The Object That Hovered over the Kerr Hollow Gate Road

At about 15:20 on 15 October 1950 the Atomic Energy Commission Security Patrol trooper on duty at Kerr Hollow Gate took the thing for a skywriter. It was a dull silver-metallic body the size of a plane at 12,000 to 15,000 feet, with a quarter-mile trail of greyish smoke, arcing down. It descended slowly and almost vertically. At about 1,500 feet a second identical object appeared 50 feet behind it. Both changed from a bullet shape to a bladder shape and shrank, and the second vanished at about 500 feet.

The first came to rest 5 or 6 feet above the road about 60 yards from the gatehouse. It was now only 2 by 5 inches, with an opalescent ribbon-like tail. As he walked to within 50 feet it moved off, rising in steps over the fence and a willow tree, and left to the south-east. It came back twice over the next ten minutes. A Maxon Construction employee, a caretaker from the University of Tennessee farm and the patrol captain saw it too. Nobody heard a sound.

What is on the record

Project Blue Book holds the folder as Unknown 819. Army counter-intelligence checked the trooper's record and eyesight, found the separate descriptions matched and found nothing with Geiger counters. It rejected balloons, birds, hoax and hysteria. An electrician named Hightower saw only a high white spot he likened to a toy balloon. The record card reads the other way from the CIC. It says the ground sightings "vary in descriptions" and calls the week's radar returns probably spurious.

It came in a week of alarms at Oak Ridge. Radar targets on 12 and 13 October sent a fighter up to find nothing, and on 16 October three troopers at Blair Gate watched a spinning ball over the K-25 plant. A copy of a CIC summary also sits in the UK MoD files, in a pack a member of the public sent in 2001.

Why it sits where it does

L4 · OFFICIAL RECORD — a released government record names who saw it. The released copy blanks most of the names. Berliner's list, made from the uncensored files, gives the trooper as Rymer, the captain as Zarzecki and the Maxon man as J. Moneymaker. Hightower, the electrician, is named in the trooper's own statement. The grade is about the paperwork, not the object. What hovered over the gate road is not resolved here.