In 1947, World War II was over, but tension between the United States and the USSR was
still high. UFO sightings were abnormally high that year, because people were on high
alert when looking at the sky. The CIA believed that it was always possible that the Russians
invented weapons that were far superior to what America had at their disposal. After
a few key incidents in the 1940’s forced the government to question their understanding
of UFO’s, the CIA and the United States Air Force coming together to create the top
secret missing called “Project Blue Book”. The goal was to decide if these objects were
a threat to the American people, and to also study the technology as much as possible.
Captain Edward Ruppelt was head of the project. He recorded over 12,000 individuals incidents
that had been reported to the government. He was the first person to coin the term “Unidentified
Flying Object.” Ruppelt used science and psychology to study the data on UFO sightings.
He eliminated the vast majority of the sightings that had been reported, due to logical explanations.
He spent far more time studying the truly unbelievable cases that defied logical explanation.
These fell under an “extraterrestrial theory”- as in, the possibility that these were objects
from another world.
10. The Kenneth Arnold Sighting In 1947, a pilot named Kenneth Arnold was
flying a private plane in Idaho when he spotted 9 silver discs flying over Mount Rainier.
They were moving so fast, he estimated that they must have been flying over 1,200 miles
per hour 10,000 feet in the air. This was nearly double the average speed of any airplane
used during the war. Arnold estimated that these objects were more than 100 feet wide.
He reported this sighting to the authorities immediately. The government debates whether
these objects were real, or if Arnold had imagined them. There were no weather balloons
in that area, so there truly was no explanation they could come up with to explain what he
saw. The press ate up this story, and after speaking to Arnold, they coined the term “flying
saucer” to describe these flying objects that he had seen.
9. The Roswell Incident Even if you’re not into UFO research, nearly
everyone has heard of The Roswell Incident. This was yet another huge case in 1947 that
lead to the creation of Project Blue Book. A silver disc crashed on Foster Ranch, which
was just outside Roswell, New Mexico. Witnesses rushed to the crash site, and claimed that
they saw a spaceship. Members of the air force from a nearby base showed up to examine the
crash site, and they carried away all evidence that they could find. Some witnesses claim
that they saw the agents carry away small bodies of aliens from the crash. That same
day, they told the press that they had discovered a real “flying saucer”.
The very next day, the government retracted their statement from the day before, and released
photographs of agents kneeling next to materials from a broken weather balloon. The air force
said that the bodies people witnessed carried away were actually test dummies that had been
tied to the balloons. The space probes that fell from the sky truly did look like flying
saucers, but the government was unwilling to explain this technology to the public until
years later.
However, for UFO believers, this information was too little too late, and they believe
the government is just coming up with rational explanations to satisfy public inquiry. On
top of that, the air force officer who arrived on the scene, Jesse Marcel, gave an interview
in where he said that he did not believe this crash was actually a weather balloon, but
he was forced by his commanding officer to lie to the press, for fear of losing his job.
He said that the metal he picked up from the crash was as thin as the foil inside of a
pack of cigarettes, and yet it was so strong, he couldn’t bend or dent it, even with a
sledgehammer. 8. Dahl and The Men In Black
In June of 1947, a man named Harold Dahl was on his boat with his son and dog. About 1,500
feet above, they could see silver donut-shaped objects flying in the sky. One of the objects
began to fall. The metal debris sliced his son’s arm, and it killed their dog. Dahl
told his boss about the incident. He didn’t believe him, so he went to see for himself.
He also witnessed these same UFO’s in the sky. A few days later, a man wearing a black
suit and fedora showed up, threatening to ruin Dahl’s life if he ever told anyone
about what he saw that day on the boat. Obviously, Dahl still told people about it. This became
known as the “Maury Island Incident”. This is considered to be the first sighting
of “Men in Black”.
We now know that this incident occurred mere months before the Project Blue Book initiative
started. It was incidents like these that made it necessary to have a task force looking
after these UFO cases, and taking testimonies seriously with scientific inquiry, rather
than threatening to silence the witnesses with Men in Black.
7. The Kinross Incident In 1953, air traffic command at the Kinross
Air Force Base in Michigan detected an unidentified flying object soaring over Lake Superior at
500 miles per hour. The blip failed to communicate over the radio, so a pilot named Lt. Felix
Moncla, Jr. and his radar assistant, Lt. R. R. Wilson, jumped in a jet to chase after
this UFO. Air traffic control watched the jet and the UFO blip on the radar, and then,
both objects suddenly vanished at the same time. They described it as the mystery blip
“swallowing” the other.
The air force sent rescue planes to search for the jet, and even dove into the water
all over Lake Superior looking for the crash. None of its remains were ever found. The agents
of Project Blue Book investigated the scene of the missing aircrafts, and alluded to the
fact that they had seen similar incidents happen before, but that the were not allowed
to say what they knew. In later years, the US government tried to claim that the mystery
blip was an airplane from the Canadian Royal Air Force, but the Canadian government has
firmly denied that it was one of their planes.
6. The Levelland Case In 1957, two men in Levelland, Texas, witnessed
a “rocket” taking off in the middle of a field, and then flying towards their truck
at full speed. Their engine failed, and it was impossible for them to drive away. They
were scared for their lives, so they jumped out of the vehicle and into a nearby ditch.
As they rocket flew over them, they felt an immense amount of heat. As soon as the rocket
was far away, their truck started back up again. They drove home and called the police.
Sheriff Weir Clem thought this was a prank, and he decided to brush off that first phone
call. That same night, several other people called in to say that a glowing ball of light
descended from the sky and hovered near their cars, causing all of their engines failed
simultaneously. After the ball flew away, their cars worked again.
There were a total of 15 calls to the police who all reported similar incidents at different
times, in different locations around the city. Sheriff Weir Clem jumped into his car to investigate,
and at 1:30AM that night, he witnessed the phenomenon first-hand. His police cruiser
stopped working for a moment, until the UFO went away.
The government investigated the scene, and took the statements from the witnesses. They
blamed it on a lightning storm, even though there was no storm that night. The government
called it “ball lightning”, which is an unexplained phenomenon that has been recorded
since the 1800’s. This is interesting, though, because ball lightning is incredibly rare,
and it only occurs during thunderstorms. So it doesn’t make sense that this would happen
multiple times in one night hours apart from one another on a clear night. It also doesn’t
account for the reports of the rocket. A professor named Allen Hynek who assisted during Project
Blue Book wasn’t satisfied with the explanation, either. He wrote that there is "absence of
evidence that ball lightning can stop cars and put out headlights."
5. The Lubbock Lights In August of 1951, a group of college professors
were sitting together in a backyard in Lubbock, Texas. They noticed blueish green lights flying
above them in formation, similar to a flock of birds. Over the course of that week, several
other people in the town noticed these same lights appearing at night. A man named Carl
Hart managed to take 5 photographs. While they were in black and white, it was clear
to see these lights clustered in a formation, and that it doesn’t look like any aircraft
that we know of. The photographs were published in local newspapers, and even made their way
into Life Magazine. When studying the 5 photographs, Edward Ruppelt from Project Blue Book noted
that every time a light moved, it was in a pattern. They were traveling at 600 MPH over
2,000 feet in the air.
In 1997, an incredibly similar sighting happened over Phoenix, Arizona that was witnessed by
over 20,000 people. Many witnesses claim that they saw one gigantic airship, and the lights
were in a V formation on the edge of the UFO. The air force eventually came forward to say
that they had been conducting a mission called “Project Snowbird” where they were test-piloting
jets in the middle of the night, and dropped several flares from the sky. However, people
have tried to recreate the phenomenon by dropping flares from planes, and it didn't look anything
like The Phoenix Lights, and the timing reported by the government simply doesn’t add up.
For both incidents, there is no rational explanation that actually makes sense.
4. The Washington DC UFO Incident of 1952 On July 19, 1952, air traffic control at Washington
National Airport spotted 7 unidentified blips on their radar. Witnesses all over Washington
DC could also see these objects with their own eyes. They were described as orange lights
that would hover, and then randomly move at extreme speeds, before hovering in place again.
People were so scared of what they saw in the sky, and they were calling the police
so much, the city’s communication system completely crashed.
The government claimed that these were weather balloons. However, weather balloons are so
small, they do not normally show up on airport radar, and there are never 7 in a cluster.
They were also moving faster than any airplane the air traffic controller had ever seen.
The agents working with Project Blue Book knew that these UFO’s were very real, but
the widespread panic in Washington DC was a sign that people could not handle even the
possibility of aliens and UFO’s. From then on, the government began taking the stance
that if anyone claimed UFO’s were real, they would start gaslighting them. Witnesses
who reported incidents were now questioned about their sanity, or accused of using drugs.
The public was no longer reporting everything they saw in the sky, for fear of earning a
reputation of being crazy. 3. Barney and Betty Hill
In 1961, a married couple named Barney and Betty Hill were on their way home from vacation.
They were driving through a rural part of New Hampshire in the middle of the night when
they spotted a flying object above them. They thought that it was a satellite, so they pulled
the car over to look with their binoculars. At the time, satellites were still very new
technology, so it was exciting to spot one. The Hills could see that it was an aircraft
roughly 1,000 feet off the ground, so they assumed it was a low-flying airplane. They
describe the UFO as being shaped like a pancake with windows all around it. The craft did
not need to turn around, and that it could move back and forth freely at high speeds,
so there was no way their car could drive fast enough to escape.
When they looked at their watches, they realized that 2 hours at passed the blink of an eye,
and they had no memory of that lost time. After this incident, they both began to have
horrible nightmares almost every night. It got so bad, they needed to seek help from
a psychiatrist.
Both Barney and Betty Hill went under hypnosis separately to help them recover their suppressed
memories of that night, and they both remembered identical incidents of being abducted by the
people, or aliens in this craft, and having experiments conducted on them. There are over
10 hours of these interviews.
When Barney goes through his memories, he is very calm and rational for most of the
interviews. Then, in the moments when he describes interacting with the aliens, he has fits of
screaming and extreme fear. He talks about trying to run, or reaching for his gun. At
one point, as he is reliving his memories in a dream-like state. He says, “I don’t
understand. Are we being robbed?” When he is asked to describe what the aliens looked
like, he said that one was like a friendly red headed Irishman, while another had an
“evil” face, “like a German Nazi.” Everyone on the ship wore black military uniforms,
and they all had “slanted eyes”. He also insinuated that he could communicate with
these people without speaking. He said, “They’re in my brain.”
In the adaptations of Barney and Betty Hill’s encounter, artists always make these men in
uniform out to be far more alien-like than what they actually testified. However, they
repeat on multiple occasions that they were abducted and experimented on by men. The agents
from Project Blue Book interviewed The Hills, and they were told to keep their story a secret.
This case is considered to be the first recorded alien abduction story.
Since The Hills were a mixed race couple in the 1960’s, they began receiving death threats.
In a lot of ways, this incident ruined their reputations. They would not have gained anything
from lying about this. Something clearly happened to them- but whether it was aliens, or some
advanced technology here on Earth, we may never know.
2. Portage County UFO Chase In 1966, a police officer named Dale Spaur
in Portage County, PA was investigating an abandoned vehicle when he witnessed a glowing
aircraft rising out of the woods. He could hear a loud engine, and feel a huge amount
of heat blowing on him as it rose into the air. When it was in the sky, he could see
that it was a silver disc-shaped UFO. He chased after it in his squad car, and got on his
radio for backup. Other police officers joined in the chase, and they followed the object
for 86 miles.
Government agents from Project Blue Book showed up to listen to the testimony from police
officers. The officers were told that they saw light retracting off of the planet Venus,
which was apparently visible that day. At this point, new leadership had taken over
Project Blue Book. Instead of performing experiments and taking actual scientific inquiry into
the cases, they would just show up and debunk everything. This incident completely ruined
officer Dale Spaur’s life. He became the laughingstock of the town, labeled as “crazy”
for believing in UFO’s. His wife left him with the kids, he was fired him his job, and
he had almost nothing left. He had to move to West Virginia to work in a coal mine, where
he fell 70 feet down a shaft and broke his back. He never backed down from what his story,
but says that he wished he never saw anything that day.
1. The Phenomenon of Blank The CIA hired a nuclear physicist named Edward
Condon to go through Edward Ruppelt’s reports with the goal of debunking his findings. Condon
had worked on The Manhattan Project, and he was an expert in nuclear weapons. In 1968,
he released what is now known as The Condon Report, which basically declares that an extraterrestrial
explanation of UFO’s is unlikely.
Project Blue Book disbanded in 1969, and the internal government memo claimed that the
CIA had concluded that UFO’s were not dangerous, and that extraterrestrial life did not exist.
But twenty years later, someone high up in the government was sending letters to William
Sessions, who was the director of the FBI at that time. Even though these were declassified
documents, the identity of the writer was still redacted by covering it with a black
sharpie. This person wrote several letters with Sessions about the possibility of having
the FBI pick up with the CIA and Air Force left off.
Apparently, they had both agreed that UFO’s and aliens may actually be real. In one of
the letters, the anonymous writer says to Sessions, “You may recall that while you
were in Fort Smith visiting your father, I called and briefly mentioned my desire to
discuss the phenomenon of (BLANK) in general, and the role of the U.S. government participation.”
In the same letter, the writer mentions a government cover-up involving “alien bodies”.
For whatever reason, the FBI redacted a single word- The phenomenon of what, exactly?
Whoever wrote these letters had an incredibly powerful position in the government. They
had access to top-secret information. They mention receiving phone calls from the Pentagon,
and he has the director of the FBI’s personal phone number. Whoever this person was, the
government doesn’t want us to know who it is- possibly because it may have been a well-known
name. At the very end of one of the letters, the anonymous person writes about their mutual
friend, “P.S., As the ultimate challenge, why not ask President Bush himself?”