Project Blue Book case review: January - June 1965

This is the latest edition of the Project Blue Book case review covering January through June 1965 Like the previous evaluations, I tried to examine each case to see if the conclusion had merit. I added comments to help clarify the explanation or if I felt it was not correct or adequate.

Summary

The cases this period continue to include many reports from teens and children. One report came from a nine-year old. Some of these reports are pretty good but most appear to be more imagination than objective observations. Of course, one can say the same for some of the reports/letters written by adults. 

Echo and Echo 2 continued to be a major source of UFO reports. I identified 35 cases that were, or possibly were, one of those two satellites (about 15%). Other satellites contributed to the mix of reports. Hynek even mentioned that there were an ever increasing number of bright satellites that could produce UFO reports, in one of his letters. Pegasus 1, Cosmos 44, Explorer 19, and a Centaur Rocket body seemed to be the biggest culprits base on my examination of the reports. 

The most puzzling cases this period involved teens. The Newport News sighting, on January 30, gave indications that it might be a ship/boat on the river, which was what Blue Book classified it as. However, the witnesses indicated it was initially well above the horizon and there was no river traffic. I felt this could have been an aircraft sighting, with the aircraft leaving the Norfolk area and heading NW. As it got close to the horizon, it appeared to be above the trees lining the river. The Waverly, Ohio case on March 20th involved two teenage girls, who had a sighting in the early AM during a sleepover. Some of their description may have involved overactive imaginations. It was hard to say but the witnesses described an object exploding in the sky. There was no evidence of debris landing in the area, the duration given ruled out a meteor and there were no re-entries that could account for the sighting. One has to assume that the witnesses perceived it as an explosion but it could have been something else like an increase in brightness of a light followed by it fading out. I left this one in the psychological category since the witness’ descriptions appeared to be distorted to the point an evaluation was not possible. 

There were also several “sighting collections” in the file. These are cases where multiple sightings are mentioned but specifics about each sighting is often limited. Most notable was a series of sighting in Alaska between January 24th and 28th. Looking at the file, the sightings were not very descriptive in some cases, which made evaluation difficult. Radar contact was mentioned but the details about the radar contact was very limited. Many sounded like astronomical and satellite observations. One could have been a balloon. Blue Book even classified one as a searchlight but it is not clear which one. They should have separated the sightings into individual reports to make them easier to evaluate. Part of the fault lay with the reporting command, which lumped all the information together in one message. It is hard to properly evaluate a sighting with just a one or two sentence description. 

Next issue, I will be only evaluating the months of July and August of 1966. There are roughly 400 cases for those two months and it should take some time to sift through that collection. 

Quelle: SUNlite 2/2022