Blue Book file, Rivera and Heaphy (CUFOS)

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

Clearly if this report is taken at face value something unusual was present in the skies of someplace (to be revealed shortly) on May 24, 1949. However, in the UFO business one quickly learns not to take reports at face value but to dig as deeply as possible. It's not that I wouldn't "trust" the Battelle Institute investigators who reported this case (and I certainly wouldn't suggest that they made this case up; after all, it was their job to explain cases if possible, not to invent unexplainable cases), but the summary is so short that certainly some details have been left out. In order to recover these details I have searched the files of Project Blue Book and of the Office of Special Investigation (OSI) of the Air Force. (These UFO related files have all been collected by the National Archives, Washington, D.C., and are available, with names of witnesses deleted, on microfilm.) The Blue Book (BB) files are in chronological order, and a chronological list of all cases is available. On this list are two reports dated May 24, 1949. Specifically, in the case list one finds the following information:

## (from the list of 15-31 May, 1949 sightings)

Observer#

Evaluation*

* The evaluation is the object that was sighted according to the BB staff . This evaluation was certainly not binding on the Battelle investigators .

Here I have handwritten in the word "missing" to duplicate the situation actually found in the case list.

# When a personal name was given it was crossed out before the microfilm copy was made. The X's preceding the word "Multiple" may cover up the name of one of the witnesses.

As indicated in the list, the multiple witness sighting of that date was missing from the case files. The single observer sighting evaluated as "aircraft" is not missing however. This pair of cases posed an interesting problem (which was not resolved until I had found the case in the Office of Special Investigation files (OSI files)) because the time given in the "aircraft" sighting was listed as "approximately 1700 hours" and the location given was 1 1/2 miles up the Rogue River from (i.e., East of) Gold Beach, Oregon. This distance would be about 2 1/2 miles from the mouth of the river where it empties into the Pacific Ocean. Because of the coincidence in time (1700 hrs) and place I could not decide at first whether or not this case reported an independent sighting of the same object as reported in the first case (which was presumably the one referred to in BB#14 - multiple witness, 2 1/2 miles up a river, 1700 hrs). Of course the most puzzling thing about the listing of these two cases was the