Fear Under Pressure
“Hard” UFO evidence—things that can be touched and held—is scarce in the world of UFOlogy. Imagine the excitement, then, generated by a man named Bob White. While in Colorado near the Utah border in 1985, White observed as a UFO ejected a 7.5-inch metallic piece—thick and bulbous at one end, and tapered to a point at the other. The object’s surface appearance evokes fish scales, as if the object had been carefully layered, one section over another.
White, forty-six at the time, retrieved the object, only to spend the next decade and a half trying to understand it, and persuade other people about the truth of how the object came into his possession. He finally found an ally in the 2000s: Mark W. Allin, a UFOlogist who co-owns The Above Top Secret Web site.
Allin has related that after he presented Bob White’s metal object to a scientist at Los Alamos, the object picked up AM and FM radio signals, and heated and cooled with equal rapidity, which encouraged the scientist to pronounce the object as extraterrestrial. That judgment certainly backed up Bob White’s story; Allin, though, was concerned because the Los Alamos scientist came under career-threatening pressure from his superiors, and recanted his findings. The bullying suggested to some in the UFO community that the scientist—and, by extension, White—was a victim of government conspiracy and cover-up.
Allin persevered. An independent metallurgist he hired in 2007 said the object was of terrestrial origin. A year after that, Allin took it to nuclear physicist Stanton Friedman, who examined it, considered the details of White’s account, and classified the object as extraterrestrial.
Later in 2008, White and Allin found another ally, Franklin Carter, former president of the Institute for UFO Research, and later a member of MUFON (Mutual UFO Network). Mr. Carter spent time with the object. He believed White’s story, and felt certain that the metal did not originate on Earth.
Bob White remained puzzled by the apparent cover-up at Los Alamos. Perhaps scientists there had seen similar objects before White showed up with his. In 2004, Bob White told his own story in a book, UFO Hard Evidence; and a DVD, The Bob White Experience.
Bob White’s apparent sincerity aside, the nature of the object he retrieved suggests an alternative, and earthly, explanation with roots in old-style metallurgy. There may be no clearer explanation than one published more than seventy years before White’s discovery: a 1914 issue of American Machinist. In a sub-article attached to a longer piece about the manufacture of shrapnel shells, technical writer W. T. Montague looked at the inevitable, and unwanted, accumulation of “grinding chips” on heavy-duty, foundry-rated grinders. As the grinding wheel turns against steel, white-hot flecks of metal collect behind the machine’s wheel guard.
A stalagmite-like (thick at one end, tapered at the other) combination of solid steel and minute pieces of the wheel’s abrasive agent begins to form. The grinder’s exhaust (for dust removal) generates a flow of oxygen that heats the stalagmite to the melting point of steel, 2,600 degrees F, sufficient for partial welding. An attentive operator will knock the stalagmite from the shield long before it has time to form into much of anything, but one left unattended will end up as “molten steel solidified into shiny solid masses of fantastic design.” Fantastic—like the metal piece discovered by Bob White.