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This Project Blue Book file from the USAF, released via The Black Vault, covers the 16 January 1958 sighting at Trindade Island. Its record card says two Rio de Janeiro newspapers printed photos of an alleged flying saucer taken from a Brazilian naval ship, and that ONI analysis judged them a hoax. The file also holds galley proofs from a Menzel book arguing the Barauna photographs were faked, plus APRO Bulletin and NICAP material.
ROB MERCERPage "4 NICAP .. . (Co n tinued from p<'gc I ) tion to the public be r ealistic and knowl- edgeable. Normally that explanation will be made only by the USAF' Inform a tion Office. It all adds up to part of the job of bein g experts in our own domain." And so we can see that the UFO issue is far from dead with the USAF. There can be no doubt that, to use the words NICAP spokesman Vice Adm. R. H. Hillenkoetter (Ret.) , "behind the scenes, high-ranking Air Force officers arc sober- ly concerned about UFO's." The Polar Satellite - What Is It? For days in the early part of February the whole world riveted its collective attention on thc dark polar satellite which had been detected by the United States' tracking system. Dubbed the "Black Knight" by so me, the unidentified object radiated no light, was tumbling in space, and was not e mittin g r adio signals. The U. S. Defense Departm ent said it might have bee n a Russian "Spy satellite," which was denied by the Russians. We tend to accept this as gos pel because Russians would be quick to claim any space achievement in order to score an- other propaganda victory. APRO staff members considered the possibility that the object might have been a captured natural satellite from the Canadian pre- cession of 1920. One by one the usual explanations were ruled out until two r ema ined: the shell of a rocket stage which had approxi- mated polar orbit, or a UAO. The former was the explanation picked out by the Defense Department to explain away the mystery object. WHAT WAS NOT REVEALED WAS THE FOLLOWING: The "Black Kni ght" had bcen tracked since t he 4th of Janu - ary, was one of two d<lrk satellites in polar orbits, both of which wei ghed in the nei ghborhood of 15 tons each! The agency from which APRO obta in ed its information certainly sho uld know what the score is, and th e leak of information occurred during an attempt to coordinate efforts at tracking the object. In fact, APRO 's information preceded that of the newspaper release by several days. Army Reg Concern s Tracking Unknowns The United States Army has in its cur- rent file of Classified Regulations, one which a uthorizes, in fact, urges, the track- ing of any object exceeding Mach 1 above 50,000 feet altitud e. This can hardly be construed as pertaining to sate llites, which orbits are placed a considerably i<l.rge r distance OHt in space,~ so it must be assumed that the .Army is watching (or hi gh-flyin g unid entified aerial objects. T HE A. P. R. O. BULLETIN '---"'--' Mystery Flash and Power Failure A bevy of clippings from various news- papers in the West reveal ed the informa - tion in ea rly February that a strange brilliant flash of ligh t h ad been observed by thousands in a four-state area. On February 7 at 12 :03 Mountain Stan- dard Time, a flash of light which illumi- nated the cabin of a Western Airlines plane piloted by Captain Richard Belew of Salt Lake City. "It wa s fantastically bri ght," he sa id. "It started as a low blue light, then came a blinding fla sh." Belew's plane was approximately forty miles south of Great Falls, Montana . At Bulte, iVIontana, the secretary at a radio station observed that a noise like several jets on takeoff, followed the flash. The most curious thing about this story is the newspaper report tha t a power failure at the Atomic E nergy Commi s- sion's reactor testing station in Eastern Idaho, took place 2Yz hours later. Mack Corbett, Director of Information for the AEC station, took pains to inform news- men that there wa s no flash at the time of the power failure, as had been report- ed. He then explained that the power failure was believed due to a bird or b irds flying into the power line. Amateur astronomer Floyd Rickores, Hollywood, Califor nia, selid he tracked a red ball in the sky for nearly five min· utes after a "bright fl ash " lighted the room. "It seemed to stay sta tionary be - tween two stars for three or four min- utes ," he said, " then took off with fan- tastic speed and disappeared." Althou gh there was no official expla· nalion by r es ponsibl e age ncies , news · papers tended to assume that the fla s h was m ade by a meteor. APRO believes t her e are too many co- incidenccs involved in this incident, in- cluding Rickores' observation, which took place within a short space of time afler the flash over Utah, Wyoming, Idaho and Monta na , and t.he power failure at the AEC station. Shortly thereafter , sU'a nge things were seen in the sk ies throu ghou t the U. S . .. Takilnashi to Study Ice Fall Data Mr. Takanashi, our Japanese represen· tative, has projected the study of unu sual icc falls in the near fu tU re. HI'! has asked the Un ited States staff to forward data concernin g ai rborne ice chunks to him [or study a nd correlation. Hc ha s a defi- nite theory in mind, and if member s will continue to forward information pertain- ing to this facet of aerial phenomena to headqu arters, said data will be forwarded to Takanashi with regular packets of related information. March, 1960 Agencies ... ( Cont inu ed frolll page 3) not explain the m despite conjecture about cra shing rockets, we must then assume that the formation of li ghts was prob- ably a floci< of UAOs. Notes and Comments APRO m entioned in an Editorial in the Cleveland Plain Dealer March 6 1960 entitled "Secrecy Abou~ UFOs Is' Over: done ... " We would like to give more detailed comment pertaining to the fine work on behalf of APRO which is being done by ollr Photo Consultant, John T. Hopf. Not only tops in photography he has proved to be a first·c la ss recruiter . . George Todt, columnist for the Valley Times, P asadena , CaliL, was awarded the Freedom Foundation George Wa sh - ington Honor Medal. George is a UFO enth usia st and some of his comment about the subject has becn read into the Congressional Record . A M1". Keith L. Milner of Cheltenham, England claim s he is building a sa ucer which will be a " sort of anti-gravity machine made up of copper and zinc plates that are supposed to spin and draw their energy from supersonic sounds in tile atmosphere. . UFOnC of Akron, Ohio has produced another excelle nt special report, dea ling with the sighti ng of sev- eral objects by American and United Airlines pilots on 24 February 1959; this report is comparable to the Fitzgerald report a nd would be an important addi- tion to a ny enth usiast's file .. .. A recent (9 Febl"Uary ) news release out of Mos- cow quotcs the opinions of Soviet sc ien- tist i\1. Agrest, relative to the actual demolition of the Biblical cities Sodom and Gomorrah. Agrest stated he 'believes present-day nuclear sc ie ntists shou ld in · vestigate possible radioactive de posits in Bi blical areas in question. He believes the destru ction of the cities was brou ght about by space travelers, and that the structu re of Heliopolis, containing some of the largest single pieces of sto ne ever shaped by man, was used for a launch- ing platform for th e home·bound space- travelers. Prof. Fred T. Haddock, or the University of l'dichigan's astronomy . depart ment , has announc ed that an at- tempt to contact in telligent bein gs on · other planets wi~l be made this spring by several leadi ng American astrono - mers. Using the most up·to·date sensi- tive instru me nts, they will attempt to intercept messages which may be tran s· mitted from billions of miles out in spa ce. For your copy o[ UFORC's " REPORT ON UNIDENT IFIED FLYING OB· JECTS" mentioned above, send $1.00 to UF ORC, P. O. Box 5242, Akron, Ohio. Why not order an extra copy and prese nt it to you r local library?
Document, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 54 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.