What happened
George Gorman, a 25-year-old World War II fighter veteran flying with the North Dakota Air National Guard, stayed aloft over Fargo after his flight landed, to log some night time in his F-51 Mustang. Around 9 pm he saw a small blinking light pass him. The tower said only a Piper Cub was up, and Gorman could see the Cub clearly. He chased the light. For nearly half an hour he described it climbing, turning inside him and twice coming at him head-on, forcing him to dive away, before it shot up and out of sight. He said it was a sharp-edged ball of light six to eight inches across that stopped blinking when it sped up. The Cub's crew and the tower controller saw a light but not all the manoeuvres. Project Sign investigators arrived within hours and found Gorman's fighter more radioactive than a grounded plane. Gorman later gave a sworn statement that the object was governed by thought.
The official explanation
The Air Weather Service found that a lighted balloon had been released from Fargo at 8:50 pm and would have been in the right place at 9:00. Investigators concluded that the object's apparent dives and climbs were an illusion created by Gorman's own manoeuvres at night with no reference points, and that the light he followed south of Fargo was probably Jupiter. The higher radiation reading was explained by cosmic-ray exposure at altitude. Ruppelt reported that a Navy pilot later re-enacted a similar dogfight with a lighted balloon. Historian Jerome Clark judged this solution plausible.
The anomalous case
Gorman was a combat-trained fighter pilot, sober and in clear weather, and he gave a detailed sworn account. He said the light out-turned and out-climbed his Mustang, followed natural curved paths, accelerated rapidly but not instantly, and pulled turns he believed few pilots could survive. Others on the ground and in the Cub saw a fast-moving light, and the tower controller watched it through binoculars without seeing any form. Ruppelt wrote that Project Sign investigators initially ruled out aircraft and weather balloons, ran a Geiger counter over the fighter and found it more radioactive than a comparison plane, and that a meeting after their return concluded weird things were going on. Retired Marine Major Donald Keyhoe and physicist James McDonald both continued to regard it as unexplained. The balloon was launched twenty minutes before the chase began; its later track was inferred, not observed.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Documents
- Project BLUE BOOK records (National Archives, microfilm T-1206) official, archives.gov
Sources
- Gorman dogfight Wikipedia
- The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects (Edward J. Ruppelt, 1956) Project Gutenberg
Witness reports elsewhere
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