The Red Bluff Incident: Two Highway Patrolmen and the Silent Object

Summer 1960. Northern California was entering a cluster of sightings that NICAP would describe as "including many police witnesses." Officer Charles A. Carson of the California Highway Patrol had served four years in the U.S. Air Force. His partner, Officer Stanley Scott, had been a paratrooper in the Korean War. On the night of Saturday 13 August, they were on Hoag Road, east of Corning, watching for a speeding motorcycle.

Just before midnight, they saw what looked like an airliner falling from the sky. They jumped out, expecting a crash. "The first thing we noticed was an absolute silence," Carson wrote. The object was "surrounded by a glow making the round or oblong object visible."

There were definite red lights at each end. At times about five white lights showed between them. He put it at about 150 feet long.

At 100 to 200 feet off the ground, it "suddenly reversed completely, at high speed, and gained approximately 500 feet altitude. There the object stopped." Twice it came straight toward the patrol car. Each time it swept the area with a huge red light.

When Scott turned the car's red light on it, it went away. Strong static filled the radio whenever it came close. James E. McDonald, who interviewed Carson in 1966, said it came within easy pistol range. The officers drew their weapons.

They followed it east to the Vina Plains Fire Station. There a second, similar object joined it. Both swept red beams across the sky, hovered, and sank below the eastern horizon. It was about 2:05 a.m.

Deputy Clarence Fry and Deputy Montgomery watched from Los Molinos. Carson said they "each described the object and its maneuvers exactly as we saw them." The night jailer in Red Bluff saw it for a short time. Fry called Red Bluff Air Force Station and was told an unidentified object was on its scopes. The next day the station denied it. The officers were not allowed to interview the radar operator.

Project Blue Book asked McClellan AFB for a detailed investigation. Then Congressman Edgar W. Hiestand wrote to the Air Force. The reply said: "The individuals concerned witnessed a refraction of the Planet Mars and the two bright stars Aldeberan and Betelgeux." In November, Col. Philip C. Evans of the Air Technical Intelligence Center named Mars "the most probable culprit," with a strong temperature inversion over northern California. The final Blue Book listing became Mars and Capella.

NICAP checked the sky and found Mars below the horizon at 11:45 p.m. Betelgeuse did not rise until nearly 3 a.m. "Apparently the AF gambled that no one would check the star positions," NICAP wrote. McDonald said Capella was "nowhere near the location of the sighted object" and that the radiosonde data did not support Donald Menzel's inversions. Carson was blunt. "No one will ever convince us that we were witnessing a refraction of light."

Richard H. Hall published Carson's letter and sketch in The UFO Evidence. J. Allen Hynek wrote the case up as "The Two Red Bluff Policemen." No source has ever accused the officers of inventing it. Carson's words still stand. "I've never seen anything like it before or since."