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This combined Project Sign file, drawn from USAF records, documents the 1 October 1948 encounter over Fargo, North Dakota, in which Air National Guard pilot 2nd Lt. George F. Gorman chased a small round white light in his F-51 for 27 minutes. The file holds checklists, interrogation reports by Major Paul Kubala of the ATI Field Office at Wright-Patterson, tower witness statements, Geiger readings on the aircraft and press clippings. It concludes that Gorman's statements should be accepted as truth until proven wrong.
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
# CONFIDENTIAL 5. Can you describe briefly what occurred during these 27 minutes? A. After the initial peel off, I realized the speed of the object was too great to catch in a straight chase, so I proceeded to cut it off in turns. At this time my fighter was under full power. My speed varying between 300 and 400. The object circled to the left, I cut back to the right for a head-on pass. The pass was made at apparently 5000 feet, the object approaching head-on until a collision seemed inevitable. The object turned and passed apparently 500 feet or less over the top above me. I chanced around still without the object in sight. The object made a 140 degree turn and initiated a pass at me. This time I matched it approach all the way and as it started to pull up, I pulled up abruptly trying to ram the object until straight up with me following to apparently 14,000 feet, I stalled out at 14,000 feet with the object apparently 2000 feet above me circling to the left. We made two circles to the left. The object then pulled out away from me and made another head-on pass. At this time the pass started and the object broke off a large distance from me heading over Factor Airport to the Northwest at apparently 11,000 feet. I gave chase circling to the left trying to cut it off until I was 25 miles Southeast of Pargo. I was at 14,000, the object at 11,000 when I again gave the aircraft full CONFIDENTIAL EXHIBIT "E" post or 7 bus
Document, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 38 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.