Decade
UAP history in the 1950s: 15 entries in date order, each with public sources. By track: Military (5), Government (4), Sightings (3), Media (2), Experiencers (1).
Retired Marine Maj. Donald Keyhoe argued in True magazine's January 1950 issue that flying saucers were interplanetary craft and disputed Air Force explanations. Radio and press amplified the claim, and Keyhoe expanded it into a 1950 book of the same name.
Paul Trent took two photos of a disc-shaped object his wife Evelyn saw over their farm near McMinnville; a local paper and then Life ran them. A Condon study analyst found them consistent with a real distant object but could not rule out fabrication; skeptics call them a hoax.
Texas Tech professors reported formations of soft glowing lights over Lubbock, and student Carl Hart Jr. photographed a formation days later. Blue Book's Edward Ruppelt investigated; birds reflecting new streetlights was the main lead, but he reached no firm conclusion on the photos.
The Air Force reorganized its UFO investigations as Project Blue Book. By the time it closed in 1969, the Air Force programs had logged 12,618 reports, 701 of them still listed as unidentified.
On two weekends in July 1952, radar at Washington National Airport and Andrews AFB tracked unexplained targets, some matched by pilot sightings, and jets were sent to intercept. The Air Force publicly suggested temperature inversions as a likely cause.
Maj. Gen. John Samford, Air Force Director of Intelligence, held a Pentagon press conference on the Washington sightings. He said the reports showed no threat to the U.S., that temperature inversions might explain the radar returns, and that the objects were not U.S. tests.
A CIA-convened panel of scientists chaired by physicist H. P. Robertson reviewed UFO reports and found no direct threat to national security. It recommended training and public education to strip the subject of its special status.
An F-89C interceptor flown by 1st Lt. Felix Moncla Jr. with radar operator 2nd Lt. Robert Wilson vanished over Lake Superior after being vectored toward an unknown radar target. The Air Force said the target was an off-course Canadian C-47; no wreckage or crew were found.
Blue Book Special Report No. 14, a statistical analysis of about 3,200 reports through 1952 carried out with Battelle Memorial Institute, judged it highly improbable that the unidentified cases reflected technology beyond known science. The Air Force made it public in October 1955.
Edward Ruppelt, former head of the Air Force's Project Blue Book, published an inside account of its UFO investigations with Doubleday. In the book he wrote that he created the term 'UFO' to replace 'flying saucers'.
Over the night of Aug. 13-14, 1956, USAF ground radars at RAF Bentwaters and Lakenheath tracked fast-moving targets, some with visual reports, and an RAF Venom night fighter was sent up and reported a radar lock. The Condon study rated a genuine UFO 'fairly high' in probability.
The crew of a USAF RB-47H testing electronic countermeasures gear reported a light and a radar-emitting source that followed them from Mississippi into Oklahoma, with ground radar also reporting a target. The Condon study left it unidentified; skeptics later proposed an airliner.
Over about two hours, drivers near Levelland reported a large glowing object and said their engines and headlights failed as it passed. The Air Force attributed the reports to ball lightning; physicist James McDonald later told Congress no storms were near that night.
Civilian photographer Almiro Barauna photographed an object over Trindade Island from the Brazilian Navy ship Almirante Saldanha, and Rio papers ran the photos in February 1958. A U.S. Naval Attache report and later Air Force correspondence judged the photos a hoax.
Anglican missionary William Gill and about three dozen people at the Boianai mission reported a large lit object with human-like figures on top over two evenings; Gill said the figures waved back. An RAAF officer who interviewed Gill months later suggested planets seen through moving cloud.
