A Spy Plane, A UFO, and Some Near Misses: The RB-47h Incident (Kansas, Texas, Oklahoma)

 1957, July 17, Forbes AFB, Topeka, Kansas.

“A Spy-Plane, A UFO, and Some Near Misses: The RB-47h Incident.”

In a year that would turn out to be truly amazing in regards the unidentified, this case and those surrounding it rank as a truly important and classic case. Better known as the “RB-47h Case” this is very impressive case. Forbes was home to a special plane loaded with some new and hush-hush electrical counter-measures equipment. 

Flying out of Forbes AFB that day the task was simple. It was a standard weapons and systems proficiency assignment that included the new counter-measures. They would fly south over Oklahoma, cross into the Dallas-Ft. Worth area in Texas, and then head east toward Louisiana (toward Jackson and Meridian in Mississippi to be precise) and then south to Gulfport. 

Finally, they would go out into the gulf to practice some predetermined weapons maneuvers to add to the previous testing of both ground equipment and the onboard gear.

Mission completed, the plane simply reversed its course. That was when things became … a little interesting. The craft (the RB-47h) was crewed by pilot Lewis D. Chase; co-pilot James H. McCoid; navigator Thomas H. Hanley; #2 Monitor Operator, Frank B. McClure; #3 Monitor Operator, Walter A. Tuchscherer; #1 Monitor Operator, John Provenzano.

Coming home, the first contact was equipment based over the region of Gulfport, Mississippi. This was followed by a visual sighting by the crew of RB-47h over western Louisiana (southeast of Jackson, Mississippi). At about 5:10 am, the aircraft commander observed a very bright white light tinted by blue. It was at an 11 o’clock position and crossed right in front of the plane at about the 2:30 o’clock position. At 1039z the aircraft commander sighted a huge light estimated 5000 ft. below the aircraft at about the 3 o’ clock position. The crew clearly recalled a light emanating from its top portion. These air reports were being verified by the ground units.

Later experts would describe the actions of this “light” as traveling faster than an airplane, nothing that it “emitted, and reflected, 2800 megahertz radio waves…it displayed behavior indicative of intelligent control.” (Craig, pg. 143).

At about 5:40 a.m. the #2 Monitor Operator reported two signals (i.e., two objects) at 40 and 70 degrees. At this time, the aircraft commander and co-pilot saw two objects with red color. There was no discernable shape to the red glow. At the time they were approaching the Dallas area and received approval to ignore their flight plan and pursue the mystery objects. Sources diverge as to the source of the approval. One indicates it was the FAA (then called the CAA) and another that it was the military authority who granted this pursuit action. One crew member recalled seeing the lights moving abruptly starboard to port side and then back; in other words the lights were actively moving. The ground sensing equipment was with several designated radar stations involved in the exercise with RB-47h. Several of these had tracked the objects. One, code named UTAH, had not been on or its settings had not been calibrated because it did not track the objects until further into the incident. When they came online it was after the objects had turned northward and reappeared visually as well on the radar screens. 

The “unknown” turned north between Ft. Worth and Dallas.  It was while in that general area that chief pilot Chase received permission to go after it from an authority (CAA or military). One source said they had “told all jets to get out of the way.”

 

The plane went toward Mineral Wells (west of Ft. Worth) before making a turn back toward the Ft. Worth-Dallas air corridor.  At about 5:42 a.m. the crew reported an object ten nautical miles northwest of Ft. Worth.  ADC’s “UTAH” station confirmed it on their ground scopes.  One of the Monitors on the RB-47h regained the object on their scope at 5:58 a.m. when it was some 25 nautical miles northwest of Ft. Worth. It was at again at a 2 o’clock position relative to the RB-47h.

At this time, the crew was beginning to fear they would run low on fuel and not make it back to their home base in northern Kansas.  So at 6:20 a.m. they took up a heading for home station at Forbes. Heading into southern Oklahoma, at 20,000 ft., they once more tracked an object (the same or similar).  Some unofficial reports indicate that the object may have been seen by people on the ground near both the Ardmore and Oklahoma City area. Just as the RB-47h was nearing Oklahoma City the object was permanently lost.  The plane continued on to Topeka, was debriefed, audio wire recordings and images from the equipment and the interviews was collected and the crew believed all reports had been filed by their superiors. 

Well, at least that was way it was supposed to happen.

That same early morning just fifty miles east of El Paso, over an area called the Salt Flats, in the far southwest corner of Texas, an American Airlines commercial plane had a near collision with a “mysterious unidentified object.” The incident made headlines – complicating things for many agencies involved in answering the mystery.

It was only fast action that kept AA Flight # 655 from having a more serious encounter than it did that morning of July 17, 1957. I was about 4:00 a.m. when Captain T. ‘Ed’ Bachner, a 15 year pilot veteran, saw a “green light” ahead. The plane was a DC-7 air coach with 85 souls (80 passengers and 5 crew). Presuming the light was the left wing running light of another aircraft while flying at 14,000 ft., he veered right. At the same time, he sent the plane into a sharp 400-500 drop. Some passengers injured, two of them seriously enough to require an unscheduled stop at the El Paso airport.  AA Flight 655 was heading west on a flight from, newspaper accounts vary, from either New York to Los Angeles from Dallas to Los Angles. His position of 50 miles east from El Paso was tracked by the beacon towers at Salt Flats and the Waco Tower.

The year would see many problems for commercial flights with numerous crashes making headlines.  That was one reason why the mysterious near-misses caught people’s attention. Add in the mysterious unknown craft angle and there was a much stronger interest. Were UFO’s causing these near collisions? Commercial pilots, crews and passengers had been among some of the earliest, and best, cases reported about unidentified flying objects. The pilots were great witnesses – smart, experienced, calm under pressure.  When the explanation that the “discs” were secret test projects one disgruntled pilot asked a still unanswered question: “why fly in commercial air space and endanger the public?”

The next week (July 22, 1957) near Amarillo in the Texas panhandle a Trans World Airlines Flight #21 had a similar encounter. It was about 10 p.m. when a Captain Schamel of TWA was flying at 18,000 ft. when, in the darkness ahead he saw, unexpectedly, what looked like “running lights.” Again, an emergency dive by an experienced pilot, created chaos in the cabin, and a few minor injuries,  but a collision was averted.

Then on the night of July 29 and early morning of July 30 in Ohio the pilots of Capital Airlines # 841 observed an object suddenly appear out of the north and passed their path some 40-50 miles out of Akron. The aircraft gave chase and the object sped up ahead of it and then disappeared northwest over the horizon of Akron itself. Both pilots were very sure the object was not a star and not jet. They described this object as large, yellow-white light, no sound, very fast, light would go brilliant then dim and then brighten once more in a cycle. It hovered at one point over the area of Cleveland and then moved northwest at a 20 degree angle.  The pilots had it view for about eight minutes.

Further north on July 30, an object was seen east of Rockford, Michigan about midnight.  It was described as three walnut sized, round, objects changing colors from red, green, and to yellow. There were three in the west and one object in the northeast. When they moved they left a small red tinged “exhaust.” The objects remained stationary and moved in bobby motion. They remained in place in the sky for some thirty minutes. The conclusion of the Air Force? The witnesses had seen the “aurora borealis” then “visible in the United States.”

This case, involving as it did a virtual “spy-plane” with electronic counter-measure equipment and a specialized crew did not even reach Project Blue Book until November of 1957. The file was classed “Secret” according to documents because of that special aspect to the equipment. To further muddy the waters the report was dated for September and as a result all weather reports and other data accessed to investigate this case were invalid.  September and as a result all weather reports and other data accessed to investigate this case were invalid. 

The CAA handed the Air Force a solution when they sent a letter to Project Blue Book saying they had proven the Aircraft (AA Flight 655) had encountered another aircraft (AA Flight 966). The TWA flight on July 22 had, it was “assumed” encountered a U.S.A.F. KC-97 aircraft “which was known to be operating in the area at the time of the incident.” “The true identify,” wrote A.L. Coulter and Ray Keeley, Director, Office of Flight Operations and Airworthiness for the Department of Commerce, Civil Aeronautics Division in a November 1957 letter to ATIC at Wright-Patterson AFB, “of this aircraft was never determined, however…”   An incident endangering civilian lives in commercial airspace was solved by an “assumption.”

The reason for this delay may have been the highly classified nature of the equipment. Just the month before the Russian launching Sputnik I there may have been concerns about leaking information. It could also have been that the incident was one big puzzle and those in “intelligence” had no clue what had happened or what had been seen by the crew over some 700 nautical miles.

In 1971, Dr. James McDonald, a rare scientific proponent of the need for serious investigations into such things, led an academic sub-committee report on this case. He and his committee noted it had been studied by the Condon Report. 

In McDonald’s group they had uncovered that (a) the case was misfiled due to the wrong date being assigned to the case. It was labeled as 18 September 1957 (Craig, pg. 134) and not 17 July 1957 ;(b) as a result of that error all the radar and weather reports analyzed by Condon’s team had used the incorrect event date thus invalidating all of their conclusions; (3) the audio interview made of the crew on landing at Forbes, the reports, and a lot of other materials were “misplaced.”

McDonald, so often horribly ridiculed and attacked by his peers and professional debunkers such as Phillip Klass and Dr. Donald H. Menzel, arranged for new interviews with the crew to replace the “lost” (or simply never generated reports of the event), he saw that the dating was corrected in the record, and made sure the scientists who were members of the AIAA were heard. For more information see “UFO Encounter 1: Sample Case Selected by the UFO’s Sub-committee of the AIAA” Astronautics and Aeronautics (July 1971) and Scientific Studies of Objects Unidentified Flying Objects (Boston 1969). 

Despite the odd conclusion found in Project Blue Book, namely agreeing with the CAA statement that the incident was caused by a near collision with an American Airlines Flight #655, later research pointed out the impossibility of that given their relative locations.  Also, the alleged AA Flight #966 was reportedly grounded at the time. So the whole solution becomes a bit sticky the closer it is examined.

Debunkers Klass and Menzel, among others, would assert “ball lightening” but when the University of Colorado committee heard the report and talked with the crew all but the diehard skeptics lost interest in that as a viable cause.

Charges of problems with the electronic countermeasure equipment would be made, as they often were, on any radar based sightings. The problem was the objects were seen by both human eye and electronic equipment.  Later, the Wing Reconnaissance Director had no question that the electronic signal they had picked up had come from the mystery object.

An excellent summary of the importance of this event is found on NICAP’s 1957 Chronology page: “1. The RB-47 case is the first known case of a UFO transmitting its own radar beam (several other cases are now known but the RB-47 was the first to become public).  Not only was the UFO tracked by an air defense radar on the ground near Dallas and by the RB-47 spy plane's airborne radar, but the UFO itself was sending out radar signals.  It is the only known radar-visual-ELINT case on record (a few radar-ELINT cases with no visual sightings, and a few visual-ELINT cases, with no radar tracks, are known too); 2.  The UFO's radar signals were picked up on special highly classified Electronic Intelligence (ELINT pronounced "EL-int") equipment aboard the RB-47. 

The RB-47 normally flew missions on the periphery of the Soviet bloc, using its spy gear to locate enemy radars.  In this case, on July 17, 1957, the RB-47 flew out of Forbes AFB, Kansas, on a training mission out over the Gulf of Mexico.  On its return leg, the UFO was detected on the spy plane's ELINT gear.”

What was scheduled to be a run-of-the-mill practice mission that day in July 1957 became much more. Although authorities attempted to hide the information, lose the evidence, and divert attention the truth did emerge.  The shell game aspect, however, leaves the possibility of other evidence lost, misplaced, and intentionally obfuscated in those years – and perhaps – still today.

Sources: Include, NICAP http://www.nicap.org/reports/rb47_update_sparks.htm’; Roy Craig, UFO’s An Insider’s View of the Official Quest for Evidence (UNT, 1995); “Airliner Misses Mystery Craft in Darkness” (The Daily News-Telegram, Sulphur Springs, TX (July 17, 1957); Project Blue Book files; “UFO Encounter 1: Sample Case Selected by the UFO’s Sub-committee of the AIAA”, Astronautics and Aeronautics (July 1971) and Scientific Studies of Objects Unidentified Flying Objects (Boston 1969). 

[From “Kansas Encounters”, Marilyn A. Hudson, 2022]