The Charles B. Moore Theodolite Sighting, Arrey, New Mexico

Charles B. Moore was no casual skywatcher. He was a General Mills aerologist and balloon engineer, working for the Office of Naval Research on a Skyhook project supervised by ONR engineer J. Gordon Vaeth. On Sunday, 24 April 1949, his crew was at a site about 3 miles north of Arrey, in Sierra County, New Mexico. They were preparing a drop test lifted by three 73-foot Skyhook balloons.

First, a routine step. A small pilot balloon went up at about 10:20 to measure the winds. The crew followed it through a 25-power ML-47 theodolite.

Around 10:30, Moore leaned back from the theodolite to glance at the balloon with his naked eye. Then he saw it. A whitish elliptical object, apparently much higher than the balloon, moving in the opposite direction.

He caught it in the instrument at 45 degrees of elevation and 210 degrees of azimuth. His report described "an ellipsoid about 2.5:1 slenderness ratio," white except for a light yellow on one side. "No clouds in sky, no haze. No noise." No trail. No exhaust. No odor.

It swept east at about 5 degrees of azimuth per second, sinking toward 25 degrees of elevation. It turned north. The azimuth held steady. Then the object began to climb, from 25 degrees to about 29, shrinking until it disappeared with distance. Total time, about 60 seconds. Four Navy enlisted men, Chief Akers, Davidson, Fitzsimmons and Moorman, backed Moore's account.

The Navy passed the report up its chain. A letter of 20 May 1949, signed by J. R. Ruhsenberger, went to the Chief of Naval Operations for the Office of Naval Intelligence. In the Air Force files, the Project Blue Book record card summed it up as "a white ellipsoid with a yellow light." Its conclusion: Unidentified.

Edward J. Ruppelt, who later headed Blue Book, counted it among the best sightings. Working from calculations that placed it 56 miles up, he put the object at "40 feet wide and 100 feet long," moving at "7 miles per second." He was almost tossed out of the General Mills offices for suggesting the crews were seeing their own balloons. In TRUE magazine, Cdr. Robert B. McLaughlin wrote that the final upward swerve would take "more than 20 G's." In 1952 Life ranked the case third among its ten most credible reports.

Donald Menzel offered a different answer in 1953. What Moore saw, he wrote, was "an out-of-focus and badly astigmatic image of the balloon above." A bouncing meteor was also floated, then dropped because nobody saw a trail. J. Allen Hynek later faulted the Air Force for putting little follow-up into a genuinely puzzling report.

Moore never budged. "What I saw was not a mirage; it was a craft with highly unusual performance," he wrote to Bruce Maccabee in 1986. It was not a balloon, he added. His team were the innovators and manufacturers of the new balloons. Supporters note that the object moved against the balloon, flew far above it, and was held for a full minute in a 25-power instrument.

There is an irony here. In 1947 Moore was project engineer on Project Mogul. A balloon train he launched on 4 June 1947 was later identified as the source of the debris on the Foster ranch near Roswell. In the 1990s that made him a key witness for the balloon explanation. The same engineer who helped explain one famous case stood firmly behind another. Karl Pflock called Arrey one of the most impressive early UFO sightings, and still unexplained.