Selected UFO Sightings of the 1950s and 1960s
The plentitude of sightings dated 1952 and 1965 (below) reflect the dramatic increase in UFO reports during those years.
February 19, 1951: Crew and passengers aboard an East African Airways Model 18 Lodestar airliner observe an enormous, cigar-shaped object hover over Mount Kilimanjaro. The object—with dull silver skin periodically interrupted by dark bands—remains in sight for nearly twenty minutes, performing very rapid lateral moves and ascents when not hovering. One of the passengers attaches a telescopic lens to his movie camera and shoots thirty feet of color film. Pilot Jack Bicknell estimates the object’s length as “over two hundred feet.”
Note: The USAF reportedly examined the movie footage, pronounced it an image of refracted light, and returned the film to the owner.
Spring 1951: A U.S. Army unit positioned near Chorwon, Korea (the so-called Iron Triangle), makes a nighttime sighting of what one soldier describes as a “jack-o-lantern.” The thing floats serenely among artillery bursts before changing course to come at the soldiers. When its orange glow becomes a “blue- green brilliant light,” the soldiers open fire with armor-piercing bullets, which strike the object with the sound of slugs against metal. A pulsing, tingling ray sweeps over the soldiers and causes them to dive into their bunker.
Note: Various men in the group shortly exhibited dysentery-like symptoms, plus weight loss, disorientation, and unusually high counts of white blood cells. The account of the incident comes from former PFC Francis Wall, during a much later interview with researcher John Timmerman, representing the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS).
August–November 1951: Numerous witnesses in and near Lubbock, Texas, report precise formations of mysterious flying lights. (See the account earlier in this chapter.)
January 22, 1952: A pair of F-94 Starfire interceptors scrambled to meet fast- moving (fifteen hundred to twenty-four hundred mph) radar targets above Nenana, Alaska, are unable to keep up with the objects’ speed and maneuvers.
One F-94 pulls to within two hundred yards and has to pull up to avoid a collision.
February 2, 1952: Crew aboard the USS Philippine Sea sailing east of South Korea witness three objects trailing flaming exhaust perform complex maneuvers at great speed. Radar suggests 600 to 1,500 mph at about fifty thousand feet.
March 4, 1952: A C-54 Skymaster flying out of Ashiya AFB, Japan, establishes visual contact with an orange oval, a hundred feet long and fifty feet thick, flying at ten thousand feet. Visual contact is maintained for 90–120 seconds.
March 14, 1952: In flight above Hawaii, Navy Secretary Dan Kimball and others are twice circled by a pair of flying discs streaking at between 1,500 and 2,000 mph. The event is also witnessed by Adm. Arthur Radford, in a second plane.
May 12, 1952: A blue-green UFO flying at 30,000–40,000 feet forty miles west of Roswell, New Mexico, follows a precise triangular course three times before departing.
May 22, 1952: Near Falls Church, Virginia, a CIA official, a retired general, and others observe a red light in level flight at about five thousand feet that abruptly climbs almost straight vertical before leveling off and going into a vertical dive. The object levels off again and rapidly disappears.
May 28, 1952: In three discrete nighttime incidents, B-29 crews flying near Albuquerque, Tulsa, and Enid, California, observe green spheres at between 15,000 and 25,000 feet.
Summer 1952: An F-86 Sabre jet based at Wright-Patterson AFB, Dayton, dives and fires on a rapidly moving disc-shaped UFO from about five hundred yards. Apparently undamaged, the disc quickly accelerates and climbs out of sight. Wright-Patterson intelligence is ordered not to send a report to Project Blue Book, but an intelligence officer later shows the file to Blue Book chief Capt. Edward Ruppelt.
Note: Ruppelt’s is the best account of this incident. The file was later burned by the officer that revealed it to Ruppelt.
July 2, 1952: While driving near Tremonton, Utah, Navy photographer Delbert Newhouse and wife see twelve to fourteen shiny silver discs. Newhouse films the objects with his 16mm movie camera; after Navy and Air Force analysis, the footage is returned to Newhouse, without the frames showing the discs.
July 19, 1952: A Peruvian customs inspector snaps a photograph of a cigar- shaped object trailing heavy exhaust as it flies over Puerto Maldonado. The inspector, Domingo Troncoso, estimates the craft’s length at more than one hundred feet. Note: Because the customs office sat along the border of Peru and Bolivia, some accounts of this incident claim that Troncoso photographed the object over Bolivia.
September 12, 1952: Schoolboys out at dusk near Flatwoods, West Virginia, run to investigate a UFO and discover a hissing, shiny-eyed creature enveloped in a noxious gas or mist. Note: For more on this, one of the most celebrated of all UFO cases, see chapter ten.
December 4, 1952: In the night sky above Laredo, Texas, USAF pilot Lt. Robert Arnold, flying a T-28 trainer, experiences numerous near misses with a glowing, blue-white object traveling at very high speed. The object approaches Arnold’s plane from a variety of directions and attitudes: in rapid ascent beneath him; on an apparent head-on collision course; and on level course, keeping pace with the T-28 at six thousand feet.
November 23, 1953: An F-89 Scorpion scrambled from Truax Field, near Madison, Wisconsin, to intercept an “unidentified target” over Lake Superior disappears from radar at thirty thousand feet, after its on-screen blip merges with the blip of the UFO. The jet fails to return to base; neither debris nor the fliers, pilot Lt. Felix Moncla and radar operator Lt. Robert Wilson, are ever found. The USAF describes the “other” blip as a Canadian plane, until Canada explains that no Canadian aircraft had been over the lake during the pursuit. Then the Air Force suggested that Moncla suffered an attack of vertigo and crashed, directing his aircraft to avoid homes. The final USAF explanation is changed to say that the F-89 exploded in midair—leaving no wreckage.
Note: Some latter-day accounts claim that the F-89 was scrambled from Kinross AFB in Michigan; in reality, Kinross tracked the object first and then notified Truax.
June 1954: Witnesses afoot past midnight at East Malvern and Carnegie, Australia, observe a flying object about the size of a rail car, and shaped like “a cross between an egg and a plate,” that spits yellow fire and reveals “portholes.” Visible behind the portholes are “vague shapes that looked like human busts.” November 1, 1954: As a woman named Rosa Lotti walks into Cennina, Italy, she encounters two diminutive, laughing humanoids that step from behind a doubled-coned craft (two cones joined at their bases). The little “men” approach her, snatching a carnation Lotti is carrying, and relieving her of one of her stockings.
August 21–22, 1955: Eleven people trapped in a farmhouse located between Kelly and Hopkinsville, Kentucky, spend a harrowing night besieged by two waves of mischievous, floating aliens. The men inside are armed with long guns, and blow the hell out of the house’s walls and windows while firing for hours at the persistent little visitors.
October 4, 1955: While aboard a train in the Caucasus region of the USSR, Georgia Senator and Armed Services Committee chairman Richard Russell observes a disc-shaped craft, and then another, take off from a spot near the railroad tracks. Russell’s interpreter also sees both craft. The “TOP SECRET” document pertaining to the sighting is dated October 14.
September 8, 1958: Officers and airmen at SAC command, Offutt AFB, Omaha, observe a red-orange “missile-shaped” UFO that tilts to forty-five degrees from horizontal while accompanied by “a swarm of black specks cavorting every which way”; after about a minute, the specks disappear. The primary object remains visible for from five to ten minutes, during which time the object slowly rotates back to horizontal and eases out of sight.
October 3, 1958: Numerous crew members aboard a passenger train on its way to Indianapolis observe four lighted discs flying in a V formation in the predawn sky above Monon, Indiana. The objects traverse the train’s entire half-mile length, moving from one side of the tracks to the other and then back again, so that crew in various sections of the train get good looks. At speed (perhaps seventy miles per hour) the objects glow bright white; as their speed decreases, the color changes to yellow and finally “dirty orange.” The encounter lasts seventy minutes.
Note: The conductor, Ed Robinson, estimated the discs as being about forty feet in diameter. (The other witnesses: engineer, fireman, head brakeman, and flagman.) A witness drawing done shortly after the sighting dates the incident at October 8 rather than October 3.
February 24, 1959: A DC-6 flying at eighty-five hundred feet in the night sky not far from Pittsburgh is approached and then paced by a trio of bright lights. The first inclination of the captain, Peter Killian, is that he’s looking at Orion, but Orion is visible above the lights. The forty-five-minute encounter is corroborated by a pair of trailing airliners and tower personnel at Pittsburgh.
June 26 and 27, 1959: William Gill, an Anglican missionary in Papua, New Guinea, witnesses saucer-shaped craft and humanoid occupants on two successive nights. Missionary support staff and numerous locals gesture toward the craft and receive visual acknowledgment.
April 18, 1961: Three humanoids inside a flying disc hovering inches above the ground at an Eagle River, Wisconsin, chicken farm ask the farmer for water, and then reward him with “pancakes” cooking on a grill. The men are about five feet tall, attired in dark blue knit uniforms (some latter-day accounts say black) with turtlenecks and knit caps. After about five minutes, the ovoid craft lifts off at a forty-five-degree angle, bows nearby evergreens in its wake, and then disappears.
Note: The Eagle River case is perennially popular and controversial, partly because the “pancake” claim of the farmer, Joe Simonton, seems risible.
But Simonton meant pancake-like. (He said they tasted like “cardboard.”) Alleged UFOlogist and/or Air Force analysis of the pancakes is difficult to verify, though accounts describe corn, buckwheat, soy, and other earthly ingredients. Simonton ended up rather worn out by the aftermath of his encounter, and finally said that “if it happened again, I don’t think I’d tell anybody about it.”
September 19, 1961: A New Hampshire couple, Betty and Barney Hill, are stopped and abducted by the operators of a UFO near Lancaster. A star map later drawn by Betty is remarkably accurate, and suggests a definite place of origin for the craft.
Note: The most famous of all UFO abduction cases, the Hills’ adventure is told in chapter thirteen.
April 24, 1964: In a desolate section of New Mexico desert, Socorro patrolman Lonnie Zamora investigates an overturned automobile that turns out to be an ovoid, three-legged craft that abruptly spits blue flame and flies away.
Note: The integrity of Sgt. Zamora’s record, and the trained eye that revealed many details to him, has caused this sighting to become both well known and, generally, highly regarded. For more, see chapter ten.
June 29, 1964: A Georgia businessman encounters a spinning, brightly illuminated UFO shaped “like a top” during a night drive near Lavonia. The amber-colored object keeps pace ahead of his car for at least a mile. Beauford E. Parham describes the object as large enough to hold a man, with the top section spinning clockwise and the bottom section spinning counterclockwise. The encounter ends when the top lifts and flies over the roof of Parham’s car, leaving a stench like “embalming fluid.”
Note: A lively account, though one might struggle to explain why Parham’s first instinct was to continue driving at sixty- five miles per hour, rather than jam on the brakes.
January 11, 1965: Six members of the Army Signal Corps observe twelve to fifteen rapidly flying white ovals, pursued by jets from Andrews AFB, Camp Springs, Maryland.
January 23, 1965: A lightbulb-shaped object, seventy-five to eighty feet tall and ten to twenty-five feet wide, causes cars to stall at the junction of U.S. Highway 60 and State Route 614, at Lightfoot, Virginia, north of Williamsburg.
January 28–February 1, 1965: UFOs are sighted across Alaska, at Anchorage, Cape Lisburne, Cape Newenham, Cape Romanzoff, Fairbanks, Fort Yukon, Indian Mountain, Northeast Cape, and Unalakleet.
February 1, 1965: Thirty to forty people observe a phosphorescent, domed UFO above Tallahassee, Florida, moving across the evening sky at one hundred to two hundred miles per hour. The same object is noted by an Eastern Airlines flight over Daytona Beach.
March 12, 1965: While camping in the Florida Everglades, a man named James Flynn gets a long-distance look at a large cone-shaped object some twenty-five feet high and seventy-five feet wide. Accompanied by his four dogs, Flynn approaches on his amphibious swamp buggy, watching as the craft lifts from the ground, hovers, and then settles back again. After observing from concealment for more than half an hour, Flynn brings his buggy closer, only to be halted by a tremendous blast of wind. When the cone lifts off again, Flynn leaves the buggy and steps into the open. Looking up at the thing at a ground distance of about seventy-five feet, Flynn is suddenly knocked flat—and unconscious—by a beam of light, “like a welder’s torch.” Flynn regains consciousness the next morning (his adventure had begun around 1:00 a.m. the previous night), and is blind.
Note: Flynn saw an ophthalmologist on March 17; his left eye showed no obvious damage but the doctor could not even locate the retina of the right.
Flynn’s sight gradually returned, but imperfectly, and he waited for over a week for his reflexes to return to normal. When Flynn and some friends visited the site on March 26, they discovered an area seventy feet in diameter that had no vegetation, no twigs, nothing. Cypress trees that ringed the perimeter showed scorch marks. Although the Air Force encouraged Flynn to mark out the spot, Flynn never was told that his story had been investigated.
April 23, 1965: A Rivesville, West Virginia, a woman cleaning up after breakfast watches a flying disc land near her house and disgorge a small humanoid with pointed ears. The creature, who is apparently tethered to the craft, removes something from the ground and then returns to the disc. The object spins counterclockwise and ascends out of sight.
July 1, 1965: A French farmer named Maurice Masse notices two children in his field at Valensole. When he moves closer, he sees that the figures are humanoid but not human. Less than four feet tall, they have oversized bald heads and heart-shaped faces with large, oblique eyes and small mouths. Both creatures wear gray-green coveralls. When one of them points a tube in Masse’s direction, he is frozen in place. Masse remains conscious, and watches as the creatures pick vegetation and then enter an egg-shaped craft that disappears into the sky. The effects of the immobilizer wear off in about fifteen minutes.
July 28, 1965: A USAF Reserve major based at Carswell AFB, Fort Worth, observes a silent, manta-shaped object, about forty feet long and showing flashing white lights, fly at about a thousand feet directly through the Carswell control zone. Personnel at the base’s control tower also see the object. Note: Radar Approach Control (RAPCON) investigated, without making an identification. The RAPCON report said, “This sighting was a positive observation, under ideal circumstances, of a definite object of an unconventional nature, possibly of foreign origin, which could be a threat to national security.”
August 3, 1965: In the early afternoon, an Orange County, California, highway inspector named Rex Heflin quickly snaps three black-and-white Polaroids of a flying disc topped with a squared-off dome. The craft apparently interferes with his truck’s radio, as Heflin is unable to contact his garage as long as the disc is in sight. Note: Increasingly sophisticated photo analysis performed on the Heflin images as late as 1993 suggests that they are genuine. Although MUFON and NICAP supported Heflin, the Air Force claimed that JPL analysis revealed fakery. Heflin absorbed unpleasant criticism for many years.
September 3, 1965: Two a.m. While walking along a rural highway three miles outside of Exeter, New Hampshire, an eighteen-year-old Navy recruit named Norman Muscarello is startled by movement above him: an enormous object showing blazing red lights. Muscarello tries to hide. When the object departs, Muscarello contacts the police, who have already taken a UFO call from a frightened woman two miles outside town, who says a red flying object chased her car along Highway 101 for ten miles. Exeter police officer Eugene Bertrand accompanies Muscarello back to the scene, where both watch an enormous illuminated object slowly rise from behind a stand of trees. The object makes no sound. As Bertrand and Muscarello retreat to the police cruiser, another Exeter officer, David Hunt, arrives on the scene. He, too, witnesses the object. Not long after, the police in nearby Hampton take a pay-phone call from an agitated male who claims he’s been chased by a flying saucer. The call is cut off before the man can say more.
Note: Officer Bertrand later described the Muscarello object as “huge, shapeless,” with five bright red lights that pulsed sequentially from left to right. The thing was, Bertrand said, “so bright you couldn’t look at it.” The sky above Exeter was clear that night, with unremarkable weather. Subsequent investigation by Blue Book was lackluster, and suggested that the witnesses had seen Air Force B-47s. The first gambit of the Air Force and the Pentagon was to enlist a parade of “expert witnesses” brought on to discredit Bertrand and Muscarello. The Pentagon/Air Force investigation suggested “weather inversion.” But at the end of January 1966, after two letters sent by officers Bertrand and Hunt, the Air Force felt compelled to alter its position in a letter sent to the officers from the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force, conceding that “we have been unable to identify the object that you observed. . . .” This famed encounter is chronicled in the best-selling 1966 book by John G. Fuller, Incident at Exeter.
October 1965: The pilot of a small plane, and a passenger, observe three “bright objects” off the starboard wing, flying about a thousand feet above Lake Norman, North Carolina, near the McGuire Nuclear Station.
October 23, 1965: A radio announcer named James Townsend, driving west on State Highway 27 near Long Prairie, Minnesota, finds his way blocked by a silver, missile-shaped craft. After Townsend’s car dies and coasts to a stop, three faceless humanoids emerge from the craft. A few minutes later, the “brownish- black” creatures return to the ship, and lift off.
March 14–20, 1966: Law enforcement officers in Washtenaw County, Michigan, investigate a seemingly unending rush of reports describing the aerial maneuvers of flying discs. They are seen over Lake Erie, over highways, and above a swamp. Most fly singly but others move in formation. Some are yellow; others are red and blue-green, or all three. Besides peace officers, some one hundred people witness the discs.
Note: This is the case that Blue Book consultant J. Allen Hynek labeled “swamp gas,” a description he gave hastily and lived to regret.
March 16, 1967: Illuminated UFOs cause worry and mechanical trouble at a missile-launch facility at Malmstrom AFB, Montana.
March 28, 1967: A motorist named David Morris sees an orange, cone-shaped UFO and then accidentally strikes and kills an extraterrestrial near Munroe Fall, Ohio. Morris stops the car and looks through his back window at three or four tiny aliens clustered around the body. Suddenly frightened, Morris drives away.
Note: A pair of investigators from NICAP’s Pittsburgh office carefully studied Morris’s account, finding nothing to disprove it. The ET’s death by automobile recalls a 1955 science fiction short story by Paul W. Fairman, “The Cosmic Frame,” and the 1957 movie it inspired, Invasion of the Saucer-Men.
May 20, 1967: A Winnipeg man named Stephen Michalak at Falcon Lake, Manitoba, is left with a waffle pattern burned into his chest by the takeoff exhaust of an illuminated, domed saucer that sets his clothing on fire.
March 1968: The fiery crash of a UFO at Sverlovsky, Russia, leaves salvageable wreckage and at least one alien corpse. Note: This case is colorful but difficult to verify, because it came out of Cold War Russia, and was supposedly investigated by the KGB. A 1998 cable-television special purporting to chronicle the story includes film footage of a supposed alien autopsy.
January 9, 1969: Georgia peanut farmer Jimmy Carter (later Georgia’s governor and President of the United States) and about ten other people witness a blue-red ball in the evening sky above Leary, Georgia. The sphere appears to move toward the group and then back away, maintaining distances of three hundred to a thousand yards. Note: Carter remained adamant that the object appeared “luminous, not solid.” He has also remarked he has no reason to believe the object had on-board operators. Skeptics have suggested that Carter and the others were looking at Venus—but Venus was in the southwestern sky; Carter (a Navy man trained in the use of sextants and well familiar with the shifting locations of planets and stars) said the object floated in the western sky.
Carter recounts his experience whenever asked, and has described it as “the darndest thing I have ever seen.” August 7, 1969: A teenage boy and girl working at a summer camp at Buff Ledge, Vermont, see a saucer-shaped UFO and are taken inside against their will. Note: During sessions of hypnosis around 1980, both people recalled medical examinations and a trip to a “mother ship.” October 24, 1969: A Chilean destroyer some 350 miles off the coast is buzzed by five UFOs sent forth from a dimpled “mother ship” at least 110 feet long. The vessel’s power goes down and does not return until the largest UFO moves well beyond the bridge.
Note: Claims of a subsequent Chilean cover-up are not unreasonable. Then again, the cover-up scenario conveniently explains why the name of the ship must remain a mystery.