United States.Nash-Fortenberry · two Pan Am pilots (Virginia)

On the night of July 14, 1952, during that summer's intense sighting wave (the same that a few days later would culminate in the famous radar events over Washington) a Pan American World Airways DC-4 was flying south from New York (the Air Force cable calls it the New York–San Juan flight; the OSI report, New York–Miami) with ten passengers and a crew of three. Captain F. V. Koepke was in command; First Officer William B. Nash and Second Officer William H. Fortenberry were in the cockpit. The aircraft was cruising at about 8,000 feet over Chesapeake Bay, approaching Norfolk, Virginia, with the autopilot engaged, when at about 20:12 Eastern Standard Time Nash and Fortenberry saw a formation of six disc-shaped objects appear below their plane, glowing with an intense red-orange light and showing sharp edges.

Per their report (detailed and consistent between the two) the discs flew in line, executed a near-instantaneous flip (they 'turned' edge-on), were joined by two more discs to total eight, and the whole group accelerated, climbed and dimmed before vanishing. The pilots' size and speed estimates implied extreme dynamics, with speeds on the order of thousands of kilometers per hour and an acute-angle turn. The incident occurred about four months after Project Blue Book received that name and five days before the first radar events over Washington. The next morning, in Miami, agents of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (OSI) interrogated the pilots; according to Nash, they were told the investigators already had seven other reports of red discs in formation, none of which appear in the Blue Book file. The report by Major John H. Sharpe (AF Form 112, 15 July) records among the two pilots' impressions that the objects "are definitely not of earthly origin", and reckons they were in view for at least five seconds, possibly ten. The Blue Book record card summarizes the case: six disc-shaped objects, 100 ft in diameter, emitting a reddish glow, approached the airliner at about 2,000 ft, made an erratic turn to avoid collision and sped away in their original formation. The card notes that five jet aircraft were in the vicinity of Langley AFB at the time; Blue Book ruled them out as the explanation and filed the case as "Unknown".

The skeptical explanations on record are two, both from astrophysicist Donald H. Menzel. In his 1962 correspondence with Nash, preserved in the Blue Book file, he first proposed a reflection in the cockpit windows; Nash replied that the objects were between the aircraft and the west, that they had followed them through three different windows and that no one was smoking in the cockpit, whose door was closed. In his book "The World of Flying Saucers" (1963), Menzel moved to a second hypothesis: a searchlight or beacon on the Virginia coast seen through layers of haze concentrated by temperature inversions, which would appear as a series of discs able to 'ricochet' as the beam turned. His critics object that the weather reports for that night recorded no inversions, that Menzel never identified the light source and that the objects were seen against the dark background of the bay's water.

Two professional witnesses with the same detailed observation, filed by Blue Book as "Unknown" and occurring five days before the same wave produced the Washington radar incidents. The two pilots described a maneuver (instantaneous flip, formation, acceleration) hard to reconcile with a trivial light phenomenon. The pilots placed the objects below the aircraft, between it and the west, and followed them through three windows, which weakens the window-reflection hypothesis; the searchlight hypothesis, for its part, requires inversions that the weather reports for that night did not record.

Its limit is that it is a purely visual case, with no radar record or independent instrument to corroborate size, distance or speed. All the dramatic speed figures are witness estimates from an angular size whose real distance was never determined, and distance-estimation errors in nighttime sightings are the classic source of apparently impossible speeds.