UFOs Visit the Old North State
In the early morning hours of May 9, 1964, two students at the Asheville School for Boys spotted a mysterious craft hovering over the school’s water tower. The craft was saucer-shaped and silver in color, with a mysterious blue light emanating from its windows. A golden disk perched atop the craft “moved wildly” as the craft hovered. Then, without warning, sparks rained down from the saucer; the craft took off in the direction of the rising sun at an “amazingly fast speed.” The students, declaring themselves to be of “sound mind and body,” attested to their encounter the following day in signed statements, their names and signatures later redacted by the bureaucrats charged with declassifying the case files of Project Blue Book.
From 1947 to 1969, the United States Air Force conducted a series of investigations into reported sightings of unidentified flying objects, or UFOs. Collectively known today as Project Blue Book (earlier iterations of the project bore different names), the program resulted in the investigation of more than twelve thousand reported incidents, including numerous sightings right here in the Tar Heel State.
The resulting case files, available online through the subscription service Fold3, shed light on a fascinating time in our nation’s history, when Americans faced new, technologically advanced threats from a foe who pushed the battle for international dominance into outer space. The launching of the Soviet satellite Sputnik in October 1957 and the resulting space race only heightened and confirmed fears of surveillance and attack from above. Is it any wonder, then, that during this period of increasing anxiety Americans began seeing strange sights in the skies?
Observers interested in reporting their experiences provided as many details of the encounter as they could: the exact date/ time of the sighting, the observer’s location at time of sighting, the angle at which the object was sighted, weather conditions, the object’s appearance and speed, etc. Using this information, investigators attempted to explain the source of the phenomena, attributing their causes to manmade objects (aircraft, balloons, and satellites), celestial bodies (shooting stars, planets, etc.), or natural events (swamp gas).
Here in North Carolina, official causes for reported sightings range from psychological to astronomic. In the case of the two students in Asheville, officials marked the cause for their sighting as the “imagination of the observers” coupled with a “misinterpretation of conventional objects” like aircraft and various stars and planets. An October 1963 sighting in Concord was attributed to the passing-by of the American satellite Echo. A slow-moving object seen by observers in Graham in early March 1956 turned out to be Sirius, the brightest star that can be seen from Earth. In Raleigh, college students observing Jupiter through a telescope in December 1961 spotted a cluster of quickly moving objects that glowed a “greenish yellow.” Officials determined the description of the “phenomenon” matched “that of a classic meteor.”
Every now and then, however, even the investigators were stumped; seven hundred such cases remain “unidentified,” including one report from Salisbury. It was a little after 11:00 PM on the night of February 2, 1966. The observer in this case, an unnamed woman, had just turned out the lights and crawled into bed when the quiet of the night was broken by a dog’s panicked barking. Alarmed, she jumped up and threw open her curtains to see the source of the commotion. The sight was, she wrote the next morning, “difficult to describe.”
There, about three hundred feet away in a neighbor’s backyard hovering above a cluster of trees, was a silver, diamond-shaped object. Though the craft remained in the same place, she described it as being in “a tremendous state of activity.” About a dozen smaller objects, “resembling balls,” orbited around the central body, each taking its own path and flashing brilliantly red, green, and white. Small “explosions” emanated from the craft, these too exhibiting fantastic color changes. With pen and paper in hand, the observer sketched, as best she could, what she saw in the sky.
For three or four minutes, the craft hovered there before suddenly shooting to a new position within the observer’s field of view. “The speed with which it moved was so rapid that I could not begin to estimate it,” she declared. As time passed, the object appeared to be slowly moving away. The craft moved so slowly, in fact, that when the observer’s husband returned from work close to midnight, he was also able to lay eyes on it. Grabbing a pair of binoculars, the man confirmed what his wife had seen: small, colorful explosions and brilliantly flashing lights. The craft finally disappeared from view around 1:00 AM, a full hour and a half after it was first sighted. “I do not know what the object was,” the woman confessed, “but I hereby swear that I saw the object as described….”
What makes her story so compelling — besides the fact that the government was unable to identify the object — was her general reluctance to report it and her status as a teacher within the community. In a letter addressed to Dr. J. Allen Hynek, an astronomer who served as a scientific advisor for Project Blue Book, the observer reveals that until this encounter, she was an avowed skeptic. “I have been trying to convince myself that I did not see what I saw,” she wrote, “and I have been trying to come up with some reasonable explanation for it, since I had not previously believed in ‘flying saucers.’” It was a news story about a similar sighting up near Dexter, Michigan, the following month that prompted her to come forward. In the Michigan case, officials attributed the cause, rather famously, to “swamp gas.”
“It is immaterial to me as to whether this report will be considered valid or not; I have done what I feel should be done by reporting it,” she stated bluntly. She gave Dr. Hynek permission to use the report in whatever manner he saw fit but requested that he withhold their names so as not to endanger her teaching contract and to protect her child from the ridicule of classmates. As a postscript, she included a sketch of the area around her house and the general flightpath of the craft. One last, matter-of-fact remark closed out her letter: “Incidentally, there are no swamps in this area of the state.”
Interested in learning about North Carolina’s role in the space race? Head over to MosaicNC.org, a new digital publishing venture of the North Carolina Office of Archives and History, for a web exhibit on the state’s contributions to space exploration.
~by Jessica Bandel
