What happened
In the early hours of 17 July 1957 an RB-47H electronic reconnaissance jet, carrying six officers and gear for detecting enemy radar transmissions, was heading home from a training mission over the Gulf of Mexico. Near Gulfport, Mississippi, monitor Frank McClure picked up a signal like a ground S-band radar at about 2,800 MHz, but it moved right around the aircraft. Over Mississippi the pilots saw an intense white light flash across their path. Over Texas, the crew saw a huge light, ground radar at Duncanville reported a target near them, and the ECM gear held the same bearing. Several times all three disappeared and reappeared together. Maj. Lewis Chase was cleared to chase it; it stopped, dropped and vanished as the jet closed, then reappeared. The object stayed with them for more than an hour and some 600 to 700 miles, into Oklahoma. A University of Colorado investigator later rated it unexplained.
The original account
The crew of a B-47 aircraft described an encounter with a large ball of light which was also displayed for a sustained time for both airborne radar monitoring receivers and on ground radar units. ... The phenomenon remains unidentified.
Condon Report (Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects, 1969), Case 5 abstract, a US Air Force-funded study (public domain)
The official explanation
Project Blue Book attributed the Dallas–Fort Worth part to an airliner. The Condon Committee's radar analyst Gordon Thayer explored a combined radio-optical mirage of a distant aircraft below a thin inversion layer, anomalous propagation echoes on ground radar, and a ground light for the final red glow, while admitting this was possible but not highly probable. Skeptic Philip Klass argued the signals came from a ground radar site and the lights were a meteor, the star Vega and airliners.
The anomalous case
This is one of the rare cases where three physically different channels agreed: the crew's eyes, ground radar and the aircraft's own passive electronic intelligence receivers, which detect emissions rather than echoes. The crew, interviewed by both Condon investigators and physicist James McDonald, described simultaneous appearances and disappearances on all three, and a signal source that circled the jet at 500 mph near Gulfport, something no ground radar could do. Thayer, the Condon Committee's own radar expert, wrote that there were many unexplained aspects and that his mirage solution did not seem highly probable; the Condon case summary concluded the phenomenon remained unidentified. McDonald interviewed all six crewmen and called the Condon treatment inadequate, noting it omitted the Gulfport episode and the hour-long duration. Blue Book case file 10073 is held at the National Archives.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Documents
- Condon Report, Case 5: B-47 Crew, Radar/Visual Sighting report, files.ncas.org
- Project BLUE BOOK records (National Archives, microfilm T-1206) official, archives.gov
Sources
- Condon Report (1969), Case 5: B-47 Crew, Radar/Visual Sighting National Capital Area Skeptics (online edition of the Condon Report)
- Condon Report (1969), Section III Chapter 5: Optical and Radar Analyses of Field Cases (Gordon D. Thayer) National Capital Area Skeptics (online edition of the Condon Report)
- The RB-47 radar visual multiple witnesses case, July 17, 1957 (includes James E. McDonald's 1969 AAAS case study) Patrick Gross, UFOs at close sight
Witness reports elsewhere
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