North Korea.Wonsan-Sunchon (Korea)

On the night of January 29, 1952, during the Korean War, two USAF B-29 Superfortress bomber crews, from different squadrons and on separate missions over North Korea, separately reported an orange spherical object that approached them. The two observations occurred 24 minutes apart and at different places, and the crews were interrogated separately, an hour apart.

According to the Air Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC) analysis, at 23:00, some 30 miles west-southwest of Wonsan, three gunners on the first B-29, flying at 22,500 feet on a 274° heading, watched for five minutes a light orange sphere, 'the color of the sun' with an occasional bluish tint, fuzzy edges and an internal movement 'like flames or fiery gases,' on a parallel course at 8 o'clock; it closed in to an undetermined distance and faded away in the distance. At 23:24, near Sunchon, two gunners on the second B-29 watched for one minute an identical object that approached from between 8 and 9 o'clock, shortly before the aircraft received flak, and withdrew on the same side. Both crews estimated its size at about 3 feet and described a disc that appeared to spin.

The incident occurred at a moment of peak institutional sensitivity within the USAF. The year 1952 saw the highest volume of UFO reports in the entire history of Project Blue Book, with the famous wave over Washington D.C. just months later, in July; the air-intelligence chain was therefore especially attentive to this kind of sighting and processed the reports under a formalized protocol. Those of January 29 were transmitted by priority cable along that chain: FEAF (Far East Air Force, Tokyo) → ATIC (Air Technical Intelligence Center, Wright-Patterson AFB) → D/I (Directorate of Intelligence, Pentagon). Each link assessed whether the object could correspond to an enemy fighter, anti-aircraft fire, a flare or an atmospheric phenomenon before escalating the file.

No one in the chain reached a firm conclusion. The wing intelligence officer believed it was 'another example of new technique in warfare under test by the enemy'; the FEAF Bomber Command intelligence directorate considered it a 'very real possibility' that these were new enemy flare devices; the ATIC analysis wrote that no conclusions had been reached and suggested as a possibility a flare towed by an aircraft to mark the B-29 for flak crews, although no exhaust flame was reported. The wing intelligence officer also noted that, because of the unusual nature of the sighting, special effort was made to eliminate all known alternatives: two crew members spotted the object from different positions at the same time, which ruled out a plexiglass reflection, and the gunners, World War II combat veterans with several missions in Korea, were thoroughly familiar with flak, flares and rockets and stated 'very emphatically' that the sightings bore no resemblance whatsoever to anything they had previously experienced. When Senator Russell asked for an explanation, the ATIC memo drafted for the reply repeated that there was no final evaluation and, 'based on the meager information thus far available', offered two tentative explanations: the exhaust of a Soviet La-9 or La-11 fighter, whose clustered stacks on each side of the fuselage would give at night an illusion like the one described, or an airborne searchlight mounted on an enemy interceptor, of which there had been several recent reports over Korea and whose light, on a very dark night, would hide the aircraft's silhouette. A March 1952 report included in the file attributed the 'globe-shaped orange-colored objects' seen by UN aircraft to World War II Japanese-type balloons made in Manchuria to frighten pilots, although their size seemed to preclude great altitude. The Project Blue Book record card marks 'possibly balloon' and comments that the object was believed to be 'same type of a/c (enemy or UN)'; it did not classify it as unknown. The full file is in the Blue Book collection on archive.org and at Project 1947.

It happened in an active combat zone during a war: an environment where the presence of troops, ground and airborne radar, enemy aircraft and military intelligence on both sides was at its maximum. That context sharply trims some conventional explanations (there was no civilian air traffic, no advertising balloons, none of the peacetime information noise) but introduces others: 1952 was the peak year of the U.S. UFO 'wave', Washington overflights included, and the USAF's attention to the sky was maximally primed. The two independent observations, separated in time and space, come from two teams that could not coordinate and that described the same type of orange object pacing the bomber.

The case has limits. The file is one of nighttime visual observation; there is, in the accessible material, no correlated radar record confirming a solid object at the reported position, and that is decisive, because phenomena such as plasma, atmospheric reflections, gas combustion or even anti-aircraft fire and flares can produce persistent orange lights that a tense pilot reads as an object 'holding station'. Nor is there an 'unknown' verdict: the Blue Book card left it as a possible balloon, theater intelligence leaned toward a flare or a new enemy device, and ATIC only offered, tentatively, the exhaust of an La-9 or La-11 fighter or an airborne searchlight on an enemy interceptor. A Soviet or Chinese observation platform tailing B-29 bombers over enemy territory is, in 1952, a perfectly plausible operational reading that was never ruled out.