The Gorman Dogfight

It was eight thirty in the evening on Friday, October 1, 1948. Second Lieutenant George F. Gorman, 25, a World War II veteran with the North Dakota Air National Guard, was bringing his F-51 Mustang into Fargo from a cross-country flight. The night was clear. Below him, at Dacotah Field, the North Dakota Agricultural College Bison were playing the Augustana Vikings.

About 9:00 pm, something passed him on his right. It looked like the taillight of another airplane. The tower said only a Piper Cub was up. Gorman could plainly see the Cub outlined against the city lights. Around the strange light, he could see no body at all.

He closed to within 1,000 yards. "It was about six to eight inches in diameter, clear white, and completely round without fuzz at the edges," he said. It was blinking on and off. In the Hector Airport tower, controller Lloyd D. Jensen watched it through binoculars. His colleague H. E. Johnson placed it at about 2,000 feet. In the Cub, Dr. A. D. Cannon and his passenger Einar Neilson saw a light moving fast toward the west.

Then the light became steady. It pulled into a sharp left bank and made a pass at the tower. "I dived after it and brought my manifold pressure up to sixty inches but I couldn't catch up," Gorman said. The light zoomed up. At 7,000 feet it turned, and he could not cut inside it.

Then it came for him. "Suddenly it made a sharp right turn and we headed straight at each other. Just when we were about to collide, I guess I got scared. I went into a dive and the light passed over my canopy at about 500 feet." Again they closed head on. Again he dived away. Trying to turn with it, he blacked out briefly. At 14,000 feet, at about 9:27 pm, the light shot straight up and disappeared. It had made no sound. It left no exhaust trail.

Project Sign investigators arrived within hours. They took sworn statements, collected Gorman's sketches and went over the Mustang with a Geiger counter. It was more radioactive than a plane that had sat on the ground for several days. "I am convinced that there was definite thought behind its maneuvers," Gorman declared on October 23. Edward J. Ruppelt later ranked the case with Mantell and Chiles-Whitted as the three 1948 classics that convinced Air Force intelligence specialists UFOs were real. In December, Gorman wrote to Kenneth Arnold that the Tenth Air Force had "issued direct orders concerning the disc or object."

On January 24, 1949, an Air Weather Service analysis reached ATIC. A lighted weather balloon had been released from Fargo at 8:50 pm. The maneuvers were an illusion produced by Gorman's own flying. Late in the chase, he was probably following Jupiter. A Wright Field memo put the radioactivity down to cosmic rays. Jerome Clark found the answer plausible. After Mantell, he wrote, this may be "the most overrated UFO report in the early history of the phenomenon."

Others disagreed. Donald Keyhoe said the balloon had been tracked by theodolite and found to have moved in a different direction. James E. McDonald also disputed the verdict. Gorman and the tower witnesses rejected the balloon.

Gorman turned down an interview with LIFE in 1952 and never spoke publicly about the case again. He retired as a lieutenant colonel. He was never convinced he had spent 27 minutes dueling a lighted balloon. In 2019, HISTORY's Project Blue Book opened with "The Fuller Dogfight," a fictionalised retelling of that night over Fargo.