Just as this story was making news, another startling event occurred over an Atomic Energy Commission plant in eastern Idaho. After midnight on June 26, witnesses saw “a blinding glow, like an enormous floodlight,” overhead. The source remained motionless for a few seconds, illuminating the ground for several miles around. Then, rising at a tremendous speed, the light vanished. This story received coverage in the local newspaper and eventually reached AP. Later the same day, Air Defense radar picked up a UFO over Ohio. A commercial aircraft, including the plane’s sixty passengers, saw the object near Columbus. The story made the papers about a week later. But like the Roe story, it was absent from the Blue Book files.71
On the twenty-ninth occurred a sighting that did make it to Blue Book and also received a good deal of media attention. It involved a BOAC (now British Airways) commercial airliner flying from New York to London. Former RAF pilot James Howard was in command, Lee Boyd was the first officer, Capt. H. McDonnell the navigator. The plane was crossing Goose Bay, Labrador, in the early evening when Howard saw a large cigar shape and six smaller black ovals about five miles away. The six smaller objects followed the “mother ship” upward into a thin layer of cloud. Howard’s crew saw the same thing and found no reasonable answer. The objects appeared to be following and tracking the airliner, and the crew informed Goose Bay of their “escort.” As they sent their message, the six mini UFOs entered the larger craft, and the object shot away. Goose Bay had the object on radar and sent a jet. When the BOAC landed at Labrador to refuel, Canadian and American intelligence officers hustled Howard and Boyd off for a debriefing, causing the takeoff to be delayed. McDonnell said that USAF personnel took the flight logs without authorization. After reaching London, Howard and Boyd were called into the Air Ministry, which then explained to the press that the crew and passengers had seen a solar eclipse. An eclipse did occur, but not until 7 A.M. the next morning, about twelve hours after the sighting. Some months later, McDonnell met up with Howard and asked what had happened at the Air Ministry. Howard’s response: “Sorry, I can’t say. You know the score.”
Years later, Condon investigator Gordon Thayer maintained the sighting was a mirage. He admitted there were problems with his explanation and added this “natural phenomenon” was “so rare that it apparently has never been reported before or since.” He made this statement without irony. James McDonald countered: “No meteorological-optical phenomenon ... could reasonably account for the reported phenomenon.” Thayer’s review of the case was a perfect example of the sterile analysis that occurs when “official culture” collides with the world of the UFO. No attempt was made to confront the social context of the problem, in this case, the pressure placed on the British pilots. The essence of the living fact, as Tolstoy once wrote, was left aside, and the argument was constructed in such a way as to “shut out the possibility of that essence being discovered.”72
The BOAC case made clear that the American military could silence not only its own military and commercial pilots but also British commercial pilots. Even now, however, reports continued to leak out. On June 30, a UFO was observed visually and tracked on radar at Brookley AFB in Mobile, Alabama. The next day, a tragedy occurred near Utica, New York. Griffis AFB radar had tracked a UFO; soon an F-94 was in pursuit and, sure enough, the pilot saw a disc-shaped object. As he closed, a furnace-like heat filled his cockpit, forcing him and his radar man to eject. The plane crashed into the town of Walesville, killing four people and injuring five others. The pilot told reporters about the strange heat, but quickly recanted this position under air force pressure. The story was now that engine trouble caused the disaster.73
Two sightings of green UFOs took place on July 3. Near Albuquerque, nine green spheres were seen visually and tracked on radar. On the same day, the captain, officers, and 463 passengers on a Dutch ocean liner saw a single “greenish-colored, saucer-shaped object about half the size of a full moon” as it sped across the sky and disappeared into high clouds. On July 8, a British astronomer in Lancashire saw a silvery object with fifteen to twenty smaller satellite objects. More UFO news came from the Washington-Baltimore-Wilmington area. On July 9, the Wilmington Morning News ran the headline, “100 Flying Objects Spotted Here.” The article reported over one hundred UFO sightings by GOC personnel, including forty during the first five months of 1954. All reports, it stated, were studied by the air force.74
