Goose Bay AFB radar-visual sighting: "target suddenly enlarges"

In 1952, Goose Air Base sat at the edge of Labrador. It was a USAF base under the Northeast Air Command. Labrador then belonged to the Province of Newfoundland, which had joined Canada in 1949. That is why Edward J. Ruppelt later placed it at "Goose AFB in Newfoundland." Today the airfield is CFB Goose Bay.

June 19, 1952. At 2:37 a.m., Project Blue Book names 2nd Lt. A'Gostino as the witness, an officer of the 373rd Transportation Major Port. The officer saw a light, not a shape. It was red at first, moved in a wobbly manner, then turned white. The sighting lasted approximately one minute.

Donald Keyhoe told it more vividly in his 1953 book Flying Saucers from Outer Space. In his version, ground men outside saw a strange, red-lighted object come in over the field. They watched the light wobble or flutter. Then it turned white and quickly disappeared, apparently as the craft went into a steep climb.

The base's Ground Controlled Approach radar had a target. The Blue Book summary describes it as stationary. Then it suddenly enlarged. Then it returned to its previous size.

Keyhoe put the two together. "The radar blip suddenly enlarged, as if the device had banked, exposing a larger surface to the radar beam. At the same moment the watching airmen saw the red light wobble or flutter." Ruppelt described the radar alone. The targets came across the scope, grew, then became smaller again. He recorded one unofficial comment that the object might be flat or disk-shaped, banking to present a greater reflecting surface.

The Northeast Air Command history for the first half of 1952 logged an unidentified aerial object. Its historian wrote: "Confirmation of the sighting was afforded by GCA at Goose Air Base." Project Blue Book carried the case as an Unknown. It appears in Don Berliner's list of Blue Book Unknowns. Brad Sparks catalogues it too, describing "possibly a disc rotating to present wider reflective surface."

The banking disc depends on timing. Fran Ridge of NICAP notes that the Blue Book records appear to show the radar and visual sightings as two separate events. Keyhoe presented them as simultaneous. Yet the command history, written that same year, said the radar confirmed what the officer saw.

Sceptics point to other causes. A sudden change in the size of a radar return can come from anomalous propagation, weather or interference. One unconfirmed lead says the official ATIC comment was weather. A red light that turns white and wobbles low in the pre-dawn sky could also be a twinkling star or planet. That reasoning was later applied to another Goose Bay case. No source applies it to this night.

Goose Bay kept reporting. Two days later, another Major Port officer saw a disk-shaped object travelling very slowly, with no sound audible as it gained altitude. In November and December 1952, F-94 crews of the 59th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron chased lights that shifted between red and white. Blue Book blamed Venus for one of them. In May 1953, an F-94 crew chased a white light up to 40,000 feet.

Among all of these, June 19 is remembered for one detail. A blip on a scope that suddenly grew, then shrank again. It is still listed as Unknown.