Documents / Report
This U.S. Air Force file of unidentified flying object check lists covers incidents 101 to 172 from 1948. Most of the pages concern the February 18, 1948 explosion over Norcatur, Kansas: witness statements, B-29 crew sightings, and letters from Norman Markham suggesting a spacecraft travelling to and from the moon. An excerpt from Dr. Lincoln LaPaz calls the event a genuine meteorite fall. Other entries record sightings at Smyrna, Tennessee, Los Angeles, the Pacific, the Netherlands, Ohio, Turkey and near Moscow.
From the source: Release of 2026-06-12 Includes a "Check-List - Unidentified Flying Objects" that contains details about the incident. Many summaries also include witness lists or statements and other narrative reports or descriptions.
This may have been heading in the general direction of what may ha ve been the goal of two later objects which r oughly resemble it in descripti on. THE TICOODEROGA OBJEC'IS - According to the tanker Ticonderoga's secom officer, two "nyinc discs " were seen heading SOU'IHWE:3T when the ship was in 43 degrees fifteen minutes north and 124 degrees 54 minutes west, at 0620 GCT, 12th November 1947. These may have been heading f or the object seen in the Pacific off the Golden Gate, not long afterward - or possibly at the same time, if earlier reports on this are consulted. • . THE PHAN'IOM REEF - On November 24, 1947, the Navy denied that it had found a phantom reef or other obstruction to navigation at a point about 4oO miles west of San Francisco. TM Navay Survey ship MAURY, s ent out there in r esponse to reports of ships that s ome hugh object had been seen in the water in tha t neighborhood , reported that when in the approximate 1 titude and long:1.tu:ie of the supposed obstruction they picked up an echo from soll8thing in the wa+.er 16oo yards f rom the ship; but that Tfhen they had steamed to within 4oo yards of thi s, the echo vanished. There seems a possible connectability between the various elements so tar considered. Later on January 7, 194.S, there were occurrences in the neighborhood o! \filmington, o., Ft. Knox, Ky., Franklin, Ky., am Nashville , Tenn., all of which must be now familiar to the archivists of the Signal Office. Something like a "fl¥ing disc" was pursued by one Lt. Mantell arrl two other pilots, ~antel being killed while in the process of att emptin g to gain altitooe to get close to whatever it was he was chasing. Also, in this connection , it may not be amiss to mention the deaths of two military officer& ,mo were said to have been bringing back material evidence from "flying discs" one of which was said to have met with some kind of accident over .14aury Island, Puget Sound, around June, 1947. It Will be seen on inspection that the geographical locales of these incidents fit inside the belt of latitu:ies hereinbefore mentioned. 'mE NORCATUR EXPLOSION was described in a previous letter of this writer, an:i it was shown in that letter that a line tangential to the meridian of Norcatur, Kans ., at hour-angle 2:20 p.m., would if con tinued outward into space to the orbit of the moon , intersect the moon's orbit at a point where the moon would have been at about 100 hours after the time of the explosion. Accordin g to r ocketry theory, it would take a reaction-propelled craft of the rocket type about 100 hours to reach the moon. !p
Report, from the pursue collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 210 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.