The Radar Ghost at Colorado Springs (1967)

The target flew the approach like a pilot. It appeared on the precision approach radar two miles behind a Braniff Boeing 720 on final approach to runway 35. The surveillance radar had it too. It gained on the airliner. As the 720 touched down, the blip pulled out to the east and passed over the airport at an indicated 200 feet. The FAA pointed out that this is the correct procedure for an overtaking aircraft or one practising an instrument approach. The track passed within a mile and a half of the control tower. The controllers there had been warned, and they saw nothing even with binoculars. A Continental Airlines flight three or four miles behind never saw it either.

What is on the record

The case appears twice in the Condon Report, the University of Colorado study funded by the US Air Force and published in 1968. The archive holds Gordon Thayer's chapter on optical and radar analyses, which names Colorado Springs and gives the time as 16.40 local. The sky was overcast with snow showers about, but visibility was over 15 miles. Thayer argued that a ghost echo was ruled out and that anomalous propagation was "rather unlikely". The radar behaviour fitted a century-series jet fighter, "yet nothing was ever seen or heard". "This must remain as one of the most puzzling radar cases on record, and no conclusion is possible at this time."

The same event is the report's Case 21, written up by Low and Rush without place names. A controller with 20 years' experience saw the target first, and a second with 15 years watched it on the scope. The case study tests Donald Menzel's suggestion of a double reflection off something on the ground, such as a steel dump-truck body, and finds that it fails on the target's height and on its pass to the east. It ends that the case "is therefore not satisfactorily explained", while the target's tie to the airliner and the lack of anything to see "suggest strongly that it was a radar artifact".

Why it sits where it does

L4 · OFFICIAL RECORD — a released government record names who saw it. The observers are the radar and tower controllers on duty at the airport, identified by post rather than by name. No independent testimony sits beside the report in the archive, and the tier measures sourcing rather than truth. What the radars painted over runway 35 is not resolved here.