The Lockheed Sighting: Kelly Johnson and the WV-2 Crew

Clarence L. "Kelly" Johnson was Lockheed's Chief Engineer and the founder of the Skunk Works. On Wednesday, December 16, 1953, he was at his Lindero Ranch with his wife, Althea. The house sat on a hillside three miles west of Agoura, facing the coast, not far from Point Mugu Naval Air Station.

At 16:29 PST a Lockheed WV-2 Super Constellation, the Navy's airborne early warning version, left Burbank on a test flight along the Los Angeles coast. It was climbing toward 20,000 feet. Aboard were Roy E. Wimmer, Rudy L. Thoren, Philip A. Colman, Joseph F. Ware Jr. and Charles "Charlie" Grugan.

At 4:58 PM, Wimmer noticed a dark shape ahead at about their altitude of 14,000 feet. It was not moving. "Look out, there's a flying saucer," he joked to Thoren. Thoren turned the WV-2 a bit to the right to head toward it.

For about five minutes they flew straight at it. Their relative position did not appear to change. Thoren saw "a very large flying wing airplane" with "definite sharp edges." Colman thought of "a B-36 type airplane heading straight towards us," silhouetted against a bright background.

Then it went. Colman said it "suddenly accelerated due west." Wimmer watched it shrink, "remaining dark and solid-looking the entire time as it dwindled to a tiny dot." The WV-2, at about 225 mph, never gained on it.

On the ground, Johnson first took it for a lenticular cloud or a smoke trail. But it "remained stationary and unchanged for several minutes." Through 8x binoculars it was a long, thin black ellipse with sharp edges. Then it began "accelerating away from him in a shallow climb in a direction opposite to the motion of the other clouds." It slipped behind the first layer of haze.

The five written statements and Johnson's sketch went through Lt. Gen. Putt to Project Blue Book at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. The record card read: "First appeared as black stationary cloud, then rapid movement in long shallow climb." The verdict was a lenticular cloud. A map drawn by Ware was later lost. "Essentially the reports were merely filed," Martin Shough would write. Johnson was unmoved. "I am now more firmly convinced than ever that such devices exist," he said.

The cloud answer still has defenders. A 2012 article, "The Lockheed UFO Case Revisited," cited UK weather forecaster Nigel Bolton, who judged the conditions "ripe for the formation of lenticular clouds." Joel Carpenter, writing for NICAP, called Blue Book's identification "untenable."

In 2014 Shough crossed the two lines of sight. They met at about 17,000 feet, above or near Anacapa Island in the Santa Barbara Channel. The implied size was about 1,700 feet across, "obviously very difficult to square with any imaginable kind of aircraft." Using radiosonde data, he argued against a cloud, a contrail, a balloon, a mirage and the WV-2 itself. He also warned that his "chain of quantitative inference is fragile."

There are no photographs and no radar. What remains is geometry. Seven witnesses, two vantage points, and one object placed where the lines crossed. Paul Kimball's 2007 documentary Best Evidence: Top 10 UFO Sightings ranked the case fifth, and the Center for UFO Studies keeps a paper on it, The Lockheed UFO Case, 1953.