Redmond, OregonSeptember 1959

On the morning of September 24, 1959, at 0400 local time, Robert Dickerson, a Redmond, Oregon police officer, spotted an extremely bright light very low on the northeastern horizon. He described it as resembling a landing light, and it began changing to orange and then showed four protruding lights in red, green, yellow, and white. Dickerson drove to the Redmond FAA flight service station and contacted Laverne Wertz, the operator on duty. Both witnesses watched as the main light hovered at about 800 feet elevation, then rose to around 3,000 feet. The object appeared to move erratically around a central point and moved rapidly toward and away from the observers. The total observation period lasted approximately one hour and 19 minutes.

Dickerson drove eastward for five miles in an attempt to get closer to the object but gave up when it showed no apparent change. Wertz reported the sighting to the Seattle FAA using a special phone line. The Seattle office then contacted the 827th Aircraft Control and Warning Squadron at Keno, Oregon, to ask if they had a radar target in the Redmond area. The senior controller confirmed they did. In response, six F-102 fighters, one F-89 fighter, one H-29 helicopter, and one civilian Tri-Pacer aircraft equipped with a geiger counter (a radiation detector) were all vectored to the target area. None of the interceptors made visual contact or picked up the object on their radar. The Tri-Pacer reported no radiation in the area. After the unsuccessful intercept attempts, the 25th Air Division ordered the radar track to be removed from tracking.

The Air Force investigation noted something important: the radar return and the visual sighting were actually separate events that happened to occur at the same time. The FAA had associated them together in their logs, but the Air Force determined these were coincidences, not the same object. The Air Technical Intelligence Center concluded that the visual sighting was most likely caused by refraction (the bending of light through the atmosphere) of the planet Venus. Venus was positioned in that part of the sky and was just below the horizon at the time, making it visible through atmospheric refraction. The planet's brightness (roughly 15 times brighter than the brightest visible star) and inconsistencies in the atmosphere could have caused it to appear to move. The radar return was determined to have come from a gap-filler antenna (a radar device that fills in coverage areas) located on a nearby mountain. This antenna had appeared on radar scopes multiple times before and since the sighting under certain atmospheric conditions.

The case generated significant public debate, particularly because Major Donald E. Keyhoe of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) and others argued that the Air Force was withholding information by separating the radar and visual sightings and by labeling the conclusion "insufficient evidence." The file documents extensive correspondence between NICAP, civilian inquiries, Air Force officials, and Congressional representatives, with NICAP arguing the evidence proved the object was real and controlled, while the Air Force maintained its position that the available data did not support a positive identification. The case was closed with a finding of insufficient data for positive evaluation, though internal Air Force analysis suggested the most probable explanation was the refraction of Venus combined with the radar return from the gap-filler antenna.

The full case file is reproduced below as held by the National Archives across 56 pages of documentation.