Documents / Document
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 Date: 29 October 1948 FIELD INVESTIGATION REPORT SUBJECT: Geiger Radioactivity Check of P-51 #5111435 Air National Guard, Pargo, North Dakota TO: MCIA2 Attn: 12. Deyarnond THRU: UCIAO Mr. Money UCIA Mr. Loedding 1. In compliance with decisions between this office (MCIAXO) and Mr. Lawrence H. Trusttner, Aeronautical Engineer, Chief of Guided Missiles Branch and Mr. Alfred G. Loedding, Technical Assistant to this division (MCIA , Capt. Robert H. Sneider, Project Sign Officer, in the company of Air Technical Field Organization Officers acting as pilot (1st Lt. T. S. Byington), co-pilot (1st Lt. Eluhoe), and engineer and crew chief (Capt. Crawford), departed Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio, on or about 0505 hours, 23 October 1948. The Air National Guard Airdrome Officer of the Day was contacted in the absence of the Commanding Officer, and arrangements were made for a comprehensive radioactivity check of a number of F-51 aircraft, including subject airplane, by exposure to a Geiger-Neueller Radiation Measurement Set, Model GLR-200A (hand-portable). 2. To obtain a comparative "Geiger" reading of the subject aircraft the following method of testing and measuring radioactivity was utilized: a. Only certain fixed areas on all aircraft were checked. b. A period of ten (10) seconds was allotted each reading. (a mean average could thus be established.) c. Portions of aircraft indicating more than usual radio- activity were checked for maximum and minimum Geiger readings. d. All aircraft tested (with the exception of the No. 11380 which was flown 20th Oct) had been flown on 22 October. NOTE: Subject aircraft, in addition to having been flown 1 October 1948 (date of the incident) had been in use the 2, 8, 14, 21 and 22 of October. 0. The selected aircraft were not equipped with oxygen thus precluding flights in excess of 10,000 feet. (Questioning of crews and two pilots revealed that none had been flown higher than 7,000 ft. 3. It will thus be seen that the factor of relative exposure to normal cosmic rays could be presumed to be fairly constant since only F-51's flown under 10,000 feet and whose daily flight-schedules correspond to those of the subject aircraft were chosen.
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.