USCGC Sebago radar-visual sighting, Gulf of Mexico

Sputnik II launched on November 3. Levelland, Texas, had its night of reports on November 2 and 3, and Kirtland AFB followed on November 4. On Tuesday, November 5, the 254-foot Owasco-class cutter USCGC Sebago, homeported at Mobile, Alabama, was about 200 miles south of the Mississippi delta.

At 5:10 a.m. the bridge radar suddenly showed an unidentified target at 246 degrees true. Range 12,000 yards, almost 7 miles. Moving north to south. At 5:14 it was gone. At 5:16 it was back, some 22 miles north. At 5:18 it faded at about 55 miles. At 5:20 it returned once more. This time it was stationary, about 7 miles north.

The ship's combat information center confirmed it. "It was a very strong contact, considered good," said Ens. Wayne Schotley, the officer of the deck. A Coast Guard spokesman put it more starkly: "in two minutes it went 33 miles straight away from the ship."

At 5:21, four men were on deck: Schotley; the navigator, Lt (jg) Donald Schaefer, spelled Shaffer in the Washington Post; Quartermaster first class Kenneth Smith; and Radioman Thomas Kirk. To the west, about 31 degrees above the horizon, they saw "a brilliant white object with no distinguishable shape" moving horizontally from south to north. It lasted 3 to 5 seconds. The Associated Press wrote that it "resembled a brilliant planet moving at tremendous speed."

The radar kept watching. The last contact came at 5:37, about 175 miles to the north, at an estimated 660 mph. Schaefer put the object's speed "between 1000 and 3300 miles per hour," based on elapsed time and distance between radar sightings.

The cutter refuelled at Pensacola Naval Air Station and went on to Mobile. On November 7 the Washington Post named radar man James Moore among the crew and reported that the crewmen "have not yet been questioned by Air Force investigators." They were booked for NBC's Today in New York, though whether the segment aired has never been confirmed. That same morning, around 5:20, A/1C William J. Mey, an electronics technician at Keesler AFB in Mississippi, reported an elliptical object approaching from the south and then accelerating into clouds. NICAP treated it as possible corroboration.

Project Blue Book concluded that the radar returns were false targets, with some contacts attributed to aircraft. The light seen from the deck was probably a meteor. For the Condon Committee, Dr Gordon D. Thayer studied the Key West radiosonde profile. He found alternating wet and dry layers able to produce anomalous propagation. He judged the visual object consistent with a meteor, and the first radar target consistent with an aircraft, possibly from Eglin AFB.

NICAP read it differently, featuring the case in The UFO Evidence in 1964 as one craft and one continuous story. Decades later, skeptic Tim Printy went through the Blue Book logs in SUNlite. The first contact, he argued, matched a Navy patrol aircraft, probably a P2V. The second looked like a false target. NICAP, in his view, had merged separate contacts into a single craft circling the ship, so it was not "best evidence."

No one has ever suggested a hoax. The quarrel is over interpretation. Strong radar returns. Four men on deck. A brilliant light that lasted seconds. A timeline that can be read as one object or several. Nearly seventy years on, the USCGC Sebago case still divides those who read it.