Walesville F-94C Crash During an Unknown-Aircraft Intercept

Summer 1954. Griffiss Air Force Base, Rome, New York. At 11:05 local time on July 2, an F-94C Starfire, serial 51-13559, took off on a training flight. Lt. William E. Atkins, 24, of Dutton, Va., was the pilot. Lt. Henry F. Coudon, 26, of Perryville, Md., was his radar observer. The jet carried 48 high-powered 2 1/2 inch rockets.

The Griffiss ground controller diverted them. An unidentified aircraft, at 10,000 ft. The pilot had trouble finding it, so the controller sent him after a second unknown. Atkins identified that one as an Air Force C-47, tail number 6099, letting down to land. Then he started a descent. The cockpit temperature increased abruptly. The engine plenum chamber fire warning light came on. Atkins shut down the engine. The light stayed on. Faced with "critical low altitude and the fire warning," both men ejected. Neither was hurt.

The Starfire flew on alone. About four miles from the point of ejection, on a heading of 199 degrees, it crashed into the Walesville intersection. A small crossroads hamlet, 11 miles southwest of Utica. The time was 11:27 AM EST.

It struck a dwelling. Mrs. Doris Monroe, 28, was in her home preparing lunch for her four children. She was killed. Her daughter was injured. Then the jet hit a car at the intersection. Stanley Phillips, 38, his wife Florence, 32, and their son Gary, 11, all of nearby Hecla, died inside. Five others were injured, two seriously.

The USAF accident board reported on August 17, 1954. It found no fire in flight, and "no evidence of smoke, fuel, or oil." The primary cause was "a malfunction of the aircraft fire detector circuit." Earlier that day Atkins had adjusted the cockpit temperature by hand. The board thought he probably "interpreted a normal, non-automatically controlled temperature rise as an overheat cockpit condition." The targets, as Kevin Randle later put it, "were both military aircraft."

Project Blue Book opened no case file. Its index lists the crash as "info only." The Condon Committee also looked at a separate sighting of a silvery, balloon-like object near Rome. Witnesses called it "walnut-like and shiny," a "flying golf ball." The committee kept the two apart. "The first object was probably a balloon," it concluded. "There was no UFO in the aircraft accident case."

Donald Keyhoe told a different story in The Flying Saucer Conspiracy in 1955. His date was July 1. An "unknown flying object" was tracked on radar and a jet "scrambled." "When the pilot tried to close in, a sudden, unbearable heat filled the cockpit." Mysterious heat, he suggested, might be a side effect of "gravity control devices."

The story kept growing. Otto Binder wrote in 1967 that the heat could only have come from the UFO. In Aliens from Space in 1973, Keyhoe had the pilot see a "gleaming disc-shaped machine." Then came J. Allen Hynek and Jacques Vallée in The Edge of Reality, 1975: "When it broke through into clear sky, the pilot saw the UFO coming at him."

Military accident reports were confidential. Writers were left to guess. Jan Aldrich later obtained this one, and it was reproduced in Clear Intent in 1984. Kevin Randle put it plainly: the confusion "might never have happened if Keyhoe had been given access to the accident report." One loose end remains. Press at the time said the cockpit was "seared by intense heat." The board called it a normal temperature rise.