An intense barrage of UFO activity appeared in the Midwest from July 31 to August 2, 1965, witnessed by thousands of people across nine states, including astronomers, state police, and journalists. What they appeared to be seeing were UFO formations.
Shortly after 9 P.M. on August 1, police squadrons in Oklahoma reported seeing diamond-shaped formations of UFOs for more than half an hour. These moved northerly and changed colors from red to white to blue-green. In Oklahoma City, a police dispatcher said headquarters had received over thirty-five calls between 8 and 10 P.M., with most estimates indicating objects at between fifteen thousand and twenty thousand feet. A police officer in Wynnewood, Oklahoma, reported a forty-five-minute UFO sighting, which was reportedly captured on radar by Tinker and Carswell Air Force Bases. The Weather Bureau at Wichita said it tracked objects south and west of Wellington that first appeared on radar at about twenty-two thousand feet, then descended to four thousand feet. Observers described the objects as red, which “exploded in a shower of sparks and at other times floated like a leaf.” Even the
That night was just the warm-up, however. On the night of August 2-3, 1965, tens of thousands of people from South Dakota to the Mexican border watched formations of brightly colored lights speeding through the skies, occasionally stopping for a few seconds. The sightings at times were awe-inspiring, changing formation, speed, color, and size. According to state police reports, many of the objects were tracked on civil and military radars. In the Minneapolis area, fifty police and sheriff squad cars radioed and reported UFOs between 12:20 A.M. and 2:20 A.M. Several objects were photographed. A fourteen-year-old boy in Tulsa took a picture with a cheap camera which, under enlargement, seemed to indicate a disc-shaped UFO which was divided by two bands into three segments. The picture was published in newspapers and studied by photo experts who pronounced it genuine. Another photo was taken near Sherman, Texas, of an object that had been tracked by Carswell AFB radar in Fort Worth.
A few reports were of objects near or on the ground. Two deputy sheriffs in Justin, Texas, saw a very bright object land while they were on a patrol near Wagle Mountain Lake. The police investigated but found nothing. In Oklahoma City, five children claimed to see a bright, round object descend close to the ground.
In Dayton, the air force dismissed the sightings as nothing more than four stars in the constellation Orion and denied that any air bases had picked up objects on radar. The problem with that explanation, as people quickly realized, was that Orion was not visible in the Northern Hemisphere at this time of year. It was an embarrassing gaffe, even by Blue Book’s typically low standards of explanation. Wright-Patterson then ascribed the sightings to the planet Jupiter and other stars.
Not surprisingly, this met with widespread disbelief. An air force weather observer in Oklahoma City said:
I have repeatedly seen unusual objects in the sky, and they are no mirage. One of them looked like it had a flat top and flat bottom, and it was not a true sphere. There seemed to be two rings around it, and the rings were part of the main body.
The
