The RB-47 Encounter (1957)

The light was "as big as a barn". For an extended period it kept a constant position relative to the moving aircraft, about ten miles off. It appeared to give out or reflect radiation at 2800 MHz as well as visible light. The pilots saw it by eye while the officer on the No. 2 monitoring set picked up its signal. Then it disappeared suddenly and reappeared somewhere else, both to the eye and on the airborne and ground radars. "Whenever we'd lose it, we'd all lose it," the radar operator told the Condon investigators. "There were no 'buts' about it, it went off."

What is on the record

The source is the Condon Report, the University of Colorado study funded by the US Air Force, where this is Case 5. It surfaced when an Air Force officer at the project's conference for base UFO officers mentioned it. Roy Craig's chapter on field studies tells how investigators interviewed the pilot, co-pilot and monitor operator of a B-47 crew of six. Their accounts of the experience over the Dallas-Fort Worth area agreed in broad terms. No Air Force report could be found. Gordon Thayer's radar chapter tried an optical and radar mirage of a distant aircraft with anomalous radar echoes, and judged it possible but not highly probable. Craig allowed that chaff and a temperature inversion may have been factors. He also noted that the monitor's signal matched the frequency of the ground radars.

Condon anonymised the crew and dated the flight 19 September 1957. Writing in Astronautics & Aeronautics in 1971, James McDonald showed from the Air Force file that the date was 17 July 1957. Condon's weather analysis had been run for the wrong night. That file, published by The Black Vault, names the aircraft as an RB-47H of the 55th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing from Forbes AFB in Kansas, with Lewis D. Chase as pilot. Project Blue Book called the object an airliner. The sceptic Philip Klass argued for a mix of an airliner, a fireball, equipment trouble and ground radar signals.

Why it sits where it does

L4 · OFFICIAL RECORD — a released government record names who saw it. The observers are an RB-47 aircrew and ground radar operators, unnamed in Condon. No independent testimony sits beside the record in the archive, and the tier measures sourcing rather than truth. What paced the RB-47 is not resolved here.