24.07.2025

Project Blue Book case review: October-December 1952

This is the latest edition of the Project Blue Book case review covering the months of October-December 1952. Like the previous evaluations, I tried to examine each case to see if the conclusion had merit. I added comments to help clarify the explanation or if I felt it was not correct or adequate. Items marked with red highlighting had photographs in the case file.

Summary

Late 1952 still had some issues. Seventeen of the 160 cases listed (10.6%) had no classifications. I could not find two of the cases, which is better than the previous three months.

There were some interesting cases in this review. Quite a few involved Venus. Others involved false radar targets. Many of them were described as interference or anomalous propagation. Most of those checked out with what radiosonde data I could gather.

Others were verified by Blue Book or the Condon study. Many of these radar targets had no visual verification.

I found the Hickman Canyon, Utah sighting of October 27 puzzling. The witnesses seemed to be sure they saw an object crash into a mountain. Blue Book thought it might have been a missile from the nearby proving grounds. I did not find any information suggesting there was missile testing in the area. However, they never found any evidence of a crash even though there were searches made. That makes me conclude that either they got the location wrong or there was no crash. Maybe it just appeared to crash into the mountain and went behind the mountain. In either case, there wasn’t sufficient information to suggest what might have been the source of the sighting.

I also was confused by the Newfoundland sightings on 16 November. The description of the sightings were a jumbled mess. It is hard to say what was seen but time was missing from one sighting and duration the other. That made them insufficient information in my opinion.

The one other sighting that had me perplexed was Bethesda, Maryland on 12 November. It involved some lab technicians and doctors looking through a window towards the area of Walter Reed Hospital. There was a helicopter transfer that day but the investigating officer said it did not line up with the direction they were looking. One of the Doctors compared them to birds and that classification stuck. Whatever they were looking at, the objects were far away or were not that big. I agreed with the bird classification because of the witness comparing them to birds and their behavior seemed consistent with birds. I would have liked to have seen the map that was part of the investigation but it was missing.

This completes my review of the Blue Book case files, which I started over seven years ago (see SUNlite 10-1). There is some bit of satisfaction I have from this endeavor and some disappointment. I am satisfied that I completed the task but disappointed that the data in the files was so incomplete that it made my task very difficult. Next issue, I will present the data I collected.

Quelle: SUNlite 2/2025