BELLEFONTAINE, OHIO, [ILLEGIBLE]Date unknown

Insufficient Data

Summary

On August 1, 1952, ground radar operators at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio, detected an unidentified target moving southwest at about 525 miles per hour. Two F-86 fighter jets were scrambled to intercept. The radar operators, lacking height-finding equipment, could not tell the pilots the altitude of the unknown object, only whether they were getting closer or farther away. As the jets climbed to 30,000 feet, ground radar told them they were nearly on target. Then the radar abruptly failed.

Moments later, the lead F-86 pilot spotted a silver sphere several thousand feet above his position. Both jets pursued the object, climbing to their maximum altitude of 40,000 feet, but the unknown remained roughly 30,000 feet higher. The pilot did manage to film the object with his gun camera, and his radar gunsight briefly picked up a return. The jets eventually broke off and returned to base, having spent about ten minutes chasing the object.

The Air Force investigators examined the evidence carefully. Through follow-up work, they discovered that ground radar had actually been tracking a commercial jet aircraft flying out of Cleveland at low altitude, traveling at about 525 miles per hour. The pilot's confusion arose because radar operators at Bellefontaine had not received the jet's flight plan. What the F-86 pilots actually saw, photographed, and detected on their gun radar was a twenty-foot weather balloon (called a radiosonde) that had been released from Wright-Patterson that morning. The ground radar never detected the balloon. Because there was no height finder on the ground radar, no one could tell that the jet was far below the pilots while the balloon was above them. The pilots, flying at 30,000 feet, were too high to see the distant jet but could see the balloon overhead and naturally assumed it was their target.

The full case file, consisting of 21 pages as held by the National Archives microfilm T1206, Roll 13, is reproduced below.

Reported location

BELLEFONTAINE, OHIO, [ILLEGIBLE]

Date of incident

Date unknown

State / country

? / XX

Page count

21 scanned pages

USAF evaluation

unknown

Microfilm

T1206, Roll 13

Original case file scans

Original case file · scanned by NARAPage 1 of 21

View transcribed text

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Source: National Archives Catalog · NAID 28947252