At midnight on May 1 came a terrific explosion from Logan City, Utah. Several people saw a brilliant object, like a glowing ball, plunge rapidly in the sky just before the explosion. A man driving on the highway was terrified to see a “dazzling red half-globe come out of the ground, ahead of his auto, and to the left.” Less than ten seconds later, according to the man, a violent blast shook his vehicle and apparently threw open doors over 250 square miles. Other eyewitnesses also claimed to see a flash at ground level. Researchers the next morning found a crater sixteen feet wide and six feet deep. La Paz was on the scene, heading the investigation and assisted by Utah state geologists. On the assumption that the object was a meteor, his crew drilled to a depth of twenty-five feet, but found no meteoric debris. The crater also seemed too small for the shock wave recorded. A Geiger counter reading showed no unusual radiation, and an artesian well appeared in the crater.
La Paz was mystified. “If it’s a meteorite,” he told reporters, “it must have been a whopper.” Excavation at the site continued for five days. La Paz then issued the following statement:
In the region from Clarkston to Paradise, numerous persons saw or heard the explosive phenomenon at midnight on May 1. The testimony thus obtained, and material evidence recovered as a result of subsurface investigation, has disclosed that the crater was not produced by a conventional meteorite fall. For these reasons, operations have been discontinued.
La Paz did not say what could have caused the explosion, and was silent on what he found. Keyhoe checked his Washington sources, but came up empty.63
WASHINGTON SIGHTINGS, REVISITED
Shortly after midnight on May 6, Washington, D.C. radar once again tracked UFOs, causing an Air Defense alert. Each time Air Defense fighters approached, the UFOs vanished. Then, on May 13—a week later—two major UFO sightings occurred in the city. The first involved multiple radar and visual tracking of an object that appeared to be 250 feet in diameter and fifteen miles above the city, or eighty thousand feet. In another year, the U-2 aircraft would be operational and capable of such altitudes. In 1954, however, no aircraft could reach that height. Moreover, the object moved in a way impossible for any aircraft, from point to point in a rectangular pattern at about 200 mph. After three hours of being tracked by several governmental radar installations, the object disappeared. At the same time, two police officers at the Washington National Airport saw two large, glowing, oval objects approach the airport and maneuver over that part of the city. Military Air Transport confirmed its presence, and the object was seen for over an hour. An air force spokesman in the Pentagon even told reporters it was an “Unidentified Flying Object.”
Frank Edwards carried both UFO stories that evening on Mutual Network Radio. Only the second of the reports made it to the press—a single edition of the
Gen. Nathan Twining, by now the air force’s Chief of Staff, made the news after speaking at an Armed Forces Day dinner at Amarillo AFB on May 14, 1954. Twining said “the air force has the best brains in the country working on the flying saucer problem.” Twining gave while he took away. He claimed 90 percent of reports were “pure imagination,” but 10 percent could not be explained. (By now, it was commonplace for officials to concede a 10 percent unexplained rate, although the number had been running at 20 percent for years.) The author of the then-still-secret 1947 memo claimed “no facts” had shown that there was anything to substantiate flying saucers, although “some very reliable persons have reported flying objects that can’t be identified.” Keyhoe reached Twining’s press officer about this but was told Twining was “talking off the cuff.”65
In an event that was presumably not pure imagination, four veteran National Guard pilots engaged in “high-altitude tag” over Dallas with sixteen UFOs before being outmaneuvered and outdistanced. This was reported in the May 25
A RUCKUS AT WRIGHT-PAT
