Paul R. Hill's Hampton Roads sighting

Summer 1952. The skies over the American East Coast were busy. On July 14, a Pan Am crew over Chesapeake Bay reported six glowing discs, then two more. Within days, radar sightings over Washington, D.C. would follow. Edward J. Ruppelt, chief of Project Blue Book, later placed the Hampton report in the "build-up of reports" that led to Washington.

The witness was no casual sky watcher. Paul R. Hill was an aerodynamicist and research manager at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics laboratory at Langley, where he worked from 1939 to 1970. He set up the Wallops Island ramjet flight-test programme and worked on flying platforms with Charles Zimmerman.

Wednesday, July 16, 1952. Hill and Frances Hoback, his future wife, stood on the Hampton waterfront, looking south over Hampton Roads. Two amber lights came in from the south. Side by side, about 200 feet apart, at about 500 mph. Hill later wrote that triangulation put them at 15,000 to 18,000 feet. "From all angles, they looked like amber traffic lights a couple of blocks away."

Then they slowed. "They practically came to a stop as they approached," Hill recalled. "It was then that they started their strange jitter." The lights made a U-turn. In Ruppelt's telling, they seemed to "jockey for position in the formation." Then they revolved around each other in a horizontal circle, fast.

A third amber sphere arrived from the Atlantic. A fourth came in from the James River. Four now, the lights sped off to the south at about 500 mph. The whole event lasted about 3 minutes. "The observers heard no sound," Ruppelt wrote, "and they were away from all city noises."

Hill did what an engineer does. He calculated. By his reckoning, the lights were spheres about 13 to 20 feet in diameter. The tight circle meant a centripetal acceleration of about 100 g, and one version of his figures gives about 122 g. To Hill, the circling looked like a "rendezvous signal."

The report reached Project Blue Book at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Investigators found that several B-26s from Langley AFB had been in the area, and the sighting was classified as aircraft. Yet none of the B-26 pilots remembered being over Hampton Roads.

Ruppelt had his doubts. Aircraft, he noted, don't carry just one or two amber lights, and had the lights been on an airplane, "the airplane would have been huge or very close to the observers." As for the witness, "the man from the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics was a very famous aerodynamicist and of such professional stature that if he said the lights weren't airplanes they weren't." Ruppelt never named him in print. He described the second witness as "another man."

In 1962 Hill saw something again. A metallic, dirigible-shaped object over Chesapeake Bay "began to accelerate very rapidly," trailing a "straw-yellow, or pale flame-colored wake." He did not report it. For about 25 years he served as an unofficial clearing house for sighting reports at NASA.

His conclusions appeared only after his death in 1990. Unconventional Flying Objects: A Scientific Analysis was published in 1995. Its argument is that UFOs "obey, not defy, the laws of physics." Edgar Mitchell praised it as "a masterful job." Officially, the lights over Hampton Roads were aircraft. None of the pilots remembered being there.