The Redmond Hover

As the jets closed in, the record says, the object shot out flame, turned the shape of a mushroom and climbed away. One pilot nearly lost control in the turbulence it left behind. The episode began at about five to five in the morning on 24 September 1959, when a bright light came down near Redmond and hung about two hundred feet up. It lit the junipers beneath it. A Redmond police officer saw it. Staff at the airport's flight service station watched it through binoculars for hours.

What is on the record

Four claimants come through a single video: the police officer Robert Dickerson, the flight service specialist Laverne Wertz, an unnamed motorist and an unnamed sheep herder. The archive's transcript spells Wertz as Wurtz.

The published record is detailed. The air defence radar site at Klamath Falls tracked a target. Six F-102s were scrambled from Portland, and a B-47 and an F-89 were also directed towards it. The archive's telling speaks of radar at two ground stations and a round gold object. The record names the one radar site and describes a bright light. Project Blue Book holds a file of fifty-five documents on the case, and NICAP included it in The UFO Evidence in 1964. The archive holds neither.

The archive's source says the Air Force's explanation shifted over time, from false radar returns to a weather balloon and then to Venus. Blue Book's final evaluation is not part of the record checked for this page, and it is not stated here.

Why it sits where it does

A police officer and federal aviation staff watched the same light for hours while military radar tracked it, and those separate witnesses put the case at L3. A government file exists, and when it enters the archive this case is a candidate for the document-corroborated tier. What hung over the junipers near Redmond is not resolved here.