Morocco.Morocco · a radar shows shapes over the sea that no one saw

On the night of December 16, 1953, at 1754Z (Greenwich time), the search radar of Detachment 2 of the 737th Aircraft Control and Warning Squadron, a U.S. Air Force radar unit in northeastern French Morocco, showed something nobody at the station could explain. A radar of this kind turns constantly and sends out waves; anything that bounces them back, an aircraft, a flock of birds or the surface of the sea, shows up on the screen as a spot of light, a "blip", at its bearing and range, refreshed on each turn of the antenna. That night the screen showed a series of blips that changed shape, V's, W's and M's. Their number varied from one turn to the next, between one and twelve, and they formed a straight line on a bearing of 25°, to the north-northeast, between 20 and 40 miles from the station, over the sea.

Each blip covered about two or three degrees of width on the screen, changed shape frequently and was at times more distinct. The report describes them as "comparatively stationary": they were first and last seen on the same bearing and, after "several minutes", faded out. The height-finding radar was out of service, so their altitude is unknown. No one is recorded as seeing them: the form answers "N/A" to color and to optical aids, and the only manner of observation it records is radar. The sky was nine-tenths overcast, with limited visibility, an estimated cloud ceiling of 8,000 feet, five miles' visibility, no rain and no thunderstorms.

Three men of the detachment were watching the screen: Airman Third Class V. A. Kay, air surveillance operator; Captain T. S. White, detachment commander; and Lieutenant V. Baker, controller. The report does not name the station; it gives its position, and that of the blips, in GEOREF military coordinates. Converted, the station lies at about 35°05′ N, 2°19′ W, at the northeastern tip of what was then French Morocco, near the mouth of the Moulouya and the Algerian border; the blips, "approximately", at sea, at about 35°35′ N, 1°45′ W, some 41 nautical miles from the station on a bearing of 43°, about 18° east of the bearing the report itself gives. The nearest coast to that point is Algerian (Rachgoun island, about 20 miles; Beni Saf and Honaine, about 25) rather than Moroccan (Saïdia, about 37); along the line the report gives, the nearest coast on the first stretch is Moroccan. The conversion and the distances are our own calculations.

The unit's parent division, the 316th Air Division (Defense), headquartered at Salé, next to Rabat, according to its teletype heading, sent a priority teletype, 12-177, whose heading mistakenly reads "36TH AIR DIV" (it closes with "CHIEF OF INTEL 316 ADIV"). It went to Air Defense Command at Ent Air Force Base (Colorado); to ATIC, the Air Force's technical intelligence center; to the Washington liaison offices of the USAF Security Service, the Air Force's signals intelligence service; and, in Wiesbaden, to the special security officer at the headquarters of the U.S. Air Forces in Europe. It is terser than the written report and does not fully match it: it says the blip changed "from straight line to V shape to M shape", that it was three degrees long and that it was stationary; it gives the time as 1810Z, sixteen minutes later, and puts the station about nine kilometers from the report's position, although it gives the blips the same coordinate. It ends with the note "addl info being sought". The receipt stamp is dated December 21.

On December 23, a week after the event, Major Edward O. Wittmer, the division's Director of Intelligence, signed the three-page written report, on an Air Intelligence Information Report form (AF Form 112) with the subject "UFOB", the term the regulation of the day, AFR 200-2, used for an unidentified flying object. In its comments it says that the personnel who maintained the radar at the site "have offered no possible cause for the sighting", but that in the opinion of "several qualified electronics personnel" at the division the signal may have had one of three causes: anomalous propagation of the radar waves; a ship-borne radar interfering with the detachment's ("ship-borne radar jamming"); and geese or storks in flight. The summary on the first page concludes that "logical deduction is that one of above mentioned possibilities is the cause for this radar return", without saying which.

The case card kept by Project Blue Book, the Air Force project that studied UFOs, copies all three causes, in the same order, as its conclusion under the heading "Radar analysis". The file holds no later check of any of them: no weather soundings, no search for ships in the area, no bird observations.

The report shows how something nobody could explain was handled in 1953: a signal the station did not understand became a priority teletype to four addressees and, a week later, a three-page form with every paragraph of the regulation filled in, even if many say "N/A". It records precisely the time, bearing, range, radar, weather and the names of those watching the screen, and leaves open what matters most: the division proposed three very different explanations and chose none, and the Blue Book card turned that list into the case's conclusion.

The three fit what the report itself describes unevenly. Anomalous propagation, first on the list in both the report and the card, occurs when the temperature and humidity of the air bend the radar beam more than usual. The radar chapter of the Condon Report (1968) explains that radar detects terrain and, at sea, the surface of the water, and that under such conditions it can return signals from distant objects it does not normally see. Nearly motionless blips over the sea that change shape and fade after a few minutes fit that reading. But the report answers "Negative" when the form asks about "any other unusual activity or condition, meteorological, astronomical or otherwise", and there are no soundings of the air to support or rule it out. The same chapter attributes surface ducts, layers of air next to the ground or sea that trap the beam, mainly to night-time cooling ("surface ducts are commonly caused by radiative cooling of the earth's surface at night"), and a nine-tenths overcast sky limits that cooling (our own reasoning).

Interference from another radar fits as well: the same chapter explains that interference recurring at a rate close to the antenna's rotation can appear in nearly the same position turn after turn, and a line of blips along a single bearing is consistent with a signal arriving from one direction. Birds fit worst: the chapter records flocks detected out to 51 nautical miles, within the range of these blips, but a flock in flight moves, and the report insists these blips did not.

What the file lacks limits any conclusion. No visual observation is recorded, with the sky nine-tenths overcast; the height-finding radar was out of service; there were no photographs of the screen; and the teletype and the report disagree on both the time and the station's position. The personnel who maintained the radar at the site, who knew it best, offered no cause; all three explanations come from the division, at Salé, more than 400 kilometers away. The second speaks of "jamming", and the report does not say whether it meant incidental interference from a navigation radar or a deliberate one, nor is there any record of a search for ships off the coast that night.

In ↗ the Condon Report attributed the radar signals to anomalous propagation after studying the atmospheric conditions of those nights; here nobody checked any of the explanations, and the conclusion is a list of plausible candidates.