United States.Discs over Muroc Army Air Field

On July 8, 1947, two weeks after Kenneth Arnold's sighting and on the same day as the Roswell press release, several servicemen and civilians at Muroc Army Air Field, the Mojave Desert flight test center that is now Edwards AFB, reported silver objects over the base. According to his sworn statement, at about 9:30 First Lieutenant Joseph C. McHenry, the billeting officer, was leaving the post exchange after remarking that someone would have to show him one of those discs before he would believe it, when he saw, next to an aircraft in the traffic pattern, two silver objects 'of either a spherical or disc-like shape' at about 8,000 feet, moving at about 300 miles per hour or less on a heading of about 320 degrees. He called T/Sgt. Joseph Ruvolo, S/Sgt. Gerald E. Nauman and his secretary, Jannette Marie Scott, pointed the objects out and asked them what they saw; according to McHenry, all three said they were discs and, without his telling them which way they were going, that they were heading toward Mojave. Their three statements agree on the discs and on Mojave, but not on the time, which ranges from 9:45 to 10:00, nor on the speed, from 300 to 400 miles per hour, and Nauman's gives the heading as northeast. Minutes later, with more personnel gathered by the dispensary, they saw a third similar object circling tightly at the same altitude over the north end; according to McHenry, five of seven people saw it. The witnesses ruled out in writing aircraft, birds and weather balloons: they heard no engine, the objects reflected the sun and, according to McHenry, they were moving against the prevailing wind.

At 11:50, Captain John Paul Stapp was waiting in an observation truck in Area 3 of Rogers Dry Lake for a P-82 ejection seat test when he saw a rounded object, white aluminum in color, which he first took for the parachute of a premature ejection. According to his statement, it was released at a determined height below 20,000 feet and fell three times faster than the parachute ejected 'thirty minutes' later, although Ruppelt, who reproduces the report in his book in different words, says thirty seconds; it drifted west-northwest against the prevailing wind, toward Mount Wilson, which from the lake actually lies to the south-southwest; it showed in profile an oval outline with two projections on its upper surface that crossed each other at intervals; it was silvery, like aluminum-painted fabric, and did not look as dense as a parachute canopy; it had no visible means of propulsion and was lost behind the mountains after 90 seconds; four of the five people in the truck saw it. His personal opinion was that it was a man-made object, about 25 feet across, that seemed to have been dropped from a great height. Around noon, alerted by the base commander, Colonel Gilkey, Major Richard R. Shoop of the technical engineering division saw, according to his July 11 statement, 5 to 8 miles to the north a thin, metallic-looking object, the size of a pursuit plane but without the shape of a conventional aircraft, that oscillated, dropped almost to the ground, climbed again and moved slowly away; he had it in view for about eight minutes and his wife saw it too. Gilkey, by contrast, stated orally that what he saw looked like paper, not important enough to report. The file also includes the statement of Major J. C. Wise, a test pilot, about a yellowish-white sphere 5 to 10 feet across that oscillated without losing altitude while he ran up the engine of an XP-84; the statement dates it July 7 at 10:10 and has it moving from west to east, while Edward Ruppelt, in his 1956 book, places it on the 8th and moving westerly.

The first statements were taken at the base from July 11 onward, before CIC agent Thomas A. McMillan; those of Ruvolo and Nauman were taken by McHenry himself on July 14. The Fourth Air Force, by contrast, moved because of a rumor: on August 4 its A-2 intelligence section at Hamilton Field noted that the Muroc commander was said to have seen discs and requested a lead sheet, warning that 'discretion and tact' be used. Stapp's and Wise's statements were taken on August 12 and 13. On August 14 the intelligence officer, Captain Harry D. Black, forwarded eight statements, and the A-2 report dated August 18, opened at the request of Air Defense Command and copied to the FBI in San Francisco, summarizes that two incidents occurred at about 10:00 and that no further investigation is being considered; the case status was left as pending.

The official verdict came two years later. The Project Grudge report of August 1949 lists Muroc as incident number 1 in its appendix of cases that remained unexplained. It notes that the first witness had just said he would not believe in the discs until he saw one and that, according to Grudge, the other three made their statements to him and agree almost word for word, so their testimony may have been influenced by suggestion; it adds that, from the times the witnesses give, the objects were in sight for at least half an hour and would have covered some 175 miles, and that if they were visible at that distance more detail would have been observed. It concludes that the report results from a misinterpretation of real stimuli, 'probably research balloons'. Yet the same report includes the April 18, 1949 letter in which the Air Materiel Command's Cambridge Field Station compared its balloon launches with the incidents: the only date candidate for incidents 1 to 4 was cluster number 11, launched at Alamogordo on July 7, 1947, and the letter judged it very unlikely, given the upper winds, that it had drifted more than a few miles west of Alamogordo, though it could not rule that out. Muroc lies more than a thousand kilometers to the west. Nor do the two January 1949 lists reproduced in the report support it: neither the Air Weather Service list of incidents where a synoptic weather balloon could have been at the location, nor the Air Materiel Command's own list of incidents most likely to be balloons, includes incident 1. Both include incidents 2, 3 and 4, which the Cambridge letter groups by date with the first, but we have not been able to confirm which sightings they are, because the part of the report with the list of incidents is not accessible.

Muroc is one of the first cases of the 1947 wave with named military witnesses and sworn statements, taken at a flight test base from personnel used to seeing aircraft, sounding balloons and parachutes. That is why the file measures two things: what the witnesses saw, and how the Army Air Forces channel handled it, opening an inquiry because of a rumor, then shelving the case without a conclusion, and only in 1949, with Project Grudge, giving it an explanation.

That explanation covers a single layer of the day. For McHenry's group, Grudge proposes balloons and offers a concrete argument against the independence of the witnesses: McHenry summoned them, asked them what they saw and took two of their statements himself, which match his. But, according to McHenry, the objects were moving against the wind, and the third one circled tightly at constant altitude; the Air Materiel Command's own balloon laboratory found only one candidate launch and judged it very unlikely, without ruling it out, to have gone that far west; and neither of the two January 1949 balloon lists includes incident 1. Grudge leaves room for other balloons, such as the station's own weather balloons, which McHenry ruled out, but it does not identify any. Stapp's object belongs to another layer: he himself, a flight test officer, believed it was a man-made object dropped from a great height, a reading consistent with the drop and parachute tests carried out at the base, although the documents consulted do not identify what was released at that hour. Shoop describes an object that dropped almost to the ground and climbed again over eight minutes, and Colonel Gilkey, who pointed it out to him, took it for paper.

Some source limits should be stated. The file cited here is Project 1947's published transcription of the Fourth Air Force documents, which carries errors, such as Stapp's surname spelled 'Strapp' or Nauman's statement signed under another name; we have not located its scan in archive.org's Blue Book collection. Brad Sparks's secondary catalog counts these sightings among those he considers unidentified in the Blue Book files; the official evaluation that does exist in writing is Grudge's.