by Mack Maloney
Located near Munich, the vast onetime Luftwaffe airfield was a short flight from the border of what was then communist-controlled Czechoslovakia. The 525th was there to patrol that hostile front line of the Cold War.
Tensions were high both in Europe and around the world in 1951. Germany was split in two, communist East staring down the democratic West. Russia now had atomic weapons. Its client state, North Korea, had invaded U.S. ally South Korea the year before, and no sooner had the United States gotten the upper hand in that war than a half million Red Chinese troops entered the fray, making the conflict even more bloody while threatening to turn Asia into a nuclear wasteland. In the early 1950s, all-out war with the Communist Bloc seemed inevitable.
The pilots of the 525th flew the F-86 Sabre jet; its communist adversaries just over the border were equipped with the MiG-15. These same two aircraft were battling each other on a daily basis high above Korea, half a world away.
Always on combat alert, the 525th was frequently scrambled whenever Soviet or Soviet-allied aircraft were detected too close to the border of West Germany.
So it was one particular day when a call came in that a virtual armada of unidentified aircraft had been spotted heading toward West Germany. The 525th was quickly airborne, its fighters climbing to meet what they were sure was an aerial onslaught of Russian MiGs.
But when the 525th Sabres reached their maximum altitude of 45,000 feet, their pilots discovered that the horde of bogeys were not Russian fighters. This air fleet was made up of metallic objects, shaped like saucers. And there were lots of them.
The objects were flying far too high for the Sabres to challenge them. So the 525th’s pilots could do little more than watch as the swarm of UFOs passed over.
Flying one of those Sabres that day was a young second lieutenant named Gordon Cooper. As he would later tell it, streams of UFOs went over the 525th’s base regularly for the next three days. Sometimes they were in groups of four; other times, in groups of as many as sixteen. They were almost always flying from east to west.
Again, Cooper and his colleagues could do little to stop them. Besides flying so high, the UFOs displayed high degrees of maneuverability. They would sometimes move at very high speed; other times they would hover motionless as the fighters of the 525th simply flew beneath them, helpless.
Finally, everyone realized that the 525th was wasting its time chasing the saucers; they eventually gave up trying to intercept them. Instead, the pilots would stay on the ground and use binoculars to watch the UFOs fly overhead.
The worst-case scenario — that the high-flying, incredibly maneuverable aircraft were of Soviet design — quickly faded. After a while it became the opinion of Cooper and just about anyone who’d seen them that these objects were not made in Russia, or China, or anywhere else on earth.
But even though word of the daily parade of UFOs was passed up the ladder to the highest levels of the Pentagon, no official investigation was ever undertaken to determine what they were. Once again, the U.S. military had its head planted firmly in the ground — or some other dark place.
Gordon Cooper gradually rose up the ranks of the air force, becoming an outstanding fighter pilot and then a test pilot. He was such a talented aviator that eight years later he would be selected as one of America’s first astronauts. He would go on to hold the orbital record for the longest solo flight in a Mercury space capsule, circling the earth twenty-two times. A few years later, he was commander of an eight-day orbital mission in a Gemini capsule.
Cooper became a genuine American hero. Played by Dennis Quaid in the movie The Right Stuff, he went on to work for Disney and become a bestselling author.
But those strange days back at the beginning of the decade would not be his last experience with UFOs.
* * *
It’s a peculiarity of history that the 1950s were considered a “peaceful” decade.
True, once the fighting in Korea had ended, the United States was not at war, at least not in the usual sense.
But a certain kind of conflict was taking place. It was a war of shadows fought mostly on secret battlegrounds. Though it never made the headlines, U.S. cargo planes converted to spy platforms and sent to fly close to Russia’s borders were shot down with alarming frequency. Soviet spies were rife inside the United States, as evidenced by the Rudolph Abel atomic espionage ring and the execution of atomic spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. U.S. and Russian submarines stalked each other beneath the world’s oceans. Huge armies on both sides of divided Europe were poised to strike on a moment’s notice.
This was the “Cold War”—that state of affairs where East and West balanced themselves on the razor’s edge of nuclear annihilation, their fingers always just millimeters away from pressing the button.
It was a strange time for other reasons, too. Literally thousands of UFOs were reported in the United States during the 1950s. It was a decade in which jet fighters chased UFOs and UFOs chased jet fighters, of near and actual midair collisions between aircraft and UFOs, of UFOs the size of aircraft carriers and of one actual aircraft carrier being haunted by UFOs. UFOs were seen watching the United States test its latest nuclear weapons, had made at least one jet fighter disappear and had buzzed the White House and the Capitol building — twice — forcing the president to instruct U.S. fighter pilots to shoot down any UFO that couldn’t be “talked down.”
There was even a UFO sighting above the very air base where the U.S. Air Force had once studied the flying saucer phenomena.
Something was going on during the 1950s — something vastly mysterious and unknown and possibly even unknowable. The fifties might have been called a peaceful decade. But it could also be called the “Decade of the UFO.”
While there were enough UFO incidents in those ten years to fill an encyclopedia, with thanks to the extensive, if sometimes dislocated, investigative work of the late, and some would say great, Captain Edward Ruppelt, U.S. Air Force, and taken primarily from his aforementioned book, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, what follows are some of the more unusual cases.
Comedy of Errors
Whether it was some kind of cosmic joke or an explicit attempt to send a message, one of the most remarkable UFO sightings of 1950 took place right over Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, the home of the U.S. Air Force’s Air Technical Intelligence Center, the same people who at one time had claimed that flying saucers were real, only to be suppressed by Pentagon higher-ups.
Wright-Patterson is located in Dayton, Ohio, not far from what was the Dayton Municipal Airport. On March 8, 1950, a TWA airliner was beginning its landing approach to Dayton when its crew spotted a bright light off to the southeast.
The TWA pilot called the Dayton tower to inquire about the light; the air traffic controllers told him they already had the mysterious object in sight. The Dayton tower then called the operations hut of an Ohio Air National Guard unit based at the airport; they immediately scrambled an F-51 Mustang.
Meanwhile, the Dayton tower operators also called the nearby ATIC and told them what was happening right outside their front door.
The people at the ATIC hurried outside and saw the extremely bright light hovering right over their heads. Many of those investigators would later say the light was much brighter than any star they’d ever seen — and because it was midmorning, the chances this was a celestial body were practically nil anyway.
Some of the ATIC researchers rushed over to the Wright-Patterson radar laboratory, where they found an object had been picked up on the lab’s radar in the same part of the sky where the mysterious light was hovering.
This blip was also showing up on the radar screen of the Ohio Air National Guard F-51, as well as another F-51 that had been scrambled from Wright-Patterson itself.
The pair of Mustangs were climbing together, and both pilots reported they could see the UFO and were intent on pursuing it. To this end, the lab’s radar operator, a veteran master sergeant, gave both fighters a vector p
oint and also linked their radios together.
The F-51s made it to 15,000 feet but then lost the UFO in the clouds. The pilots decided to continue the search, though. They put some space between them to avoid collision and continued climbing into the cumulus. But then their wings started icing up.
The radar operator back at Wright-Patterson was telling the pilots they were right underneath the UFO. But as the pilots couldn’t see in the clouds and didn’t want to slam into whatever the object was, they decided to cancel the pursuit.
The F-51s came back down to a safer altitude; moments later, the object began fading from the radar screen.
When the clouds cleared about an hour later, the UFO was gone.
* * *
What happened next was characteristic of how the U.S. Air Force would handle most UFO sightings in the coming decade.
A meeting was held at the ATIC shortly after the UFO sighting. While some ATIC radar experts were on hand, neither the F-51 pilots nor the master sergeant who’d actually run the radar intercept was at the meeting.
After some discussion, the ATIC experts, no longer charged with solving the UFO riddle, decided the sighting was caused by two simultaneous events. First, the bright light all the witnesses initially saw was the planet Venus. This, even though it was midmorning daytime.
And the radar return also seen by so many other people? That was caused by ice-laden clouds.
This dual conclusion seemed to be the result of two things: that Venus was located in the southeast sky at the time of the sighting — even though, again, it was midmorning and not nighttime, and that the F-51 pilots had reported ice on their wings when they went up through the clouds in search of the UFO.
So, case closed.
Except… neither the man who was running the radar intercept — a veteran of radar ops since before World War II — nor the F-51 pilots agreed with the report.
The radar expert was quoted as saying he knew ice clouds on a radar screen when he saw them. They came across as fuzzy, not solid as he had read the UFO that day.
Moreover, the F-51 pilots both said that as they climbed, they’d gotten a closer look at the object. One said it looked huge and metallic.
And just to double-check, this pilot searched for Venus in the same part of the sky the next day and it wasn’t there — again, maybe because it was daytime.
But still, the air force considered the matter ended.
Atomic Spies in the Sky
Just down the street from the world-famous Las Vegas Strip, you can find what might be the most unusual military installation in the world.
It is Nellis Air Force Base. In addition to being so close to Sin City’s main thoroughfare and serving as a huge installation for several air force fighter squadrons, Nellis also anchors the Nevada Test and Training Range, an enormous swath of restricted airspace larger than the state of Connecticut. Red Flag, the massive NATO simulated air warfare exercise, takes place there every year. Plus, about an hour northwest of Nellis is the infamous top secret spook base, Area 51.
Part of Nellis also serves as a major repository for nuclear weapons, and it’s Nellis’s longtime history with these kinds of armaments that resulted in one of the strangest UFO stories of the 1950s.
In 1951, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) established the Nevada Test Site. It was located 75 miles northwest of Nellis at a place called Yucca Flat. The AEC soon began detonating nuclear devices there, and airmen assigned to Nellis were routinely asked to provide security for the AEC testing site.
According to a report by Walter Webb, a consultant for MUFON, the highly respected UFO investigative network, on the morning of October 30 that same year, something very strange happened at Yucca Flat.
A group of Nellis airmen were acting as sentries for a test at the AEC site that day. The size of the explosion was to be between 10 and 20 kilotons, a substantial blast.
The airmen were in position just a few miles from ground zero. It was twenty minutes past dawn. The sun was at their backs, and the sky was clear.
Suddenly the airmen saw three silvery disks hovering close to where the bomb was about to go off.
The objects were shiny and reflected the early morning sunlight. They were described as having flat bottoms with a dome on top and were hanging in the air in a sort of triangle formation about a half mile high. They were making no sound.
On seeing the objects, the airmen called for their corporal, the senior man of the group. By the time the corporal arrived, a virtual fleet of UFOs had appeared, joining the original three. Suddenly there were eighteen UFOs hovering near the blast site. One airman said later the objects were arranged in a half dozen groups containing three UFOs each. They were stretched out horizontally.
The airmen observed the armada of disks for more than a minute. Then suddenly the UFOs turned upward and disappeared in an instant.
Once everyone caught their breath, the corporal said the smart thing for them to do was forget what they’d seen. And this is what happened — the airmen involved never heard any mention of the incident again.
But years later, one of the men who was there finally revealed the sighting to MUFON, and it was his feeling that a lot more people had seen the UFOs that day than just his group of fellow servicemen. In fact, atomic tests were usually filmed by the AEC, using many cameras and shot from many angles. This means the appearance of the fleet of UFOs may have been recorded on film somewhere.
No such film has ever surfaced, though, and no explanation has ever been given for what happened that day at Yucca Flat.
But this incident would have a foreshadowing effect for years to come.
The Great Washington DC Saucer Flap
In July 1952, two of the most spectacular UFO sightings in history happened — and they took place right over Washington DC.
On two successive summer weekends, UFOs appeared in the sky over the nation’s capital. They were tracked on radar, and seen by military and civilian pilots, as well as ordinary citizens in the surrounding area.
Fighter jets were scrambled, leading to a series of high-speed chases. At one point, four UFOs surrounded a fighter, forcing the pilot to call for help. Things got to the point where President Truman issued what might have been one of the most astonishing secret orders of all time, telling U.S. military pilots to shoot down any UFO that couldn’t be “talked down.”
The U.S. military was so baffled, not only did they refuse to talk to the press at first, they even barred their own UFO investigators from looking into the matter.
* * *
It all started on July 19, a Saturday night.
Just a few minutes before midnight, seven objects popped up on radar screens inside the air traffic control (ATC) tower at Washington National Airport, now known as Reagan Airport. The radar indicated these objects were flying about 15 miles southwest of Washington, in an area well off the established flight paths and where no aircraft were supposed to be.
After first confirming their radars were working properly, the tower personnel contacted the airport’s second radar center. The blips had shown up on its radar screens, too. What’s more, people stationed at this second radar station could actually see the objects by looking out their windows.
When the objects started moving toward the White House and the Capitol building, the National tower called Andrews Air Force Base, about 10 miles away, and told their ATC personnel what was happening. Initially, the military personnel at Andrews saw nothing unusual. But no sooner had the first conversation ended than one of the Andrews ATC crew called the National tower back to say that not only were they now picking up the blips on their radar screen, but he, too, could actually see one of the objects.
As all this was going on, an airliner was waiting to take off from one of National’s runways. Its pilot had seen a white object flash across the sky but had assumed it was a meteor. Yet just after takeoff, this pilot was informed by the National tower that UFOs were coming close to his airplane. The pilot r
esponded that he could see six fast-moving objects, all without tails and white in color. The pilot had the strange objects in sight for nearly fifteen minutes, during which he was in constant radio contact with the National tower. The National controllers confirmed that whatever the airline pilot was seeing, they were seeing on their radar screens, too. And when the pilot reported that one of the objects had flown off at tremendous speed, it disappeared from radar screen at the National tower as well.
Finally, two jet fighters arrived on the scene. Runways at Andrews were under repair, so the fighters had to fly in from a base in Delaware. But just as soon as the airplanes showed up, all the UFOs suddenly disappeared. The fighters flew around for a while, trying to spot anything unusual, but they soon ran low on fuel and had to leave.
Just as the jets departed, though, incredibly, the UFOs returned. This led the ATC people in the National tower to believe that the UFOs were somehow listening in on the radio traffic between the tower and the jets, knowing when to come and go.
The sightings continued until around 5:30 A.M., when the UFOs finally left for good.
* * *
The following day, Americans awoke to headlines like: “Saucers Invade DC” and “Saucers Swarm Over Capital.” The news immediately jammed the switchboards at both the White House and the Pentagon. People across the country feared the episode was just the start of some kind of UFO invasion of earth. Up to its neck with the fighting in Korea and other Cold War concerns, it’s easy to imagine the quandary the U.S. military found itself in once news of the DC sightings became widespread.
Yet by pure coincidence, the U.S. Air Force’s chief UFO investigator, Captain Edward Ruppelt of Project Blue Book, was in the Washington area that weekend. Project Blue Book was the successor to Project Grudge, the organization that was in charge of investigating aerial phenomena when the air force effectively slammed the door on any substantive UFO study back in 1949. Blue Book was started in 1951 as a revitalization of that study, in no small part because of the number of UFO sightings being made by military pilots fighting in Korea. And while never very robust in its methods, most UFO experts agree it was infinitely better than the days of Grudge.
