by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear
In 2019, U.S. Navy pilot Lt. Ryan Graves began speaking publicly about regular encounters by flight teams starting in 2013 with UFOs. On July 26, 2023, he testified before congress and said that on one occasion, two jets were forced to make evasive maneuvers to avoid a collision with an object he described as a clear sphere with a black cube inside. By the time of the hearing, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office headed by Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick had looked into these types of reports, and in May of 2023, Kirkpatrick informed NASA’s UFO advisory council that AARO had about 800 instances of “metallic orb” UFOs. This is according to a January 24, 2024, Science Times article by Caleb White headlined “Cube in a Sphere UAP Could Be ‘Aliens’ or ‘Next Generation’ Spherical Drones, Pentagon Former UFO Chief Says.”
In the article, Kirkpatrick is quoted saying, “There’s a large number of people, pilots, others, who have said, ‘Hey, I saw this giant sphere. It had a cube in it. I don’t understand it. It must be an alien.’ Well, actually, no, there’s a number of papers out. The most recent one was from the University of Singapore, I believe, where the next generation of drones that are being built are spherical.”
One of the papers he might have been referring to is one by Ying Hong Pheh, Shane Kyi Hla Win, and Shaohui Foong that was published in Drones 2022, 6 (9), titled, “Spherical Indoor Coandă Effect Drone (SpICED): A Spherical Blimp sUAS for Safe Indoor Use.” It describes and has an illustration of the drone, and it is a good match for what was being reported. While this is a very plausible explanation, a report of a similar object from 1960 obviously predates this technology, and the Air Force investigation under Project Blue Book resulted in a conclusion that some might find less than satisfying.
The 1960 case got a paragraph (page 7 of the pdf) in the September 1960 APRO Bulletin and the date is given as September 20:
Denver, Colorado. Object described as disc-shaped, or spherical, enclosing a square object with lights alternately flashing red, white and green lights [sic] was reported by FAA agents and many others in southwest Colorado. FAA employee at Eagle, using an inclinometer estimated object was 37 miles above earth. It appeared to hover for 30 minutes, then moved off to southwest. First seen at 9:35 MST. Among observers were two Frontier Air Lines pilots.
A news clipping from an un-named paper out of Grand Junction, Colorado, of an Associated Press story is included in the July-December 1960 portion (pages 97 and 98 of the pdf) of the Loren Gross compilation titled The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse, UFOs: A History. Gross lists the date and time of the incident as September 28, 1960, between 9:35 p.m. and 10:35 (?) p.m. The description is short (FAA detects “space object” that hovers 30 minutes), and the reader is referred to the clipping dated 9/29/60 on the next page.
According to the AP article, headlined “Flashing UFO is a Mystery in Southwest: Spherical Flying Saucer Enclosing a ‘Square’ Reported to AF,” the night before, reports of a UFO “flashing red, white and green lights” came from FAA offices in Grand Junction and Eagle, Colorado; as well as from Farmington, New Mexico. An FAA spokesman said the reports had been forwarded to NORAD at Colorado Springs.
At Eagle, an FAA employee used an inclinometer and estimated that the UFO was 37 miles above the earth. First seen at about 9:35 p.m. MST, it seemed to hover for around 30 minutes before moving off towards the southwest. Other witnesses included two pilots, one in a military jet and one flying for Frontier Airlines. The spokesman described the object as appearing to be a sphere enclosing a square object with the lights seeming to come from the square.
Because it was reported to the Air Force, there is a Project Blue Book file on the case. The Project 10073 Record Card gives the date as September 28, 1960, and the location as Grand Junction. The summary of the sighting is the same as in the AP article except that the object is said to have been reported as being stationary for 20 minutes and the total length of the sighting is said to have been 40 minutes. The conclusion is listed as “Temp Inversion,” and in the comments there is this typed explanation:
The sighting gives all indication of being due to atmospheric refraction.
There is this handwritten correction initialed by J. Allen Hynek under it:
Stellar scintillation possibly. This caused by turbulence, not inversion. If motion was real, cause is not inversion.
A document headed “MEMORANDUM FOR RECORD” has more details. According to this, a phone call was made to the home of a witness (name redacted) in Grand Junction, “and the following information was acquired.” The first report of the object was from Farmington, New Mexico, where it was observed at a bearing of 35º. It was also reported from Eagle, Colorado where it was seen at a bearing of about 225º. The witness in Grand Junction saw it at a bearing of 100º, made a triangulation and determined that it was over Gunnison, Colorado.
The witness said there was a B-52 refueling in Deadwood and that when the aircraft was contacted, “a reply was made to the effect that the object could be seen.” After refueling, the plane changed course and headed for the object, but once the it was in the area, the pilot reported to Denver control that they saw nothing.
The last paragraph of the memorandum has the description of the object as it appears on the record card as do the first three paragraphs of the report written by then head of Project Blue Book, Lt. Col. Lawrence J. Tacker, who was notorious as a debunker and made his anti-saucer feelings clear in the 1960 book, Flying Saucers and the U.S. Air Force. The remaining four paragraphs explain that weather data obtained from the Air Weather Service at Asheville, Carolina, showed there was a temperature inversion in the area, that these are known to produce “looming mirages, and that this is what was responsible for the reports.
Check out this seasonal blog by Charles Lear!
Thanks to UFO Jack for this week’s blog suggestion.
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