November 7, 1951

November 7, 1951--Lake Superior. Steamship Captain and crew watched elongated orange object with six glowing “portholes” speed towards Ontario. [XII]1

Section XII does not give us much more information than the summary.2 It states:

It was evening

It exhibited horizontal flight

It was a bright orange

It was oval shaped

It traveled at high speed

The “portholes” were in two rows of three each on the underside of the UFO.

There is no source for any of this information and I can only assume it came from a newspaper clipping of some kind.

Other sources

There are no cases that match this in the Blue Book archives. The only other possible source that contains information from that time period are the news papers. I could not find any report of this in the newspaper archive and Loren Gross does not mention the case in his UFO history either. Most of the on-line databases reference “The UFO Evidence”. Therefore, the trail ends with what was written there. 

Analysis

We have no real data to go with here. There is no time. There is no exact location for the observer since “Lake Superior” is a rather large lake. We don’t even know the name of the steamship! Additionally the direction of travel was listed as “Ontario”. There is no city of “Ontario” in Canada. There is only a province. That province borders the entire northern and eastern shore of Lake Superior. With such meager data, all we can say is that the event happened in twilight or darkness (Sunset was around 5 PM local time) and the object was traveling anywhere towards the west east depending on the location of the “steamship”. 

With the information we do have, I can only compare this with known IFO cases that described a rapidly moving object that had portholes. Many turn out to be meteor fireballs or satellite re-entries. This is before the space age, so it was not a re-entry. Therefore, one has to consider the possibility that it was a meteor. I searched the newspaper archives for reports of bright meteors but there wasn’t any for the region. That is not surprising. Lake Superior is very large and the coastal area was sparsely populated. A bright meteor could have happened and be only seen by a small group of people. Back in SUNlite 9-6, I demonstrated that 60-70% of American Meteor Society’s on-line database for fireball report contained only one report! Therefore, it is not surprising that a fireball meteor were not reported in the news media or astronomical journals from such a remote location. 

Conclusion

The description of the object does appear to match that of a meteor. It behaved like a meteor and there is no good argument that states it was no a meteor. This is not “Best evidence” for UFOs and should be eliminated from the list. 

Quelle: SUNlite 6/2019