The Fukuoka F-61 Black Widow Radar-Visual Intercept

October 15, 1948. A clear moonlit night off the northwest coast of Kyushu, Japan. A USAF F-61 Black Widow night fighter of the 68th Fighter Squadron, 347th Fighter Group (All Weather), was flying about 50 miles northwest of Fukuoka, over the Korea Strait.

There were two men aboard. 1st Lt. Oliver "Bud" Hemphill Jr. was the pilot. 2nd Lt. Barton Halter was the radar observer. His airborne set could see out to 10 miles.

At 11:05 p.m., Halter picked up a target ahead. It was moving at about 200 mph, somewhere between 5,000 and 6,000 feet. The F-61 closed at 220 mph, only 20 mph faster. Then, as the crew's statement put it, "the target gave the indication of diving beneath us... it was gone too fast."

They went in again. And again. Six intercepts in all, each about a minute long, all within under 10 minutes. The pattern never changed.

In Edward J. Ruppelt's words, the F-61 would "get to within 12,000 feet of the UFO only to have it accelerate to an estimated 1,200 miles per hour." Then it slowed down again, "leaving the F-61 far behind." Once it made a 180-degree turn and dived under the fighter. Another time it came up from behind and "added a burst of speed dead ahead and outdistanced us immediately." Halter watched it pull "away to the outer limit of my set which is 10 miles."

On the third pass, Hemphill saw it. "I had an excellent silhouette of the target thrown against a very reflective undercast," he said. It was 20 to 30 feet long and looked "like a rifle bullet," tapered towards the rear, with a square-cut aft end. No wings. No tail. A dark or dull finish.

No exhaust. It "did not look like any type aircraft I was familiar with." The closest he could come was the German ME-163. On the fourth pass it went over them from behind, and he got "just a fleeting glance." The intelligence report said "the object seemed cognizant of the whereabouts of the F-61 at all times."

The report went up through Far East Air Forces intelligence channels. The file held Hemphill's statement, a summary and the crew's sketch. Project Sign evaluated it as "Unidentified." In the later Project Blue Book index it became Case #218, Unknown. Ruppelt went on to head Blue Book, and he included the case in The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects.

The case has one weak point. Two ground radar stations, Shigamo-Shima and Fukae-Shima, tracked the F-61. Neither of them ever picked up the unknown. James E. McDonald suggested ground clutter as a possible reason. Radar null zones were also raised as an explanation. The crew rejected that. They said the target vanished from their scope because of its speed. Their own guess was a new type aircraft "by some agency unknown to us." No case-specific sceptical explanation has been published.

In 1968, McDonald told a House committee that this was "one of many cases wherein radar detection of an unconventional object was supported by visual observation." J. Allen Hynek retold all six intercepts in The Hynek UFO Report. Martin Shough's NARCAP radar catalogue begins on this very date. NICAP rates the case Preliminary 5. In 2024, Thomas Tulien called it "The Original 'Tic-Tac' UFO" and set it beside the Nimitz Tic Tac encounter of 2004.