B-29 radar-visual encounter over the Gulf of Mexico (Karas, Naumann / "Harter and Coleman")

1952 was the year of the Washington, D.C. radar flap. In December, a B-29 of the 3510th Flying Training Wing at Randolph AFB, Texas, was returning from a night training flight over the Gulf of Mexico. It was heading for Galveston at 18,000 or 20,000 feet, depending on the account.

December 6, 1952. Just before dawn. A bright moonlight night, about 100 miles south of the Louisiana coast.

At 5:25 a.m., 1st Lt. Norman Karas noticed a target on his radar. He wrote that it was "approaching our aircraft at terrific rate of speed." He timed it with a stopwatch over a known distance. The instructor flight engineer did the calculation. 5,240 mph.

It was only the first. Karas counted about 20 objects, sometimes several blips at once. Most flew straight, heading southeast. Some readings worked out to 22,000 to 26,000 mph. In Keyhoe's telling, some swerved to miss the bomber by several miles. One group swung in behind it at about 30 miles and held speed and distance for roughly ten seconds.

The crew were told to look out. From the waist blisters, men watched where the scopes showed targets. They saw blue-white flashes, about three seconds each, moving left to right along the right side. "I saw a blue-white streak travel front to rear and disappear under the wing," one crewman says in Keyhoe's account.

Around 5:35 a.m. came the moment the case is remembered for. A large return appeared, too big for any known aircraft. 1st Lt. William W. Naumann Jr. watched as "a group of the blips merged into a ½ inch curved arc." The arc then "proceeded across the scope" at a computed speed of over 9,000 mph. Both officers said the targets were real and not a radar fault. "I believe that this object was real and moved at an extremely high speed," Karas wrote.

Many readers know a different cast. In Flying Saucers From Outer Space (1953), Donald Keyhoe named the pilot Capt. John Harter and the radar officer Lt. Sid Coleman, with Bailey, Ferris and Cassidy aboard. The Project Blue Book file names Karas, Naumann and four visual observers. Yet the quotes nearly match.

Coleman's stopwatch line is close to Karas's signed statement. Coleman's 9,000 mph line matches Naumann's. It is almost certainly one event. Whether Keyhoe used pseudonyms on purpose is not known.

Randolph AFB intelligence questioned the crew after landing. Lt. R. A. Reed wrote the Air Intelligence Information Report on December 10, 1952. The file holds signed witness certificates, a hand-drawn scope sketch, a map, and weather and balloon data. It went to ATIC and Project Blue Book. Later it became case number 8 among 41 formerly classified reports that Albert M. Chop, of the Air Force press desk, cleared for Keyhoe. NICAP says the case remains unidentified in USAF files.

Anomalous propagation, temperature inversions and equipment interference are often proposed for 1950s radar cases. No published skeptical analysis of this specific case is known. Dr James E. McDonald dismissed the obvious answers: "No meteor explanation would fit the visual sightings, and ground-return effects are essentially out of the question." The story lives on in NICAP's The UFO Evidence, Jerome Clark's The UFO Encyclopedia and Paul R. Hill's Unconventional Flying Objects.