1952.07.14
20.12
On the evening of 14 July 1952, [a PanAm DC-4] was flying from New York to Miami with ten passengers and a crew of three, including Captain Nash and pilot Fortenberry. They were at about 2,500 metres over Chesapeake Bay, approaching Norfolk (Virginia)…
(The UFO Mystery Solved, Campbell)
It was a clear night with unlimited visibility, and the lights of Newport News could be seen from the port window. With the senior captain temporarily out of the cockpit, Second Officer William B Nash (also a captain) was at the controls and Third Officer William Fortenberry was the co-pilot.
Shortly after eight pm (EST), both men spotted a reddish glow off in the distance, apparently east of Newport News. As the glow resolved itself into six bright points, it became obvious that the “objects” were approaching at a very high rate of speed. Within seconds, the objects could be clearly recognised as reddish, glowing discs as they streaked under the airliner.
(The UFO Evidence, Hall)
(UFOs and the Limits of Science, Story)
They… saw that the light was actually a procession of six red-orange lights shooting forward like a stream of red tracer bullets. They were sharply defined large discs, arranged in a narrow echelon formation.
(The UFO Mystery Solved, Campbell)
Then, abruptly, the entire group flipped on edge, made a sharp-angled turn, and reversed direction. As this was happening, the procession of six discs was joined by two more identical objects, coming from under the plane, and all eight blinked out, back on again, and then off for good, while heading westward, north of Newport News; the whole observation lasting only about fifteen seconds.
Captain Nash described the objects as definitely disc-shaped: “Their shape was clearly outlined and evidently circular,” he stated. “The edges were well defined, not phosphorescent or fuzzy in the least.” The maneuver was described by Nash as follows:
“They flipped on edge, the sides to the left of us going up and the glowing surfaces facing right. Though the bottom surfaces did not become clearly visible, we had the impression that they were unlighted. The exposed edges, also unlighted, appeared to be about fifteen feet thick, and the top surface, at least, seemed flat. In shape and proportion they were much like coins.
While all were in the edgewise position, the last five slid over and passed the leader so that the echelon was now tail-foremost, so to speak, the top or last craft now being nearest to our position. Then, without any arc or swerve at all, they all flipped back together to the flat attitude and darted off in a direction that formed a sharp angle with their first course, holding their new formation…
Immediately after these six lined away, two more objects just like them darted out from behind and under our airplane at the same altitude as the others.”
The following morning, in Miami, the two pilots were questioned by Air Force Intelligence; again, the words of Captain Nash:
“At 7.00 am, the morning after the sighting, we were telephoned by the Air Force… to come for questioning. There were five men, one in uniform; the others showed us ID cards and badges of Special Investigations, USAF. In separate rooms, we were questioned for one hour and 45 minutes – then about a half-hour together. We made sketches and drew the track of the objects on charts… The tracks matched… The accounts matched… All conversation (was) recorded on a stenotype machine.
They had a complete weather report… It coincided with our visual observations… our flight plan. The investigators also advised us that they already had seven other reports. One was from a lieutenant-commander and his wife… They described a formation of red discs traveling at high speed and making immediate direction changes without turn radius…
Regarding speed: we tried again to be very conservative in our computations. The objects first appeared about ten miles from Newport News… They traveled to within about a half-mile of our craft… changed direction, then crossed the western suburban edge of the town areas… out over a dark area at least ten miles beyond the lights, then angled up at about 45º…
We drew a line through the lighted area, measured the distance from our aircraft (and we knew our exact position both visually and by VAR navigation using an ILS needle) to the line through the lighted area. The distance was 25 miles. We had seen them cross this line twice, so we knew that they had traveled at least 50 miles… To get a time, we, seven times, separately, using our own panel stopwatch clocks, pushed the button, mentally went through the time, even to saying to ourselves again, ‘What the hell’s that?!’ Each time we came up amazingly close to twelve seconds. To be conservative, we increased it to fifteen seconds… 50 miles in fifteen seconds equals 12,000 miles per hour.”
(The UFO Evidence, Hall)
(UFOs and the Limits of Science, Story)
In his book The World of Flying Saucers astronomer Donald Menzel attempted to explain this case as light effects involving a combination of ground lights and clouds and/or temperature and humidity inversions in the air. As stated in his book:
“The densely populated coastal region near Newport News and Norfolk, with several airfields and military installations, included countless possible sources such as a searchlight, an illuminated advertising sign, (or) an air beacon. Stratified clouds or inversion layers of temperature and/or humidity could have multiplied such a light into a series of glowing disks.”
However, Menzel’s “explanation” is extremely weak, in my view, for the following main reason: a weather report for the time and vicinity of the sighting is given in Menzel’s own book as follows: “A third of the sky at 20,000 feet was covered with thin cirrus clouds, practically invisible; at lower altitudes the night was cloudless and sharply clear, there was no apparent haze, visibility was unlimited, and no temperature inversion existed.”
To counter the evidence that would spoil his argument, Menzel devised a rather complicated scheme to debunk first the official weather report and then the sighting. The starting point of his argument was the expected duration of twilight, which was cut short, he maintained, by the hypothetical presence of “a dense cloud bank low in the west”, a cloud bank not reported by anyone, but which had to exist in Menzel’s theoretical scheme. Also, despite official weather reports to the contrary, Menzel believed “that inversions of both temperature and humidity must have been present”. And if so, “a light on the Virginia coast, shining northeast toward the plane, could easily have been spread out into a series of images like those observed”.
But if we look back at the testimony given by Nash and Fortenberry, that the visibility was unlimited and that the lights of Newport News could be clearly seen below them, we find nothing but evidence against Menzel’s “theory”. For if the cloud cover existed anywhere above 8,000 feet (the altitude at which the PAA DC-4 was flying when the pilots saw the “objects” below them), the searchlight-against-clouds theory cannot work.
I would also tend to think that a reflected or refracted light source (such as Menzel described) would not revolve as clearly and distinctly as the pilots Nash and Fortenberry described. I would expect such an image to appear more diffuse or hazy-looking than what these two pilots described when they said: “The edges were well-defined, not phosphorescent or fuzzy in the least.”
Another argument against Menzel’s debunking attempt can be made on the basis of the other testimony (mentioned earlier) from ground witnesses who described something very similar to what the pilots reported. Surely, the freak light effect, hypothesized by Menzel, would not appear exactly the same from above as below.
The only important factor counting against this case is the short duration of the sighting (twelve to fifteen seconds), which seems extraordinary given the wealth of detail. However, when Captain Nash was confronted with this objection, he replied:
“Both Bill Fortenberry and I, while in the Navy, were trained in identification, as were all military pilots. We memorized the contours of every ship in the German and Japanese navies. We did this also with all enemy aircraft. Needless to say, we had to learn all of our own air and sea craft, too. We had to draw outline sketches of any of them in tests. These, once learned, were flashed upon a screen, first at a tenth of a second and later at a hundredth of a second… We had to tell the instructor the type, nation and number of craft we had seen… We had all the time in the world to make our (UFO) observations!”
(The UFO Investigator October – November 1962)
(UFOs and the Limits of Science, Story)
(When you think about it, you couldn’t really ask for a more impeccable witness.)
Furthermore, in my view, commercial and military pilots are, generally speaking, the best possible UFO witnesses one could ask for. In addition to their specialized training (upon which their own lives depend, as well as the lives of their passengers), veteran pilots have, at one time or another, seen virtually every odd “apparition” which can occur in the sky, day or night, during all seasons of the year.
The state of their health, both physical and mental, is regularly checked, and most commercial pilots would stand to lose, rather than gain, by making a UFO report. If anything, it is far more likely that many good sightings have gone unreported than that the existing reports from commercial and military pilots are generally unreliable. Unless mitigating circumstances are known to me which would tend to discredit a report, I tend not to regard professional pilots as liars or incompetents, as opposed to the standard policies of some UFO skeptics. I personally agree with the official US Air Force verdict of “unexplained” in this case.