The Falconbridge NORAD Radar-Visual Sighting, 1975

Canadian Forces Station Falconbridge stood near Sudbury, Ontario. It was a Pinetree Line radar station, home to No. 33 Radar Squadron, call sign "Tomboy". Its job was to watch the northern sky for NORAD.

It began around 3:00 a.m. Sudbury residents phoned the police about low lights that "suddenly shot straight up". Four objects. Three hovering, one moving in a circle.

At about 6:15 a.m., four people at the radar station saw it for themselves. The official message described a "circular object, brilliantly lighted with two black spots in the center", climbing at high speed from 42,000 to 72,000 feet with no horizontal movement. The sighting lasted 14 minutes.

Major Robert Oliver, the commanding officer, watched the nearer object "rising vertically at tremendous speed" and took three snapshots with a Brownie camera. Search and height finder radars painted a target 25 to 30 nautical miles south of the site. To the naked eye it looked "like a bright star". Through binoculars it was a 100-foot sphere with craters, "possibly portholes".

The police saw it too. Regional Constables Bob Whiteside and Alex Keable spotted three objects, then a fourth. Near Coniston on Highway 17 East, Constable John Marsh watched lights to the southwest. The object "moved in a jerking manner and had pulsating lights". Other officers, using binoculars, called it "shaped like a cylinder", or "resembling a gem with colored lights around it". About 90 miles north-east, in Haileybury, radio dispatcher Fred Sauve saw "a bright object over Lake Temiskaming".

Two F-106 interceptors launched from Selfridge Air National Guard Base in Michigan. The sources disagree on the hour, 10:45 a.m. or 12:50 p.m. The jets searched from 8,000 to 30,000 feet. They made no contact.

NORAD did not hide it. "Yes, we saw this so-called UFO at the same time people outside were seeing it too," said Capt. Gordon Hilchie of the 22nd NORAD Region. "They shot up from 26,000 feet to 45,000 feet, stopped for a period of time, and then shot up to 72,000 feet." Lt. Col. Brian Wooding, the Control Centre director, said "this is about the only one we've actually seen on radar, and the only time we've gone to the point of scrambling interceptors." A NORAD spokesman in Colorado Springs said it was tracked on radar intermittently for six hours.

Robin Rowland of the Sudbury Star broke the story that day. Wire services carried it as far as The New York Times. By Rowland's account, it was the first time NORAD publicly confirmed scrambling jets for a possible UFO. The report went to the National Research Council, and NORAD referred it to the Space Defense Center and intelligence. A US Defense Department message grouped Falconbridge with the base intrusions, noting that "efforts by Air Guard helicopters, SAC helicopters and NORAD F-106s have failed to produce positive ID."

No official conclusion ever identified the object. Suggested explanations include Venus, clouds and weather balloons. No hoax has ever been alleged. And Major Oliver's photographs? Their fate is unknown.

The NORAD log book page was declassified in 1995. The case lives on in Clear Intent by Lawrence Fawcett and Barry Greenwood, in Raymond E. Fowler's Casebook of a UFO Investigator and in Palmiro Campagna's The UFO Files. It remains a rare thing. A UFO that NORAD saw, tracked and chased, and then confirmed on the record.