Indiana, Illinois, Ohio July 12, 1952
The source of the information is from the Blue Book files. There are 6 entries in the Weinstein catalog that cover this sighting. Since the event crossed two time zones and daylight savings time was in effect in some locations and not others, the times being off an hour can be explained.
Source material
Loren Gross’ history has a casual mention of the sighting but gives no specifics.2 The newspaper archive contains many Illinois newspaper articles describing the object. Two are presented below.
While the newspaper stories have sightings from various locations, the Blue Book files contain the most information.5,6 They placed most of these sightings in one case file labeled Illinois-Indiana with the exception of the Dayton sighting, which had its own case file. In addition to the pilots, there were many ground based observers, who saw the same event. This table describes those obser- vations listed by Weinstein.
Several sketches exist in the file from ground observers. They indicate a straight or curved path. Their observations are consistent with those of the pilots and look like sketches of a meteor.
Analysis
The times all seem to revolve around 0205Z (2005 CST or 2105 CDT/EST) and they all stated the object was moving in a westerly direction. This indicates all the observers saw the same object and it was at a significant altitude above them. These are the char- acteristics of a bright fireball meteor. It probably was very bright since it was seen only 30 minutes after sunset (2026CDT/1926 CST).
Further research reveals the scientific literature mentioning this meteor in a scientific paper about anomalous sounds and elec- tro-magnetic effects produced by fireball meteors.7
Conclusion
There is little doubt that this was a bright fireball. There is no reason to include these six sightings on the Weinstein list and they should be removed.
Quelle: SUNlite 4/2023