3 THE 1940’S
The forties are marked by a global war, the development and use of nuclear weapons, and a post war
explosion of scientific and technological advancements. The backdrop was the rapid drop on temperature between one time allies and the United States. Post-war the reality that the Soviet Union was as large and potentially dangerous an adversary as the United States caused tension, anxiety, and fear. The warmth of comradeship when fighting a common foe was now in the deep freeze as a new era called The Cold War began.
On the home front of the United States the people were adjusting to brand new changes. Advancements made by women in the work place, people of color, and similar societal strictures viewed as flexible in war time were now snapping back into their earlier, and often rigid, shape. The guiding need post war was normalcy.
So everyone set about putting things back in place the way they were: Mother and children in the home and Father off to work. One area that was not going back into place was the areas where new ideas, scientific discoveries and technological innovations generated in the war effort on both sides might now be put to work in a challenging future.
The late forties saw the top-secret projects of several countries striving to make planes fly higher, faster, and with fewer fueling stops. The largest groups of the Nazi scientists had been divided up between the Americans, the Russians, and the British. In some cases, such as the flights by Chuck Yeager some critical flight records were broken in top secret and no one knew it for decades.
The creative energies unleashed by war were being pursued at top speed and with the same willingness to achieve what had seemed impossible in a dozen scientific fields.
In the spring of 1947 people all around the country were reporting seeing odd and strange objects buzzing past in the skies. They were fast moving, shiny and often performed a-typical maneuvers. They were seen mostly during the day with some night time reports. Many were reported by police, military personnel, business people, civic leaders, and normal people who would be, for any other purpose, termed “reliable” and “reputable.” Some of those early descriptions were of shiny objects, lights, “upside down washtubs”, and “discs.”
So when the Roswell story first broke and said one of the flying discs had been captured they were referring to these other accounts. Finally! Because the truth was no one knew to whom those flying craft belonged and that according to records included the military and the FBI.
On June 22, 1947 Kenneth Arnold joined in an air search for a downed plane and in the process saw something very unusual. Nine shining objects flowing each other like a “string of pearls” were zipping in and out of nearby mountaintops. The sun catching their shining surfaces drew the eye and then the speed raised eyebrows. Arnold attempted to describe the motion of the things through the air as being similar to a saucer – many would have said a rock - being skipped across the surface of water. When he finally landed for the day his description had morphed into “Flying Saucers” and the rest, as the saying goes, was history.
On July 6, 1947, another pilot (Army) would also recount at approximately 1:45 p.m. (1345) that he observed one disc shaped object 30-50 feet diameter traveling east. It was very bright in color. The pilot estimated it was moving at 210 mph. at an estimated altitude of 11,000 feet. This object seemed to accelerate to very high speed. Additionally, it appeared to fly a parallel course with the observer.
This pilot first observed this object as a “flash” low in his field of vision that caught his attention. Then he noticed a “disc” 1000 feet above the aircraft.
This case from the files of Project Blue Book’s predecessor, Project Sign concerned Army Air Force pilot Major A.B. Browning as he was flying, with a crew, a B-25 toward Kansas City, Kansas. They observed a silvery, circular object some 30-50 feet in diameter first at a little lower altitude than their own craft. The unknown object then shot off at a high speed going to the east at an estimated 11,000 feet and approximately 210 mph speed.
The wording on the file’s cover sheet and the incident report are a little misleading. This is not unusual for these records as there is often evidence of missing information, information that does not sync with the official explanation or incorrect (or incomplete) information. The cover sheet for this file, for example, reads the date of the episode as “July 16, 1947” well past the explosion of events in and around the nation’s birthday. Inside, however, all papers reflect a July 6, 1947 date for the events. Since many times the only portions of these files allowed to be viewed were these cover sheets this is a significant issue. The cover sheet was a precis of the entire case giving date, time, location, summary of witness statements and possible or probable explanations. Since military and Air Force regulations clamped down access to the files and forbid sharing of case details except for those the Air Force had explained, the result was that tabulations, statistical studies, and various other projects based on studying these cases were in slanted, and thus, the results should be questioned.
On July 7th a news release from the Army Air Field at Roswell appeared. One of the mysterious flying “discs” had apparently been collected.
Agencies all across the government were salivating. FBI archival records of a teletype of July 8, 1947 to the Dallas-Ft. Worth area make that clear. The 8th Army Air Force has the “disc” which as described as “hexagonal in shape”, suspended by balloon cables, 20 feet in diameter…”object found resembles a high altitude weather balloon with a radar reflector.” Elsewhere in the missive “But that telephone conversation between their office and Wright Field had not [text is marked out] borne out this belief.”
So, in essence the FBI is saying that after a phone conversation to the people at Wright Air Field, the idea of the object being a high altitude weather balloon had not supported this belief. Bad phrasing or something more? Wright Air Base was home of the Air Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC) under the AMC wing of the Army Air Force. Wright will be better known soon as Wright-Patterson and the home offices of those in charge of the future Project Blue Book.
The short lived excitement was dead within 48 hours. The saucer theory was “emptied” as one wit termed it on July 8 when the big brass at Ft. Worth, where part of the debris from Roswell had been sent, announced the only thing found was a mundane weather balloon.
With this ending everyone laughed, closed their newspapers, and shook their heads. What many, many newspapers, and many successive works, ignore is the host of other stories reported.
There was a story about one of the leading “rocket experts” and his team who saw a “saucer.” Leading naval scientists involved in rocket experiments in the New Mexico desert witnessed in April, in May and then in June, an object over their test site. Also, of note was that one of those man will be called upon decades later to represent the Air Force’s explanation of Roswell as part of “Project Mogul.” He was in New Mexico at White Sands in 1949 and reported seeing something “non-balloon.”
That event – with its diverse and expert witnesses - from the spring was picked it up and newspapers across the county carried it (one of many such articles was “Saucer’ Seen by Rocket Expert: Flight over Dessert Described” in The Evening Star out of Washington D.C.).
The U.S. Navy attempted to explain it away as “revolutionary” aircraft with diameters of 105 (+/-), jet nozzles around the edges, ten feet in thickness, able to land a speeds as low as 35 mph and attaining speeds of 200-600 mph.
Was this an early experimental aircraft? Witnesses claimed the object seen was elliptical, white, 100 feet long or 105 feet in diameter, 300,000 feet (57 miles) altitude, 5-7 miles a second, and able to make very sharp and fast turns.
Whatever happened at Roswell aside, there was a lot going on in the skies over the United States in those early years and a lot of it was a mystery to even those charged with dominating and guarding the skies overhead. The response to the event at Roswell was a response to a host of unknowns from across the nation. They gave birth to a separate arm of the military in the United States Air Force, the rise of several federal level intelligence agencies, and to much more.
