Chris Mellon

The UFO World Since December 16, 2017

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By Martin Willis

Since our blogger, Charles Lear is off the week, I thought I would inject a brief opinion about my thoughts on what has changed with UFOs since late 2017. What better time to do that than now with my guest, Lue Elizondo who played a key role.

It may have had an unusual title: “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program” but it certainly changed everything in the world of UFOs. There have been other great informative articles since in the New York Times, but this one was on the front page and it started the UFO ball rolling.

Those of us really fascinated with the UFO topic were really paying attention when To The Stars Academy Of Arts & Science launched in October of the same year and ran a livestream featuring their prestigious team consisting of: Luis Elizondo, James Semivan, Harold (Hal) Puthoff, Steve Justice, Chris Mellon, and president, Tom Delonge. We heard some amazing things that day, and there was a real bustle among the UFO community, social media was ablaze for several days, and then things seem to settle down. There was some talk here and there, but the needle wasn’t really moved too far from what I could tell.

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UFOs and Balloons

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by Charles Lear

Throughout UFO history, a common explanation for sightings has been that the witness or witnesses saw a weather balloon. This explanation has often been used in a ludicrous manner by authorities seeking an easy means of dismissal, and this causes many UFOlogists to scoff at it in all cases. The truth is that it has been convincingly proven that weather balloons and balloons of all sorts have been mistaken as anomalous flying objects.

There is a classic Project Blue Book case known as, “The Gorman Dogfight.”  This incident occurred on October 1, 1948 and involved North Dakota Air National Guardsman, Lt. Frank Gorman. Gorman described chasing a six to eight inch, white light with sharp edges that “was blinking on and off. He chased it in an F-51, getting up to a maximum speed of 400 miles per hour, and it eluded him. The explanation in the Blue Book file is that Gorman was chasing a lighted balloon but there are problems with that and even notorious skeptic, Donald Menzel took issue with it.  What makes the balloon explanation doubtful is that two air traffic controllers saw the object from the ground and one described its speed as “excessive”. Adding to this, a pilot in the vicinity flying a Piper Cub also saw the object and described it as “moving very swiftly”. Menzel resolved the problem by concluding that Gorman was seeing a balloon and “a mirage of the planet Jupiter”.

Because this was at the very beginning of modern UFOlogy, the balloon explanation was off to a bad start and would continue to be used by the Air Force as a convenient way to dismiss a case. This was unfortunate because the explanation is often correct and if the Air Force could have been trusted it would have been able to remove a lot of noise from the signal.

A Blue Book case involving what appears to be a genuine misidentified balloon appears in a scanned document from the collection of Robert Mercer. The document can be viewed in the section, “From the Desks of Project Blue Book” on The Black Vault website. A .pdf labeled, “Balloons” has an undated description of the above- mentioned incident along with pictures. The report states that there had been “a rash of UFO sightings” reported from Golden, Colorado. The case was solved when police found a homemade hot air balloon made of thin clear plastic with a “saucer- shaped platform” that supported candles. Read more →