RB-47 Radar and ELINT UFO Encounter

The aircraft flew out of Forbes AFB in Topeka, Kansas, with the 55th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing. Six men were aboard the RB-47H. Maj. Lewis D. Chase was pilot and aircraft commander, James H. McCoid his copilot, Capt. Thomas H. Hanley the navigator. In the back, with no windows, sat three electronic warfare officers: John J. Provenzano, Capt. Frank B. McClure and Capt. Walter A. Tuchscherer. The last leg was an electronic countermeasures exercise on the way home.

Just before 04:00 CST, over the Mississippi coast near Gulfport, the crew's receivers caught a signal at about 3,000 MHz. It looked like a ground search radar. But it moved up the scope during straight flight. A fixed station on the ground should have drifted the other way.

At 04:10 CST, near Winnsboro, Louisiana, Chase and McCoid saw it. A "very intense white light with light blue tint", closing fast from the left at their own altitude. Chase had no time to react. The light crossed in front at an angular velocity he had never seen matched in 20 years of flying. Then it apparently disappeared.

The signal began to pace them. It held a fixed bearing while the crew changed speed and went to full power. Chase saw a "huge light" about 5,000 feet below. Then a "bright red glow 'bigger than a house'" dead ahead. At one point both pilots saw two red objects at once.

Near Fort Worth the object appeared to stop, and the aircraft overshot. The ground radar station called "Utah", at Duncanville, lost it. Near Mineral Wells it returned on all three channels. Chase dived, and the light, Utah radar return and McClure's receiver signal blinked out together. Low fuel ended the pursuit before the signal faded near Oklahoma City.

Project Blue Book filed the case as "Identified as American Airlines Flight 655". Critics say it merged two events more than 600 miles apart. Flight 655 belonged to a separate near-collision between two American Airlines DC-6s near Salt Flats, Texas, the same night.

The Condon Committee studied it as Case 5. Investigator Roy Craig found the crew remembered the date as "Fall 1957", and no records turned up. The verdict: their descriptions "are not adequate to allow identification of the phenomenon encountered." According to James E. McDonald, the study's radar specialist Gordon Thayer called the airliner explanation "literally ridiculous".

McDonald championed the case at the AAAS symposium in December 1969 and in "UFO Encounter II" in 1971. The object, he stressed, had vanished and reappeared on three independent channels at once. The AIAA UFO Subcommittee said it "deserves the attention of the engineering and scientific community." In Jerome Clark's UFO Encyclopedia, Brad Sparks called it "the first conclusive scientific proof for the existence of UFOs."

Philip J. Klass disagreed. He proposed equipment malfunction, a fireball for the first sighting, an airliner for the later lights, and ground radars, including a training radar at Keesler AFB in Biloxi. Sparks replied that the Keesler course ran September to June. Tim Printy answered that Keesler was training at "maximum capacity" in July 1957. Kevin Randle found that the 1957 papers and the crew's later memories do not always match.

No photographs of the object exist, and no radar-scope photos or wire recordings have ever been found. Still, the case is often paired with the 1956 Lakenheath and Bentwaters radar-visual case, and Best Evidence: Top 10 UFO Sightings (2007) ranked it number 1. Most later researchers, on both sides, call it unresolved.