Thailand.Sisaket · an object “fallen from the sky” turns up in Thailand

In the spring of 1965, in Sisaket province, in northeastern Thailand near the Cambodian border, a metal object turned up that was said to have "fallen from the sky." The provincial governor handed it to the Royal Thai Air Force, which asked the US Joint Military Advisory Group in the country for help in identifying it. On May 25, 1965, Colonel B. B. Beck, the advisory group's intelligence chief, sent it to the Air Force's Foreign Technology Division at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, with a letter headed "Unidentified Flying Object" and citing the Air Force regulation on UFOs. The letter warned that there was no information on sightings or eyewitnesses to the fall.

At Wright-Patterson, where Project Blue Book was also based, the object was examined and judged to appear to be "part of the igniting mechanism of a US rocket." On July 9, Colonel Eric T. de Jonckheere, the division's deputy for technology, asked the Ballistic Systems Division in California for help so that "an adequate reply" could be made to the advisory group. It could not be positively identified there either, but the markings pointed to a specific manufacturer, and the object ended up with the company that had built the motor. Meanwhile, the US military command in Thailand asked by telex about the status of the identification: according to the telex, the Thai government was "anxious" for information.

On August 5, in a telephone conversation that Blue Book noted down, an official of the Allegany Ballistics Laboratory in West Virginia, operated by the Hercules Powder Company, explained what it was: the object came from a Scout rocket launched from Wallops Island on December 16, 1964 on the San Marco mission, a joint program with Italy to measure air density. The laboratory would photograph it and probably hand it to NASA.

On September 29, Hercules sent the full data. The parts were from the fourth-stage motor of Scout rocket S-137 on the San Marco mission: a Jato 24DS-5850 X258 with serial number RH-75, built at Allegany on November 13, 1964 for NASA's Langley Research Center. The satellite had been placed in a 115-by-350-mile orbit (about 185 by 565 kilometers). The letter put the fall in Sisaket province "approximately May 1964," and on October 27 an erratum corrected it to "approximately May 1965." The parts stayed at the laboratory. The Blue Book card closed the case as "Other (Scout rocket)" and noted that the object had been returned to the manufacturer.

Jonathan McDowell's satellite catalog gives the date of the fall. According to the catalog, San Marco 1, the first Italian satellite, launched by an Italian team from Wallops, reached orbit on December 15, 1964, universal time; the Blue Book note and the Hercules letter say December 16. Its fourth stage is listed in the catalog as 1964-084B, with the same motor as in the Hercules letter, which the catalog calls an Altair 2 X-258, serial number RH-75, and a re-entry on February 7, 1965. The date used by Hercules and the Air Force, "approximately May," was when the object was handed over, not when it fell.

An object that fell from the sky in Thailand was identified down to its serial number. Every step is on first-hand paper, and McDowell's catalog, built from independent sources, gives the same serial number.

In 1965 the Air Force required any unidentified aerial object to be processed as an "unidentified flying object," and that included debris that fell from the sky without anyone seeing it fall. So a US rocket motor picked up by a Thai governor traveled to Ohio labeled as a UFO, passed through the office that studied foreign technology and ended up at the laboratory that had built it. Washington did not know at first that the object was its own, and took more than two months to find out.

The date error shows that the papers dated the object when it reached whoever was writing, not when it fell: between the February re-entry and the May handover, it may have spent weeks or months in a field before anyone reported it.