Harmon Field Disc and Cloud Hole Photographs

July 1947. The flying disc wave was at its height. Two days earlier, Roswell had made its announcement, and one day earlier, glowing objects had been reported over Grand Falls, Newfoundland. On the island's west coast stood Harmon Field, the US base at Stephenville. Newfoundland was still a separate Dominion and would not join Canada until 1949.

10 July 1947. Late afternoon. Three Pan American Airways mechanics were returning from a fishing trip. John E. Woodruff, Robert Leidy and John N. Mehrman Jr. were driving up a mountain road about six miles south-southwest of the base. Woodruff saw the disc. It was silver and circular, the size of a C-54 transport. It was flying at high velocity at about 10,000 feet, paralleling the earth's surface, and passed in horizontal flight along a great curved course.

Behind it ran a dark bluish-black trail. About fifteen miles long. It was compared to the afterglow of a powerful searchlight when suddenly switched off. The object seemed to ascend and cut a path through the scattered clouds. The trail passed over the base and out toward the north-northeast.

The disc was seen only briefly. The gap it left was not. It stayed open in the sky for about an hour. Leidy photographed the trail and the hole in the clouds in two Kodachrome colour shots. The disc itself is not in either frame.

Base intelligence filed reports on 16 July, and the case went into the weekly intelligence summary. By 21 July a detailed report had reached the Pentagon. Brig. Gen. George Schulgen ordered Col. Howard M. McCoy of Air Materiel Command intelligence at Wright Field to send investigators to Harmon Field. According to Hall and Connors, the team may have included the engineer Alfred Loedding.

The T-2 engineers read the object as a powered craft. "The bluish-black trail seems to indicate ordinary combustion from a turbo-jet engine, athodyd motor, or some combination of these types of power plants," they wrote. The absence of noise and the clear path through the clouds indicated "a relatively large mass flow of a rectangular cross section containing a considerable amount of heat." Project Sign filed the case as Incidents 26, 27 and 27a, with a final report by Capt. William Smith, and the file includes an evaluation by J. Allen Hynek. Air Intelligence Report No. 100-203-79 cited the case in December 1948, and Project Blue Book classified it as Unknown.

No one has claimed the photos or the witnesses were faked. The debate is about what made the gap. Analyst Martin Shough rejected a simple distrail. He noted that "true cumulus clouds are not thin sheets, they are deep volumes." His most plausible option was a shadow cast from above onto thin cloud by a dense contrail or smoke trail.

A meteor trail, he thought, seemed unlikely. "A smoky jet or missile might do it." He conceded that Woodruff's translucent disc and the feathered edges of the gap do not fit easily.

On 9 May 1949, editor Ken Purdy sent Donald Keyhoe a telegram. "See if you can find anything about a secret picture, taken at Harmon Field, Newfoundland," it read. The request appears in Chapter I of The Flying Saucers Are Real, the case's first appearance in popular literature. It is now case 37 in Brad Sparks' catalogue of Blue Book Unknowns and is documented in detail by NICAP. The original Kodachromes remain elusive. Shough asked: "Do we know where these are?"