Patterson AFB, where he was assigned to Project Blue Book. My mother and younger siblings were living on a SAGE base in eastern Pa., where my father had been the commander. I was in college, about an hour's drive from home.

My father came home about every other weekend, and he brought Project Bluebook materials with him. The folders would lie on the dining room table, complete with SECRET stamps.

On several weekends when I came home and my parents were out, I leafed through them.

They contained detailed reports from the witnesses, the location and history of other incidents in that area, background of the witnesses, atmospheric and weather conditions at the time, reports of all military, commercial, and private air traffic, and all weather balloons etc. within x miles, all satellite positions, records from commercial and military radar, and so on.

I asked my father about the files. It wasn't hard to get him to talk about them. He thought it was the best fun he'd ever had.

His job was to read through all the material, and then come up with an explanation based on that information, that would stick. So he'd work out visibility distance, cloud patterns, wind directions, and so on, and then write an explanation of what it could have been, if this were just a bit west of the report, and if this were so, and so on. However, it was not written up as "what it could have been" --- it was entered in the file as what it was scientifically proven to have been!

I was not amused.

It's interesting that my father had been unable to explain my own UFO experience.

It happened a few years before the Blue Book assignment, when I was 15, 1960. He was the commander of the SAGE base then. The base was on the top of an isolated mountain in northeastern Pa., surrounded by a state park, a wildlife preserve, and miles and miles of nothing.

I used to spend hours with my dog in the fields and woods around the base. I didn't have a watch, but I knew the commercial flight schedules and directions, so I knew when a certain flight went over (Avoca to Chicago?) it was time to head home for dinner, and so on.

One summer day I was near the rifle range when I caught the glint of planes near the northeastern horizon. Odd. No commercial planes ever came from the northeast. There were three of them, close together, one in front, two flanking, in a perfectly clear sky. Three in formation seemed to say military. They were very bright, like the sun was reflecting off them. They were long and thin, too long for their width, like needles, and I realized I saw no wings, and heard no sound. They left no contrails, either. All of that made me think that they were very high. I watched them fly over, and then I realized that they had taken only 10 seconds or so to cross from horizon to horizon. Man, that's FAST! Either that or they weren't as high as I thought they were - but if they were lower shouldn't they have looked bigger, shouldn't I have seen wings?

A few minutes later, the commercial "go home for dinner" flight came over and I went home. My father was home, so I told him about these really fast planes, and asked him what they were. He called the guy on duty in the towers (two search, one heightfinder, and the SAGE block) and asked what had come over just before the commercial flight.

None of the radar had shown anything. My father went up to the base (we lived right next to the gate) to find out why not.

Later, I got pretty thoroughly grilled, because, of course, that's impossible. There was never any explanation. There were no radar tracks. My father told me I was nuts, and never to mention it again, and as proof that I was nuts he pointed out that planes traveling from the northeast to southwest at that time of day would not be lighted by the sun, they'd be silhouetted, therefore I'm nuts.

And that was that.
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