NUFORC Sighting 67710

Occurred: 1965-08-01 01:30 Local
Reported: 2008-12-29 15:53 Pacific
Duration: 20 Minutes
No of observers: 3

Location: Potter (11 mi. north of), NE, USA

Shape: Unknown
Characteristics: Lights on object, Emitted other objects

I will never forget this night.............a friend and I was arrived home (11 miles north of Potter, Nebraska) and saw lights over our field to the southwest about 1 mile away. We observed it with our rifle scopes as it moved slowly to the southeast before hovering motionless . It had 3 small windows that we could see.

I called from the shop to the house and asked my wife to bring her fathers old 300 power telescope to the shop.

She brought the scope and I laid it over a 55 gallon drum and we three watched the thing for about 15 - 20 minutes.

I saw a small light come from the crafts belly and hold there as another small light joined it. They zipped off at a very high rate of speed to the southeast toward Souix Army Depot.. My wife called some neighbors and her brother who lived in Potter, Nebraska 11 miles south.

Don climbed his shortwave radio tower and looked with his binoculars stating he saw the light in the north.

After eight to ten minutes one of the lights appeared to the west side of the craft and moments later the other one appeared. One and then the other entered the bottom of the craft, then the craft, shot off to the southeast and disappered in a flash.

Never was there a sound we could hear and the craft only moved slightly to the west from which it came before it zipped off to the southeast in a flash.

NOTE: The small lights that came from the belly of the craft did so in a downward arch and re-entered the same way.

I ____________ saw it and as of this date I have no idea what it was.

I know several thing it was not.

We had been walking near one of the many minuteman undergrown sights a few days before and was aluminated by a shaft of white light from directly overhead that lit up the countyside in a flash that lasted about 10 seconds. We could see our shadows at about the 1 o'clock position and deer in the meadow about half a mile away.

We heard no sound at all.

===================================================================================== See below in YELLOW the report from F. E. Warren Air Force Base, Cheyenne, Wyoming 90 miles west of our sighting just west of Souix Army Depot, ===================================================================================== ** Begin Excerpt ** The popular impression through the years was that Blue Book was a full-fledged, serious operation. The public perhaps envisioned a spacious, well-staffed office with rows of file cabinets, a computer terminal for querying the UFO data bank, and groups of scientists quietly studying reports, attended by a staff of assistants.

The actual situation was unfortunately the opposite. The operation was generally headed by an officer of lesser rank. In the military the importance attached to a mission is usually in direct proportion to the rank of the commanding officer. The relatively low-ranking officers in charge of Blue Book were usually assisted by a lieutenant and sometimes only by a sergeant. For one long period of time a sergeant with little technical training was given the chore of evaluating most of the incoming reports.

This was not exactly a first-line, high priority operation. Blue Book had much too small a staff to do justice to a phenomenon that so often greatly concerned the public. Compounding the problem, the staff was able to devote only part of its time to the technical problem at hand. During my regular visits to Blue Book across the years I observed that much of the work in the office was devoted to peripheral matters all done at a leisurely pace.

Further, Blue Book's low-ranking officers had no leverage to initiate the type of investigations that were needed and for which I frequently asked.

The military is entirely hierarchical; a captain cannot command a colonel or a major at another base to obtain information for him. He can only request. As long as Blue Book did not have at least a full colonel in command, it was impossible to execute its assigned task properly. In reviewing cases that had come in during the previous month, I often asked that additional, often crucial information on a case be obtained. The results were at best minimal; officers at other bases were generally too busy to bother to investigate further. Why should they? They all knew it was a finger exercise anyway.

Blue Book was a "cover-up" to the extent that the assigned problem was glossed over for one reason or another. In my many years association with Blue Book, I do not recall ever one serious discussion of methodology, of improving the process of data gathering or of techniques of comprehensive interrogation of witnesses.

The reader may well ask at this point why I did not either lay siege to the Pentagon, demanding action, or simply resign in disgust. Temperamentally, I am one who can easily bide his time. I also dislike a fight, especially with the military. But most importantly, Blue Book had the store of data (as poor as they were), and my association with it gave me access to those data. In a sense I played Kepler to Blue Book's Tycho Brahe.

As far as demanding action from the Pentagon, I knew only too well the prevailing climate and recognized that had I been too outspoken, I would have quickly been discredited, labeled a UFO nut, lost access to data, and certainly would have lost all further effectiveness. I have always been of the turn of mind that "truth will out" if given time; if there was indeed scientific "paydirt" in the UFO phenomenon, as time went on and the gathering of data improved, even the most hostile skeptics would be powerless to sweep it under the carpet. The astronomer traditionally adopts a very long time scale.

By and large, however, Blue Book data were poor in content, and even worse, they were maintained in virtually unusable form. With access to modern electronic data processing techniques, Blue Book maintained its data entirely unprocessed. Cases were filed by date alone, and not even a rudimentary cross-indexing was attempted. Had the data been put in line readable form, the computer could have been used to seek patterns in the reports, to compare the elements of one report with those of another, and to delineate, for instance the six basic categories of sightings used in this book. Since all the thousands of cases were recorded only chronologically, even so simple a matter as tabulating sightings from different geographical locations, from different types of witnesses etc.

was impossible except by going through, manually, each and every report. A proposal for elementary computerization of the data in the Blue Book files, devised by Jacques Vallee and myself and submitted by me directly to Major Quintanilla at Blue Book, was summarily turned down.

In view of the above and of the frequently contradictory and inane public relations statements concerning UFO reports, which even the man on the street found unconvincing, it is hardly a wonder that the charge was frequently made that the publicly visible air force "investigation" of UFOs was merely a front for a real investigation being carried on somewhere "higher up." Were I the captain of a debating team whose job it is, of course, to marshall the facts favorable to his side and studiously to avoid the other's, I could defend either side of the argument. At no time, however did I encounter any evidence that could be presented as valid proof that Blue Book was indeed a cover-up operation. However, many indications, bits of information, and scraps of conversation could be force-fitted into a yes for the cover-up thesis. Thus, for instance, one time when I inquired into the specifics of a certain case, I was told by the Pentagon's chief scientist that he had been advised by those at a much higher level to tell me "not to pursue the matter further." One can make of that what one will.

In a country as security conscious as is ours where central intelligence is a fine art, it frequently seemed to me that very provocative UFO reports were dismissed without any seeming follow-up - certainly an illogical if not dangerous procedure unless one knew a priori that the report really was of no potential information value to the security of the country (or that it was but was being taken care of elsewhere). As an example, the report of five rapidly moving discs, made by a member in good standing of the 524th Intelligence Squadron stationed in Saigon and observed by him from the roof of the squadron's headquarters, went untouched by Major Quintanilla and Blue Book on the grounds that "the sighting was not within the continental limits of the United States." It would seem almost inconceivable that the intelligence officer in question would not have been further interrogated by some agency; certainly in an active battle area his sighting might have presaged a new military device of the enemy.

Another example, one of many, was this, on the first day of August, 1965, and on the following two days there occurred the "Midwest flap." From several states strange Nocturnal Lights were reported by ostensibly reliable police officers on patrol at various places over an area of several hundred square miles. Blue Book dismissed this event as "stars seen through inversion layers," although I know of no astronomer who has ever witnessed inversion effects that produced these reported effects. Both past experience and calculations show that such illusory effects, in which stars move over at a considerable arc of the sky, simply cannot be produced by thermal inversions.

However, police officers weren't the only ones to report. The following is a direct transcript of a Blue Book memo: In the early morning hours of August 1, 1965, the following calls were received at the Blue Book oifices by Lieutenant Anspaugh, who was on duty that night: 1:30 A.M. - Captain Snelling, of the U.S. Air Force command post near Cheyenne, Wyoming, called to say that 15 to 20 phone calls had been received at the local radio station about a large circular object emitting several colors but no sound, sighted over the city. Two officers and one airman controller at the base reported that after being sighted directly over base operations, the object had begun to move rapidly to the northeast.

2:20 A.M. - Colonel Johnson, base commander of Francis E. Warren Air Force Base, near Cheyenne, Wyoming, called Dayton to say that the commanding officer of the Sioux Army Depot saw five objects at 1:45 A.M. and reported an alleged configuration of two UFOs previously reported over E Site. At 1:49 A.M. members of E flight reportedly saw what appeared to be the same uniform reported at 1:48 A.M. by G flight. Two security teams were dispatched from E flight to investigate.

2:50 A.M. - Nine more UFOs were sighted, and at 3:35 A.M. Colonel Williams,commanding officer of the Sioux Army Depot, at Sidney, Nebraska, reported five UFOs going east.

4:05 A.M. - Colonel Johnson made another phone call to Dayton to say that at 4:00 A.M., Q flight reported nine UFOs in sight; four to the northwest, three to the northeast, and two over Cheyenne.

4:40 A.M.. - Captain Howell, Air Force Command Post, called Dayton and Defense Intelligence Agency to report that a Strategic Air Command Team at Site H-2 at 3:00 A.M. reported a white oval UFO directly overhead. Later Strategic Air Command Post passed the following: Francis E. Warren Air Force Base reports (Site B-4 3:17 A.M.) - A UFO 90 miles east of Cheyenne at a high rate of speed and descending - oval and white with white lines on its sides and a flashing red light in its center moving east; reported to have landed 10 miles east of the site.

3:20 A.M. - Seven UFOs reported east of the site.

3:25 A.M. - E Site reported six UFOs stacked vertically.

3:27 A.M. - G-1 reported one ascending and at the same time, E-2 reported two additional UFOs had joined the seven for a total of nine.

3:28 A.M. - G-1 reported a UFO descending further, going east.

3:32 A.M. - The same site has a UFO climbing and leveling off.

3:40 A.M. - G Site reported one UFO at 70' azimuth and one at 120' . Three now came from the east, stacked vertically, passed through the other two, with all five heading west.

When I asked Major Quintanilla what was being done about investigating these reports, he said that the sightings were nothing but stars! This is certainly tantamount to saying that our Strategic Air Command responsible for the defense of the country against major attacks from the air, was staffed by a notable set of incompetents who mistook twinkling stars for strange craft. These are the people who someday might have the responsibility for waging a nuclear war.

For some, incidents such as the above would be prima facie and conclusive evidence that the cover-up hypothesis was the correct one, on the grounds that no group charged with serious defense responsibilities for the country could have been so stupid.

On the other hand, our hypothetical debating team captain could amass an even more impressive cache of evidence to conclude quite the opposite: that the entire Blue Book operation was a foul-up based on the categorical premise that the incredible things reported could not possibly have any basis in fact. After all, science pretty well understands the physical world and knows what's possible and what is not. Since the reported actions of UFOs clearly didn't fit this world picture, they simply _had to be_ figments of the imagination produced in one way or another.

All my association with Blue Book showed clearly that the project rarely exhibited any scientific interest in the UFO problem. They certainly did not address themselves to what should have been considered the central problem of the UFO phenomenon: is there an as yet unknown physical or psychological or even paranormal process that gives rise to those UFO reports that survive severe screening and still remain truly puzzling? Such lack of interest belies any charge of "cover-up"; they just didn't care. There is another argument for the "noncover- up" viewpoint: the underlings in the military hierarchy (and all Blue Book officers were such - generally captains or majors, two of which finally made lieutenant colonel but never full colonel) looked mainly toward two things, promotion and early retirement. Therefore, in controversial issues it was always considered far wiser not to "rock the boat," to please the superior officer rather than to make waves. Thus, when the superior officers, who did not know the facts but were wedded to a rigid framework of military thinking handed down from above, let it be known in any controversial issue (whether UFOs or not) what the "right way" of thinking is, no underling officer was going to oppose or even question it unless, of course he was 99 percent certain that he could prove himself correct in the controversy - and quickly.

Since the Pentagon had spoken in no uncertain terms about UFOs, no Blue Book officer in his right promotion-conscious military mind was going to buck that, even if he had private opinions on the matter.

Another factor added to the noncover-up theory. Turnover in the Blue Book office was rather high. Sooner or later the officer in charge would be out of it, just that much closer to promotion and retirement, if he just sat tight.

>From 1952 to 1969 the office was headed in turn by Captain Ruppelt (who did not make his own views known until he was out of the air force), Captain Hardin (who had ambitions to be a stock broker), Captain Gregory (to whom promotion was the be-all and end-all of existence), Major Friend, and finally Major Quintanilla, who had the longest term of office. Of all the officers I served with in Blue Book, Colonel Friend earned my respect. Whatever private views he might have held he was a total and practical realist, and sitting where he could see the scoreboard, he recognized the limitations of his office but conducted himself with dignity and a total lack of the bombast that characterized several of the other Blue Book heads.

Thus one can have one's choice of whether Blue Book was a front or merely a foul-up. But that there was certainly foul-up and complete divorce from the scientific community within Blue Book was apparent. The members of the scientific fraternity were, of course, wedded to the misperception-delusion hypothesis (there was no need for interchange of ideas with Blue Book, which held the same views), and some members rose to heights of vitriolic verbiage in denouncing reporters of UFOs. This phase of the total phenomenon had many of the aspects of a modern witchhunt.

** End excerpt **

Posted 2009-01-10