UFO Dateline

 

Here you will find an overview of the biggest UFO events in the past 50 years, from 1947 to 1997. The page is not complete yet, but I hope it will be finished real soon.

 

 

Washington invasion Date:24.06.1947
Kenneth Arnold, a businessman from Idaho, never expected that a misquoted comment of his would turn into one of the 20th century's most evocative and enduring mysteries, and become so entrenched in the language that it would become a standard dictionary entry. On June 24th 1947, the date now considered the start of modern ufology, Arnold was lending a hand (and eye) to a search for a crashed aircraft in the Cascade Mountains, Washington State, while on his way to Yakima.
Flying past Mount Rainier, Arnold's attention was caught by a flash of light, sunlight glinting against metal somewhere nearby. Thinking the flash might have come from a USAAF Mustang fighter also engaged in the search, Arnold tried to spot the aircraft. Instead, he saw another glint of light and was astounded to see something that would not only change his life, but bring a new term into the English lexicon.
What Arnold saw was a formation of nine aircraft, flying across his flightpath at an incredible speed - Arnold estimated them to be moving at around 1700mph, a speed far in excess of what any aircraft of the time could achieve. Arnold thought the mystery aircraft were roughly boomerang shaped, resembling flying wings, but this part of his story was quickly buried by misinterpretation of his description of the objects' movements.
Arnold claimed that the objects moved in a very unusual manner, certainly inconsistent with normal aircraft, appearing to skip and glide through the air as if bouncing off a surface at high speed. Once he had landed and reported his sighting, first to other pilots and later to the press he described this movement as flying "like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water". Reporter Bill Becquette of the East Oregonian paper condensed this into 'flying saucers', and a phenomenon was born.
Within the next month, thousands of UFO reports were made all across the United States, most of them no doubt resulting entirely from a War Of The Worlds-type hysteria - without the reporting of Arnold's sighting and its handy soundbite, the chances are that practically all of the reports would never have been made. Since most of the new reports confirmed to the 'saucer' of the news stories rather than anything like what Arnold saw, a lot of them can be written off as classic cases of 'me-too' syndrome.
However, there were still enough reports from witnesses generally regarded as 'credible' even USAAF scientists, to lead the government into investigating the matter further. Then, just a week later, events took another turn.

 

Roswell Date:02.07.1947
The town of Roswel, New Mexico, was a typical American small town, its only real point of interest being the presence of Roswell Army Air Force Base, home of the USAAF's sole nuclear-armed bomber wing, the 509th Bombardment Group. On the night of July 2nd, though, a chain of events began that led to Roswell becoming, for a while, the centre of world attention.Witnesses in Roswell spotted something flying overhead at high speed. Althoug the object was unusual, being described as 'glowing', most people probably thought it was somehow connected th the nearby airbase and gave it little further thought.
Next morning, however, ranch manager Willian 'Mac' Brazel was out checking the sheep on the Foster Ranch, his workplace, after a thunderstorm the previous night. Brazel had thought that he had heard an explosion, bat had dismissed it as merely being thunder - until he discoverd a debris trail running through the ranchlands. His first thought was that it was from a military aircraft, but when he dicussed it later with others, he heard about the recent UFO sightings and wondered if it might be a UFO, especially as the wreckage displayed some unsusual characteristics.
Whatever tha cause, aircraft or UFO, Roswell AFB was the place to report it, and in response Major Jesse Marcel came with another officer to the crash site. Marcel, the base intelligence, immediatly realised that the wreachage was not from one of the base's B-29 bombers, or any plane on the Air Force's inventory. By July 8th, troops had arrived on the ranch to collect all the debris.
That same day, a few miles away from the debris site, Grady Barnett - an engineer from the town of Socorro - made another startling discovery. Lying at the foot of a cliff, as if it had crashed to an abrupt halt there after skidding across the desert, was a 'metallic, disk-shaped object', apparently the source of the debris trail. The wrecked craft was roughly 50 feet across, with a truncated rear section.
More importantly of the nature of the occupants - Barnett said that all the aliens he saw ware dead, but other supposed eyewithnesses claim that at least one of the beings was still alive. More soldiers arrived on the scene soon after, the wreckage having been spotted by by an aerial reconnaissance unit hunting for more debris, and the aircraft was apparently taken away soon afterwards.
Delighted by such a speedy solution to the mysterious UFO reports plaguing the nation, Roswell AFB commander William Blanchard autorised a press release announcing his base's capture of a 'flying disk'. The report first appered in the Roswell Daily Record on July 8th, and quickly spread via wire to numerous other newspapers around the world.
By then, though, senior officals were already attempting to squash the story. Blanchard's superior, General Roger Ramey of Fort Worth AFB, issued orders to cover up the saucer story, and while newspapers into a press conferance where he sheepsihly explained that the wreachage had been nothing more than a weather balloon, holding up varius pices of metal foil balsa wood as proof.
The official line today on Roswell is that there was a cover-up, but it was to protect nothing more alien than a military experiment. Project Mogul, the cause of the panic, was designed to test equipment that could detect Soviet nuclear detonations, the payload being carried aloft by a vary large balloon. However, this explanation has failed to satisfy investigators. Marcel repeatedly said that the debris he discovered was definitely not from any kind of balloon, secret or otherwise, as its properties - including extreme lightness, great strength and a reesistance to damage or even marking - did not correspond with any kind of material in use, then or noew. "One thing I was certain of," said Marcel, "being familiar with all out activities, was that it was not a weather balloon, nor an aircraft, nor a missila. It was something else."
Roswell is now something of a Mecca for ufologists, even though any possible evidence of the crash of 1947 has long since been swept away by the military. A film about the Roswell incident was made in 1994, and further new interest was opened by the 'Roswell autopsy' footage released in 1995. As if that wasen't enough, more controversy arose when a theory emerged that the Roswell crash (actually soe 75 miles from the town) was actually a phoney operation to divert attention from a real crash in the vincinity of the town of Corona, 30 miles away!
Whatever the truth behind the Roswell crash may be, it is certian that something did come down on the Foster Ranch, and that the governmant knows more than it is letting on. Marcel was a trained intelligence officer, routinely given a great deal of secret information as part of his regular duties, and would be unlikely to make such an elementary mistake as to aircraft wreckage. The fact that there was so much wreckage also weighs against the balloon theory - the balloon would have had to be completely shredded, but there was nothing in the area that could have accountde for this.

 

Majestic-12 Date:12.09.1947
In the light of the flap of 1947, following on from the Kenneth Arnold sighting and the potential dangers posed by UFOs to national security that President Harry S Truman signed an executive order authorising the creation of a top secret investigation group codenamed Majestic-12. Majestic (aka Majic, MJ-12) was headed by 12 high-ranking military officials and noted scientists, and the group supposedly had jurisdiction over all aspects of UFO investigation, though their primary objective was to keep the whole affair out of the public eye in order to prevent any kind of panic impending alien invasion.
Whether or not Majestic-12 actually existed is a matter of much debate - some ufologists, such as Stanton Friedman, insist that it does, while other think that the documents (including a copy of the executive order signed by Truman) relating to it are hoaxes or, worse, deliberate disinfomation created by the US governmant in order to discreadit UFO investigators.

 

Mantell and Venus Date:07.01.1948
In the late morning of January 7th 1948, the control tower at Gordman AFB received reports of a UFO flying west through its airspace, and not long after, the object was sighted by ground staff at the base, including the commander. In response, a flight of Air National Guard P-51 Mustangs was sent to intercept the UFO and attempt to identify it.
One of the Mustang pilots was Captain Thomas Mantell, who reported while climbing in pursuit that the UFO was 'metallic... tremendous in size'. As the patrol continued to climb, its pilots dropped back one by one, as the Mustangs did not have oxygen supplies. But Mantell continued with was lost, a search was initiated, concluding less than two hours later when his P51 was found smashed over a large area of ground.
The official explanation at the time was that the object Mantell had been chasing was the plant Venus, and he had lost consciousness when the air became to thin to breath. This explanation was widely ridiculed, as not only was Venus not visible in the sky at that time, but it also ignored the numerous UFO sightings that had led to the Mustang being despatched in the first place. With the country in the grip of flying saucer fever, the obvious conclusion was that Mantell had somehow been shot down by a UFO.
As with the Roswell incident, there was a military cover-up exposed, though not to everyone's satisfaction, decades later. Again as with Roswell, a balloon was blamed, a secret Navy Skyhook balloon being the culprit on this occasion. The Skyhooks were over 450 feet high and 100 feet wide, and were coated with aluminium to reflect the heat of the sun, so would account for Mantell's description. The post-war obsession with military secrecy and 'need-to-know' had resulted in a man's death, and the government's clumsy handing and feeble explanation of the tragedy would backfire in later years as more and more people took an interest in investigating UFOs - and their potential threat. Instead of discouraging people, the 'Venus explanation' resulted in a greater desire to uncover the truth about UFOs. 

 

Project Blue Book Date:February 1949
In responce to the thousands of UFO reports flooding the country, and also in the hope of persuading the American public that the country was not on the verge of invasion by beings from outher space, the Air Force set up an investigation group. At first codenamed Project Sign, the group began operations in Januray 1948, where one of its jobs was to investigate the death of Captain Thomas Mantell.
The officals at project Sign worked this way through the numerous UFO reports that had come in over the past year, and eventually came to the conlusion in February 1949 that¨, sice no agency on Earth could procedure craft capable of doing what the UFOs could, they must therefore be extraterrestrial in origin. The was not what Pentagon wanted to hear, and Sign was promply shut down, to be replaced by Project Grudge - the name reflecting the Air Force's attitude towards it.
Grudge differed from Sign in that for the most part it examined only UFO reports from military sources rather than civilian, and it also toed the official line by avoiding controversial statments about the nature of UFOs. Despite an official annoncement of its closure in December 1949, Project Grudge continued to work away quietly until 1952, when it became the better-known Project Blue Book.

 

The first picture Date:11.05.1950
A farming couple, Mr. and Mrs. Trent (Mrs. Trent apparently having no name of her own on record) of McMinneville, Oregon, took some of the earliest - and still most intriguing - photos of a UFO. According to their story, Mrs. Trent spotted a silent object heading towards their farm on the evening of May 11th. She ran into the house to get Mr. Trent and a camera, and managed to take two pictures of the UFO before it disappeared.
The pictures showed a flattened saucer shape with a raised dorsal bulge at its center, metallic in appearance. In one shot the UFO was almost side-on to the camera, and in the other it was slightly angled, showing its upper surfaces.
To date, nobody has been able to show that the Trent pictures are fakes, even after subjecting the pictures to computer analysis and image enhancement, which concluded that the UFO was at least 70 feet across, ruling out any 'hubcap hoaxes'. The Trent also did not profit from the pictures, so this was evidently not a motive for fakery. However, it has been noted that the pictures appear to have been taken in the morning, rather than the evening as the Trent claimed. Despite this, the pictures are still as interesting now as they were nearly 50 years ago.

 

Agent Cooper Date:1951
Although he would later achieve fame/notoriety by being the first NASA astronaut to go on record stating that he had seen UFOs while involved in the space program, Major Gordon Copper first saw UFOs while serving as a pilot in West Germany. Over the course of two days, Cooper, flying an F-86 Sabre, saw numerous metallic disc-shaped UFOs flying at high altitude and easily able to outmaneuver and outpace any of the aircraft sent after them.
Once in the US space program, Cooper was one of the original 'Mercury Seven', the first American astronauts, and he was also the last astronaut to date to make a solo trip into orbit. It was on this last flight, on May 15th 1963, that he saw another UFO.
Copper described the UFO as a greenish, glowing object, which was quickly approaching his Mercury capsule. The UFO was also detected by radar from an Australian tracking station. However, when Cooper landed, he was forbidden to answer any questions relating to his sighting.
Some years later, testifying before the United Nations, Cooper told them, "I believe that these extraterrestrial vehicles and their crews are visiting this planet from other planets... Most astronauts were reluctant to discuss UFOs." He also gave a taped interview to one J L Ferrando, in which he started, "for many years I have lived with a secret, in a secrecy imposed on all specialists in astronautics. I can now reveal that every day, in the USA, our radar instruments capture objects of form and composition unknown to us. And there are thousands of witness reports and a quantity of documents to prove this, but nobody wants to make them public. Why? Because authority is afraid that people may think of God knows what kind of horrible invaders. So the password still is: We have to avoid panic by all means."
Copper is by no means the only astronaut to have come forward and state that he has encountered a UFO, but he is certainly the most outspoken.

 

 

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