Tinker AFB and Wichita Radar Sightings, 1965

Summer 1965. A wave of sightings was building across the Midwest. On July 31, near Wynnewood, Oklahoma, Lewis Sikes watched a blue-green object with a rotating centre. The next night became one of the core events of the flap.

Sunday evening, August 1. In the control tower at Tinker AFB, near Oklahoma City, observers saw four objects to the south at an estimated 22,000 feet. They were "bluish-white with a red haze in color, the size of a pea held at arm's length." One moved south and another north, at approximately 150 to 200 mph. The other two did not appear to move. The tower watched for an hour and a half.

The Oklahoma Highway Patrol was watching too. Four patrolmen at Shawnee, less than 30 miles from Tinker, saw four objects travelling in a diamond formation. At the same instant the Patrol logged one sighting at Harrah and two from Norman. Officers in three patrol cars watched for about 30 minutes as the objects changed colour "from red to white to blue to green." The Patrol reportedly said they descended "from 22,000 to 4,000 feet in a matter of seconds." Dispatcher Jim West was firm. "If these were just a bunch of people, I could say it was a crank. But when this many officers see something, then there's something there."

Oklahoma Journal photographer Jim Swatek saw an object "red and green in color" and heard "absolutely no sound." Near Ardmore, businessman Jack Thompson and his wife Helen watched through a 60-power telescope from their cabin on Tater Hill. "They appear to be cone-shaped, like a spinning top, and have a green cast to them," he said. "They slip and fall away for a few seconds and then turn, circle and move back in."

Tinker reportedly had up to four unknowns on radar at about 22,000 feet. The 746th AC&W Squadron confirmed one contact at 10,000 feet near Norman. Then Kansas joined in. At 2:30 a.m. on August 2, unidentified blips appeared on the Weather Bureau radar at the Wichita Municipal Airport. They came and went until after 6 a.m. and were concentrated around Wellington, where at least four residents reported coloured glows in the southern sky.

The record was never clean. The base security office confirmed the sightings at first. Then officials refused to confirm or deny radar tracks. And the radar approach control tower at Tinker reported no contacts during the height of the local sightings.

Project Blue Book opened a file, and the reports went to the Foreign Technology Division at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. On August 3 the Air Force called the sightings "astronomical in nature." The culprits were Jupiter or the stars Rigel, Capella, Betelguese or Aldebaran. By the fall, a temperature inversion and a meteor shower had been added. The one radar report of an object was put down to a reflection from a ground object. Mental Floss links the Jupiter explanation to Blue Book chief Hector Quintanilla.

Dr. Robert Risser, director of the Oklahoma Science and Art Foundation planetarium, did not hold back. "This is as far from the truth as you can get." A UPI reporter in Wichita objected that "Ordinary radar does not pick up planets and stars." Sceptics point to problems in the record itself. The altitudes conflict, and Tinker's approach radar showed nothing at the peak of the sightings.

NICAP now indexes the Blue Book pages on the case, and Marilyn A. Hudson has revisited that summer in Sooner Saucers. The lights over Shawnee and the blips over Wichita remain part of the unfinished story of 1965.