Arrey 1949 Blue Book documents (combined PDF)

Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.

## STATEMENT

On 24 April 1949, three miles north of Arrey, New Mexico, four Navy enlisted men from White Sands Proving Ground (Chief Akers, Davidson, Fitzsimmons and Moorman) and I saw a rapidly moving object while making a pibal wind run. We released a 350 gram balloon at about 1020 MST and were following it with a standard ML-47 David White Theodolite. After the 1030 reading, Davidson took over the theodolite and Akers and I looked up to find the balloon with naked eye. We thought we had the balloon when we picked up a whitish spherical object right along the direction the theodolite was pointing (45° elevation and 210° azimuth). The object was drifting east rapidly (5° second as estimated by stopwatch and width of fingers), but we had thought to encounter similar winds on the balloon. When the distance between the theodolite and supposed balloon became apparent, I took over the theodolite and found the true balloon still there, whereupon I abandoned it and picked up the object after it came out of the sun (this gives another good bearing if you wish to work out a sun shot at 1033 MST at Arrey). The object was moving too fast to crank the theodolite around; therefore, one of the men pointed the theodolite and I looked. The object was an ellipsoid about 2½:1 slantness ratio about .02° subtended angle. White in color except for a light yellow of one side as though it were in shadow. I could not get a hard focus on the object due to the speed at which the angles changed. Therefore, I saw no good detail at all.

The azimuth angle continued to decrease as the object continued on a north heading, growing smaller in size. At around $ 2 0^{\circ}-2 5^{\circ} $ azimuth the azimuth held constant and the elevation angle began increasing from the $ 2 5^{\circ} $ minimum to about $ 2 9^{\circ} $ . The object then apparently disappeared due to distance after a

ncl. 4