The Gorman UFO Dogfight

The Gorman UFO dogfight took place in the skies over Fargo, North Dakota on October 1, 1948 at approximately 9 PM. Second Lieutenant George Gorman was a WWII-veteran fighter pilot serving with the North Dakota Air National Guard. Gorman was logging some flight time in his F-51 Mustang. It was a clear, cloudless night. Perfect for night-flying.

Gorman noticed a Piper Cub flying about 500 feet below him. He then spotted another bright object flying to his west. Uncertain about what he was observing, Gorman radioed the control tower at Fargo's Hector Airport for assistance. The control tower informed Gorman that the only air traffic they were aware of was his F-51 and the Piper Cub. The pilot and passenger of the Piper Cub quickly reported that they could also see the bright flying object.

Gorman informed the control tower that he was going to investigate. The pilot was approaching the the mysterious object at about 5,000 feet when he first reported that it was travelling too fast for him to catch. Suddenly, the F-51 and UFO were on a collision course. Gorman reported that the object passed over him, barely avoiding collision.

Gorman temporarily lost sight of the object. When he saw it again the UFO had apparently made a 180-degree turn and was once again on a collision course with his Mustang. The mysterious light then made a sudden, steep vertical climb. Gorman pursued the UFO until his F-51 stalled at 14,000 feet. Regaining control of his aircraft, Gorman chased the object until he was twenty-five miles outside of Fargo. He broke off his pursuit at 9:27 PM and returned to Hector Airport.





After landing, George Gorman spoke with air-traffic controller L.D. Jensen and the pilot and passenger of the Piper Cub. All three told Gorman they had witnessed the strange encounter.



USAF investigators from Project Sign were soon on the scene to interview Gorman and the other three witnesses. Their initial report found the pilot and witnesses highly credible and concluded "that something remarkable had occurred" in the skies over Fargo. The investigators also discovered that Gorman's F-51 recorded an "unusually high" Geiger counter reading. They speculated that Gorman "may actually have been pursuing an atomic-powered craft".

Project Sign later revised their findings, announcing that Gorman had first been chasing a lighted weather balloon and then the planet Jupiter.

Disappearance Over Lake Superior

Air Defense Command ground intercept radar operators based in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan picked up an unusual target over the Soo Locks on the night of November 23rd, 1953. A lone F89C Scorpion jet interceptor was scrambled from nearby Kinross Air Force Base to investigate. The Scorpion was piloted by First Lieutenant Felix Moncla with Second Lieutenant Robert Wilson serving as the jet's radar operator.



 

 

Ground radar was tracking two radar blips over Lake Superior. One blip represented Moncla and Wilson in their F89. But what was the other object?

 

The Air Force interceptor was flying at 8,000 feet at 500 miles per hour. Radar operators watched as the two blips came closer and closer together. The two radar targets merged in to one. Observers suspected that Moncla had either flown over or under the object he was chasing. Suddenly, the single blip faded from the screen. The last radar contact had occurred roughly 70 miles from Keweenaw Point over Lake Superior.

 

Attempts to contact the F89 by radio were unsuccessful. A search and rescue team was dispatched immediately. They found no trace of the Air Force jet or the object it was chasing despite an expansive search that lasted in to the next day.

 

Various explanations for the jet's disappearance were offered. Did a case of vertigo cause Lieutenant Moncla to crash his F89 in to Lake Superior? Was the F89 actually chasing a Royal Canadian Air Force plane that had strayed off course? For the record, Canadian officials vigorously denied that.

 

The strangest explanation? Noted UFO investigator Donald Keyhoe wrote about it in his 1955 book The Flying Saucer Conspiracy. Keyhoe eerily wrote that he had received a phone call the night of the F89 disappearance from a friend in the Air Force. Keyhoe said his friend advised him that Kinross Air Force Base was reporting that they had lost an F89 after it had been "hit by a flying saucer".

The 1952 Mariana Sighting

Nick Mariana was the general manager of the Great Falls, Montana Electrics minor league baseball team back on August 15th, 1950. He also became one of the first people to capture UFOs on film that fateful day.

Mariana and a team employee were inspecting the Electrics Legion Stadium before a game scheduled later that day. At 11:25am, they both witnessed two bright objects rotating across the sky. Mariana quickly retrieved a 16 mm camera from his car and was able to shoot about sixteen seconds of footage of the two objects hurtling across the Montana skies. Below is a still-frame from that film.

 

 

 

 

 

The initial Air Force explanation was that Mariana had filmed two F94 jet interceptors that were flying toward nearby Malmstrom AFB. Project Blue Book's Captain Edward J. Ruppelt eventually dismissed that explanation, stating that those jets weren't "anywhere close to where the two UFOs had been". The film has been studied several times since. There has never been a universally-accepted, conclusive explanation for what Nick Mariana captured on film. Jets? Meteors? Swamp gas? Extraterrestrial craft? No one is certain.

 

The Electrics changed their team name to The Voyagers in 2008 to commemorate the 1952 encounter.

 

Copies of this UFO film currently reside at the National Archives and the footage is often used in UFO documentaries.

The Green Fireballs

The mysterious Green Fireballs began appearing over America's southwest, primarily New Mexico, in late 1948. These "visitors" seemed to be paying particular attention to sensitive research and military installations including Los Alamos and Sandia Base. Both Los Alamos and Sandia Base were heavily involved in the testing and construction of atomic weapons.

The official theory is that the Green Fireballs are simply meteors with a heavy copper content. Those that disagree with the official theory recount several of the first reported sightings. Both civilian and military pilots witnessed several of the unusual visitors on December 5, 1948. These pilots reported that the fireballs travelled parallel to the ground or upwards, not at all like the path of a meteor.

Fearing Soviet espionage or sabotage, the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) immediately dispatched a two-man team to New Mexico. They had a Green Fireball sighting of their own on December 8, 1948. The Air Force investigators reported seeing an intensely bright, large green light that was travelling about 2,000 feet above their aircraft and moving almost flat and parallel to the earth.



Air Force Project Blue Book's Captain Edward J. Ruppelt travelled to Los Alamos National Laboratory in early 1952 to interview scientists and technicians about their views on the Green Fireballs. Ruppelt was surprised that none of them accepted the conventional meteor explanation. Some believed the visitors were Russian spy devices. Others had an even more chilling theory.

Ruppelt recorded that many scientists believed that the fireballs were actually "extraterrestrial probes projected into our atmosphere from a spaceship orbiting several hundred miles above the earth". Below is a copy of the April, 1952 Life magazine article that explored the extraterrestrial theory.

 

 

 



Meteors? Russian spy craft? Visitors from another world trying to determine the extent of the threat our atomic program presented? The Green Fireballs remain a mystery to this day.

The Battle of Los Angeles

The first mass UFO sighting of the World War II era is most likely the incident that is commonly called The Battle of Los Angeles. During the very early morning hours of February 25, 1942, the US Army 37th Coastal Artillary Brigade's antiaircraft batteries fired on a large, mysterious object that was hovering above the city.

 

 

 

 

Tensions were high and nerves frayed. The Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor had pulled The United States into World War II less than three months before. Making matters worse, Santa Barbara's Ellwood Oil Fields had been shelled by an off-shore Japanese submarine just two days before the mysterious object appeared in the skies over Los Angeles. Every military unit in the area was on high alert.  

At 3:16am February 25, 1942, thousands of area residents awoke to the sound of wailing air raid sirens. Next came the deep boomp-boomp-boomp-boomp of 12.8 pound anti-aircraft shells exploding in the skies above the suburbs of west Los Angeles. Hot steel rained down on the houses below. Six people were killed by the falling debris.

So what were the soldiers firing at? Whatever it was was a sitting duck for the Army's guns as it slowly moved along the coast line before finally vanishing. Gunners claimed to have scored several direct hits, making it highly unlikely that their target was a dirigible or some other kind of fragile lighter-than-air craft. The enhanced photo above is inconclusive. It does appear that there is some solid object caught in the searchlights.

The roar and flash of the exploding shells made the scene even more chaotic and unclear. Edgy soldiers continued to send shells skyward until 4:14am. Sirens finally sounded the "all clear" at 7:21am. The shooting was over. Now the public waited for an explanation. The military admitted it could not identify the flying object.

A USAF review conducted decades after the incident speculated that nervous artillerymen were actually firing at the point were the searchlight beams intersected. Despite the fact that tens of thousands of witnesses reported seeing the large object, the Air Force report attributed the entire incident to jumpy, trigger-happy soldiers. 

More than seventy years later, mystery still surrounds what really sparked The Battle of Los Angeles.



The Modern UFO Era

Flashlight Theater Presents True UFO Stories will bring you tales of strange encounters with mysterious flying objects. Most of the research we are doing covers sightings from the 1940's until today. For the purposes of full disclosure, we would describe ourselves as "UFO agnostics".

Yes, there are UFOs. Hundreds of highly credible people see flying objects they cannot identify every single day. But that does not mean these objects are piloted by extraterrestrial beings. It simply means people cannot identify the flying object they are observing. Period.

Could beings from other worlds be visiting Earth? Absolutely they could be. But we certainly can't prove that. And it is not our intention to try. We are simply going to report our research.

Skeptics and Government Officials have offered many explanations for the nearly 70,000 sightings that have been reported annually since records began being kept in 1947. Possible explanations have included the planet Venus, swamp gas, weather balloons, secret government aircraft, space junk, mass hysteria, birds, meteors and, of course, hoaxes. Anyone who has spent any time viewing "UFO" videos posted on YouTube is well aware of the flood of computer-generated hoaxes.

The United States Air Force began serious study of the UFO phenomenon in January, 1948 with the launch of Project Sign. Project Sign evolved in to Project Grudge and finally the famous Project Blue Book. Project Blue Book officially concluded its work in 1970.

There have also been highly credible civilian research groups investigating strange aerial sightings over the past fifty-plus years. Three of the best known are National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomenon (NICAP), the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) and the Aerial Phenomenon Research Organization (APRO).

Some critics have long believed that the USAF research was simply designed to debunk every sighting. Other critics felt the civilian organizations were far too willing to believe.

Let's take the middle ground. Despite the exhaustive work of these government and civilian groups, roughly 22% of all of the reported aerial sightings remain "unexplained". Again, that doesn't mean they were flying saucers from Mars. But it does mean that we will have a lot to report.