The Nash-Fortenberry Sighting over Chesapeake Bay

The summer of 1952 brought a wave of sightings across the United States. On Monday, July 14, a Pan American World Airways DC-4 was flying from New York to Miami with ten passengers and three crew. Capt. F. V. Koepke was in command alongside First Officer William B. Nash, a former Navy patrol-bomber pilot, and Second Officer William H. Fortenberry. The airliner cruised on autopilot at 8,000 feet over the Chesapeake Bay, heading for Norfolk. The night was clear.

8:12 p.m., Eastern Standard Time. Nash pointed out Newport News ahead and to the right. Then a red brilliance appeared beyond it, near the ground. The pilots wrote that it "seemed simply to have appeared, all of a sudden, in place."

Six bright objects were streaking toward them, well below the plane, in a narrow echelon with the leader lowest. They were circular, like coins, and the pilots put each at about 100 feet across. They glowed like hot coals, far brighter than the ground lights.

Halfway in, the leader seemed to slow. Then all six flipped on edge together, and the last five slid past the leader. They flipped flat again and darted off on a new course, about 150 degrees from the first. "The only descriptive comparison we can offer," the pilots wrote, "is a ball ricocheting off a wall."

Two more identical objects darted out from behind and under the airliner. All eight blinked out, blinked on again in line, and sped westward, climbing in a long arc above the plane. Then they vanished, blinking out one by one in no particular order. It had lasted about 12 seconds.

At 7 a.m. the next day, the Air Force called. Maj. John H. Sharpe and four officers from the 7th District Office of Special Investigations questioned each pilot separately for 1 hour 45 minutes, then together. Map overlays were compared and a weather report obtained.

The pilots were not alone. About 15 minutes earlier, a naval officer aboard the cruiser USS Roanoke had seen eight red lights moving in a straight line. Sharpe said seven more reports came from the area within about 30 minutes. Two days later, Paul R. Hill, an aerodynamicist at NACA Langley, watched two amber lights slow, turn and revolve around each other over Hampton Roads. Project Blue Book ruled out jets from Langley AFB and filed the case as Unknown.

Donald Menzel was not persuaded. In 1962 letters to Nash and in The World of Flying Saucers, he proposed haze-distorted ground lights, cockpit reflections, fireflies trapped between the window panes, and a searchlight shining through inversion layers. Nash replied that the objects looked the same through several windows, with the cockpit door closed and no light inside. Researcher Thomas Tulien, revisiting the case in 2002, noted that none of this explained the formation or the edge-on flip, and that the weather report showed no inversion. In 1994, Steuart Campbell proposed a mirage of Venus.

Fortenberry died on November 8, 1957, when Pan Am Flight 7 was lost over the Pacific. Nash later flew the Berlin corridors for 15 years. In 2002 he told Tulien, "I know to this day, that it was nothing from this planet." Edward J. Ruppelt covered the case in his 1956 book, and the Blue Book file rests in The National Archives. Nobody has alleged that the pilots invented the story.