The anomalous target on both scopes had been moving at speeds faster than anything known to be possible.
Jerome was an intelligence officer at the base and was ordered to make a report on the incident. It had been suggested that the object was a meteor, but when he interviewed radar operators on both sides of the base, he found the object was tracked as it maintained an altitude of 18,000 metres throughout its flight and he believed this ruled out a meteor as a possibility. While conducting his investigation, he was shocked to learn that the very next day, both radars again reported an anomalous object, this time moving slowly over the base at about 16 kilometres per hour at 14,000 metres. This time, the anomaly was explained as “high-flying seagulls.”
Remember, this case occurred long before rockets and jet aircraft were capable of such speeds or high-altitude helicopters were possible. The consternation of the inspectors and the embarrassment of the radar technicians must have been considerable, and was something that was talked about in the mess hall for many weeks.
If a radar case is explained as being due to faulty equipment, technicians point out that the same equipment is used to track known military operations without malfunctions. You can’t really have it both ways; either the equipment was working or it wasn’t.
Through the rest of the decade, there were four more known sightings at Goose Bay. Three of these were October 29, 31, and November 1, 1948, with little information available on the first two other than that they were noted in Project Blue Book. But Donald Keyhoe, a noted journalist and author of several UFO books, described the cases this way, citing the third case as well:
One of the first cases, involving three separate incidents, took place in Labrador, at Goose Bay Air Force Base. About 3 a.m. on October 29, 1948, an unidentified object in slow level flight was tracked by tower radar men. Two days later, the same thing happened again. But the following night, on November 1, radar men got a jolt. Some strange object making 600 mph was tracked for four minutes before it raced off on a southwest course. At the time, weather conditions were considered as a possible answer. But … this obviously must be ruled out.
A fourth Labrador sighting took place on September 9, 1949, when a military aircraft pilot saw an egg-shaped object disappear into a cloud at a high speed.
In the 1950s, UFOs were again plaguing the Goose Bay air force base. On September 14, 1951, at 9:30 p.m., another sighting there was recorded in Blue Book case files, listed as No. 969.
Technical Sergeant W. B. Maupin and Corporal J.W. Green were witnesses when two objects were tracked on radar on a collision course. One of the radar operators attempted to warn the objects of the imminent collision and was surprised to watch one avoid danger by moving to the right. A third unidentified track then joined the first two. The entire incident lasted more than 15 minutes. No aircraft were known to be in the area.
It’s difficult to say what might have happened in the radar booth that night. It’s likely that someone there remembered the unfortunate incident with the visiting dignitaries just three years earlier and wanted to avoid another reprimand. So, he logically decided that the unknown objects were aircraft and handled them as unidentified traffic, vectoring them to safety. It appears rather unlikely, however, that two spacecraft from another planet would need assistance from a terrestrial radar operator for flight directions.
The next year, another weird “something” was reported over Goose Bay. Edward Ruppelt, former head of Project Blue Book said that one night early in 1952, the pilot of an Air Force C-54, about 320 kilometres southwest of Goose Bay, contacted the tower to report a large “fireball” had buzzed his airplane. It had come from behind and had not been seen it until it was “just off the left wing,” only an estimated 30 or 60 hundred metres away.
The base officer-of-the-day, also a pilot, was in the flight operations office and overheard the report. He went outside and saw a light coming from the southwest. In the blink of an eye, it flew over the airfield, increasing to the size of a “golf ball at arm’s length,” looking like a “ball of fire.” The object seemed so low and close that the officer and the driver of his command car dropped to the ground and hid under the car because they were sure it was going to hit the ground nearby. But as they watched, the fireball made a 90-degree turn over the airfield and flew off to the northwest. In the control tower, the technicians saw the object make its right-angle turn and were certain it was not a meteor.
UNIDENTIFIED FLYING HAT
A photographic UFO case, in McMinnville, Oregon, has been debated since it was reported in 1950. On June 8 of that year, Paul Trent and his wife watched a dark, hat-shaped object flying over their property and some clear photos were taken. Skeptics and believers have traded insults about the case for more than 60 years, focusing on shadows on buildings in the foreground, density of the image on the negative, and so forth. There’s no question that something was captured on film, and if the witnesses were truthful, an unidentified flying object did pass over a small farm that day.
This incident was discussed during a briefing Ruppelt had some time later in the Pentagon with General Samford, the Director of Intelligence, some members of his staff, two Navy captains from the Office of Naval Intelligence, and other officials. He was describing some outstanding Unknown UFO reports he had investigated and noted they were increasing in number. Even though the reports were detailed and contained a great deal of good data, he noted they still had no proof that UFOs were “real.” An officer used the Goose Bay sighting as an example of an unexplained case, and said it, too, could not be accepted as proof of alien spacecraft. Ruppelt noted: “I said that our philosophy was that the ‘fireball’ could have been two meteors: one that buzzed the C-54 and another that streaked across the airfield at Goose AFB. Granted a meteor doesn’t come within feet of an airplane or make a 90 degree turn, but these could have been optical illusions of some kind.”
The colonel asked, “What are the chances of having two extremely spectacular meteors in the same area, traveling the same direction, only five minutes apart?”
Ruppelt’s response was that he “didn’t know the exact mathematical probability, but it was rather small ...”
The colonel went on:
Why not assume a point that is more easily proved? … Why not assume that the C-54 crew, the OD, his driver, and the tower operators did know what they were talking about? Maybe they had seen spectacular meteors during the hundreds of hours that they had flown at night and the many nights that they had been on duty in the tower. Maybe the ball of fire had made a 90 degree turn. Maybe it was some kind of an intelligently controlled craft that had streaked northeast across the Gulf of St. Lawrence and Quebec Province at 2,400 miles an hour.
“Why not just simply believe that most people know what they saw?” the colonel said with no small amount of sarcasm in his voice.
Also in 1952, on June 1, a cargo ship was anchored at Port Gentil, Gabon, when at 2:40 a.m. the first mate notified the Master Seaman that a bright object was passing directly overhead. He said he had watched it come from the shore, stop, turn and continue on its course out to sea, once again making an erratic move as it flew near the ship. The Master held up his binoculars and saw a bright, “phosphorescent orange light, circular in shape and moving at great speed in a seemingly straight-line course.” He followed the light for three minutes as it headed out to sea and was lost to sight. He
