A century of ufo sightings and Close Encounters in the Midwest

CHAPTER 6: 1975 & 1976

Dr. Rutledge is the author of "Project Identification."

On a historical note, in March 1975, the Air Force Project Blue Book files were transferred from Maxwell AFB, Montgomery, Alabama to the National Archives in Washington, D.C. To many people the retirement of the Blue Book records seemed to mark the end of the UFO problem. To others, it was just the beginning...

Bobby Doane, 14, was standing at the end of the driveway of his home waiting for a friend, who was running late, to arrive. Bobby was standing with his back toward the house when he was startled by a noise behind him. Turning around Bobby saw an airborne object through the bare branches of a tree located about thirty feet west of his house. His first impression was that he had spotted a low flying airplane but it became immediately clear to him that he was looking at something more unusual than an airplane. As he ran up the driveway toward the house, the object moved into an unobscured area between the tree and the house about four hundred feet from him. The object was in full view of the witness for about one minute before he ran into the house to tell his father about it. Bobby's last view of the object was as it moved in a northeasterly direction to a point where it was partially out of sight behind the house.

When Bobby's father, Mr. Bob Doane, ran outside the object was gone.

The witness said that the object resembled "two Frizbees together edge to edge about 27 feet across. It didn't rotate as it moved and it was at an angle showing a circle off center on the top. Its color was a dark grayish-green like camouflage and it had a smooth surface as far as I could tell."

The elder Doane supports his son's claim saying Bobby definitely saw something and that he (Mr. Doane) had thought he had heard a low roar. However, according to the witness, there never was any sound connected with the UFO. (Ref 2)

Steps were taken by Dr. Hynek's group at the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) to improve the transmission of UFO reports from the public to the UFO investigative community. On April 1, 1975, the Federal Aviation Administration approved cooperation with CUFOS, authorizing air traffic controllers and other personnel to report UFO sightings as their workload permitted. This, plus CUFOS request for cooperation from law enforcement officials, helped ensure UFO reports were sent to someone who could follow up on them.

In 1983, I appeared on a two hour, radio call in talk show on WGBF in Evansville, Indiana. During the show, an ex-Air Force man called in and reported that an alert had taken place at Headquarters, North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) during these sightings.

The NORAD Command Post, Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado, includes the National Combat Operations Center. The Command Post, located as it is, deep inside Cheyenne Mountain is designed to withstand a direct hit by a 10 megaton nuclear weapon. As you might surmise, UFOs sighted by military personnel and/or detected on radar near any military installation cause quite a bit of havoc. In late October, 1975, when bona fide UFOs violated airspace over NORAD Command Post enough concern was generated for NORAD to upgrade their security alert status.

No one except cleared, high ranking officers or security patrols was allowed to enter the Cheyenne Mountain base. No one was allowed to leave. Those persons on base who had just completed duty were called back to work. Jet interceptors were scrambled.

The following incident, which I investigated, is paraphrased from a paper I wrote for MUFON which was printed in the MUFON UFO JOURNAL, Issue Number 192, February 1984. The incident itself occurred in 1975.

The men worked their shift of duty at Headquarters NORAD and got off duty about eight in the morning. Everyone in the group of nine or ten men went home, gathered together their hunting and camping gear and met at the home of one of them. They then all left on one of their routine hunting trips.

One of the men who was supposed to go on the trip got assigned to radar duty and couldn't go; a circumstance that later proved valuable as evidence of what happened later at Cheyenne Mountain that day. Another man, who became a pilot for United Airlines a couple of years later, secured some information about a sighting from an aircraft the same evening as the NORAD security alert. United Airlines filed a UFO sighting report with the Air Force.

My informant, one of the men in the group, told me, "We weren't drunk!" He said that they had been hunting all day and had stopped for the evening. They built a warm, cozy fire, ate a late dinner (it was between 10 PM and midnight) and were preparing to turn in for the night when one of them thought he saw a shooting star. Some unusual animal noises then occurred for about a fifteen minute period. One of the other men then said, "Well! There's two of them!" They stopped their preparations for turning in for the night and kindled down the fire, eventually putting it completely out. so they could better see the shooting stars.

What they then saw were three, distinctly separate lights in the sky which were moving to a point where they blurred across the horizon and then they would stop, move back in the opposite direction, and then move away from them to a point where the lights almost disappeared. Then, they would again move.

"We were thinking about our eyes playing tricks on us until they lined up almost abreast of each other and proceeded directly toward the Mountain," continues Mr. E. He later stated to me that there appeared to be trails behind the objects.

Six to eight minutes later the men heard the alert klaxons at the Cheyenne Mountain base.

Hearing the klaxons, they immediately packed their gear and headed for the Mountain to man their security posts. They had been off duty for ten to twelve hours but, except for the pilot among them, they were still subject to recall to duty as part of the security force for the Mountain.

It was about a forty five minute drive from their campsite to the gate to the Mountain. At 0210 hours they showed their passes to the gate guard and were admitted as part of the base security force. They did not have an opportunity to change clothes and were still in their hunting gear. They retrieved their weapons and reported to their assigned security posts. They were on alert at their posts until 0600 hours when the alert was "stepped down."

Two or three days later when they were all together again, the man who had been on radar duty the night of the alert said that he had tracked UFOs on radar for about twenty minutes. He stated that it was "weird" and proceeded to describe the radar tracks to the rest of the group. His description matched what the rest of the group had seen visually.

A couple of days later some of the men in the group began checking into the records to try determine the reason for the security alert. They found that nothing about the alert was in the records. "We couldn't find anything in the records that were available to us," said Mr. E. "Now, we didn't try to get into clearance areas, but the records that were available to us were primarily security records." Even the files of the radar men of the group were devoid of any mention of the alert. It appeared that all material relating to the event had been purged from the records.

They then started asking around to see if they could find anything to explain the event. It was then that the Air Force "UFO people" appeared.

Mr. E. referred to the investigators as representatives from the "Air Force UFO division." "Whatever they were called," he said, "they came out to talk to us." The investigators interviewed everyone in the group one by one. Everyone's story matched; even the radar operator's story.

Mr. E. gave his report to the Air Force investigators and was told not to worry about it and to ignore it and continue his business.

Everyone in the group was ordered at that time not to mention the incident. "As long as we were in uniform we were not to discuss it with anyone other than military personnel with an official need to know and the fellows from the Air Force's investigating team that came out to talk to us." They told the group that they had seen navigational or landing lights.

Mr. E. said that all the members of the group had been in Viet Nam and were familiar with seeing navigational and landing lights. They had all seen night fighter aircraft at work and taking off and landing many times. These were not navigation or landing lights.

The investigators told the men in the group that their reports could not be taken seriously because they couldn't identify a shape or a color other than white which was like a shooting star.

It appears that the Air Force was pleased that the men could not provide a more detailed description than they could. Bonified sightings of nocturnal lights are, however, important evidence, especially when they correlate with other, better quality visual sightings and anomalous radar tracks.

It is strange that the men were asked not to relate their stories to anyone "outside." They were told that the incident fell under the purview of a specific Air Force document.

Mr. E. said that "they played it off like it wasn't anything." Yet, a security alert is very serious. The over-flight documents mention a Security Option 3 alert with UFOs showing "clear intent" near a weapons storage area.

Within sixty days of the alert, everyone in the group received a written reprimand for drinking on duty. None of them had been drinking on duty. In fact, they weren't even on duty when the sighting occurred and the alert was initiated. The men reportedly were not abused or mistreated. The promotion of only one person, the radar man, was affected by the written reprimand. His Letter of Reprimand mentioned drinking on duty and dereliction of duty. About six months later he was passed over for promotion because the written reprimand was in his records. (Ref 2)

The written reprimand came "out of nowhere, dated the same day as the sightings," a copy of which was placed in each man's personnel records.

In the over-flight documents there is one page that states, and I quote: "3) HQ USAF/DADF also forwarded a copy of a NORAD document for a review for possible downgrade and release. We have determined the document is properly and currently classified and is exempt from disclosure under Public Law 90-23, 5 USC 552b(1)." This document is signed by Col. Terrence C. James, USAF, Director of Administration.

On November 5th the abduction of Travis Walton took place near Snowflake, Arizona. The Walton experience become the subject of a motion picture, "Fire in the Sky", released in March 1993.

The couple lived in a mobile home. The dog was barking and woke them up so the man looked out a window, saw a light, and went outside on the porch to see what was arousing the dog. The sky was clear and the weather must not have been to cold because he walked out on the porch in his night clothes. There had been some thefts of gasoline in the area and he was concerned about this. He also wanted to check on the security of some equipment: a backhoe, a dump truck, a 4-wheel drive, etc. He "saw the glow from the object." The whole area was lit up "like a dusk to dawn light that wasn't supposed to be there."

His wife didn't, at first come out of the house. When she did, she only went out on the porch. "She was scared for two or three days after that," he said.

He was at the rear of the trailer looking south at the object which was less than two hundred feet above the ground and five to six hundred yards away. At first it was stationary but then moved slowly eastward climbing gradually. He said that he knew what airplanes, balloons, and dirigibles looked like and it wasn't anything like those things. "It was shaped a whole lot like a dirigible but it was flat on the bottom."

The object continued to move eastward across a field and a gully to a point south of his son's trailer about five to six hundred yards from his own trailer. The object appeared to long and somewhat rectangular shaped with blunt ends and a strong yellow-greenish beam of light coming from it that could be seen moving very slowly across the open field.

The witness said that it was a "greenish, pinkish, overly bright light, extremely bright light. I stood there at the window (at first). I'm telling you I could see the ground out there, the grass, the weeds...clear as a bird. . .good n' daylight (like)."

"When I first saw it," he continued, "it was less than two hundred feet (off the ground)."

A little later, just south of his son's trailer, there was a round object. "It was darker green than the rectangular thing and looked like it was right in the fence row. This one looked like it might have been eight or ten feet in diameter and on, or very near, the ground. It changed color from pale green to bright blue and back to pale green. When the larger rectangular object got over in the area back of the trailer and a little south, the smaller sphere moved up to the bottom of the big object and went out like a light." The single remaining object then departed slowly to the east.

The main rectangular object appeared to be projecting a beam of light that was coming down and forming a moving bright rectangle on the ground. "And, I could see clouds going between the object and the (round) thing that was down here on the ground, which I (at first) presumed was (from) a beam of light."

The large object was moving very slowly. "I mean I've heard stories about them zooming away. They didn't. It was slow. It was (going) easy, just like it was drifting with the wind, but it was going up and going in that direction (east).

The witness returned to his bed while the object, now very distant, was moving slowly away. (Ref 2)

March 26, 1976: At 8:45 AM the MADAR system indicated an anomaly. The background radiation was normal and no one filed a UFO report.

This was MADAR anomaly No. 8.

There were six witnesses to this event. Although it was a night sighting, the distance between the witnesses and the object at its closest was two hundred to two hundred fifty feet which makes this a close encounter sighting.

The high degree of strangeness is evident from the testimony of witness Lee Golden: "This is no hallucination. This thing came right over the top of the house (which was fifty feet from the witnesses), I'd say at one hundred to one hundred fifty feet over the top of the house. And, it was rectangular on the top and had a big light at the bottom. I couldn't see how the bottom was made, but it was totally noise-proof (there was no sound at all)." As it came over it appeared to be the size of an automobile and it was gaining altitude and moving northward. When it got to a higher altitude, something shot out from the bottom of the object. Later, something shot out from the side.

The object came from the south, initially headed northward at low altitude (one hundred to one hundred fifty feet), then turned and began moving to the northeast, gaining altitude and finally shrinking to the size of a star. The duration of the entire sighting was 15 minutes.

"The object had a rectangular shaped cage of some sort on the top portion (Exhibit 1E), and looked very clearly like it had some sort of cylinder or entrance from top to bottom located in the middle (see drawing). Also, noticed what appeared to be a door or heavy screened opening at the top part located in the middle." The lights on the object initially had a yellow cast and then changed to white. The object moved very slowly at first and then moved quickly away and out of sight. (Ref 2)

Other, distant sightings of limited merit, occurred in 1976 which are not listed here.

1. Project Identification, page 185, Rutledge.