Redmond, Oregon UFO Incident

Redmond is a small city in Deschutes County, central Oregon. In 1959 its airport, Roberts Field, housed an FAA communication station. Thursday, September 24. Shortly before dawn.

Officer Robert Dickerson of the Redmond City Police was on patrol. He saw a bright object falling like a meteor. It did not burn out. It grew into a larger ball, stopped abruptly, and hovered about 200 feet above the ground, bright enough to light the nearby treetops.

"It came close to the ground and it stopped," Dickerson said. "And at that time, I pulled over the side of the road and stopped the car and watched it."

He drove toward it. The light turned orange and moved very rapidly northeast, about 10 miles, to an estimated 3,000 feet. At the station, Laverne Wertz and other FAA staff raised binoculars. They saw something round and flat, with tongues of "flame" extending from the rim. The log recorded long tongues of red, yellow and green light that "extended and retracted at irregular times."

At 5:10 a.m. the report went to Seattle Air Route Traffic Control Center. The object also appeared on radar at the Klamath Falls GCI site. Six F-102s were scrambled from Portland. A B-47 and an F-89 already airborne were diverted to join them. As a high-speed aircraft approached, the log reads, the "UFO took shape of mushroom." A long yellow and red flame showed from its lower side as it rose rapidly and disappeared above clouds estimated at 14,000 feet. It was seen again about 20 miles south of Redmond, at an estimated 35,000 feet. Seattle Center later reported radar contact 25 miles south at 52,000 feet.

Later retellings, including MUFON UFO Journal #257, add that the object shot straight up in the jets' path and that one fighter almost went out of control in its wake. The FAA log says nothing of this.

On January 15, 1960, L.E. Davis, Chief of Air Traffic at the Redmond station, set the log down in a letter sent to NICAP. The Air Force answers kept shifting. First Venus, then a balloon. On January 19, 1960, Maj. Lawrence J. Tacker wrote that ATIC carried the case as "insufficient information." On April 27, 1960, Col. Gordon B. Knight told Sen. Warren G. Magnuson the radar return was "a radar echo from a gap filler antenna located on a mountain at the 8010-foot level." By 1963, the Air Force was back to Venus. Dan Wilson later found 55 documents on the case in the Project Blue Book files.

The FAA had said on October 1, 1959, that people had probably seen Venus. Boyd Wolfe, of the FAA's Redmond technical field office, identified a bright object seen the following Sunday as the planet. The Blue Book record card weighs refraction involving Venus and Regulus, and notes that the GCI site did not consider the radar and visual observations related.

Critics answered that a low hover, a 10 mile relocation and a climb through cloud do not fit a planet. "Venus would have behaved very strangely if the people who saw it were reporting accurately," said Trish Pinkerton. NICAP replied that the gap filler echo, by the Air Force's own account, "did not move," while height-finder altitudes varied from 6,000 to 54,000 feet.

KGW-TV's "Space Report", hosted by Hal Starr, covered the case that September. NICAP's The UFO Evidence carried it in 1964. Donald Keyhoe and Jerome Clark retold it. Ground Saucer Watch later demanded CIA and FAA documents under the Freedom of Information Act. No photograph exists. The FAA's International Geophysical Year monitoring camera had stopped filming about an hour earlier.