by Charles Lear
That UFO sightings, more often than not, have prosaic explanations should surprise no one. Whether or not an explanation is accepted by witnesses and believers is another question.
An important factor influencing acceptance is the credibility of the investigator. It should be safe to say at.this point that civilian UFO investigators have more credibility than government employed investigators. This is because, far too often, commonly mistaken objects have been indiscriminately offered as explanations by public officials in order to put a case to rest. This is unfortunate because there are occasions where a good solution to a case that could help clear out some of noise in the signal may be dismissed by many due to what has become a reflexive reaction. From a list that seems logical, here are the most commonly misidentified objects listed from 1-7: military experiments, airplanes, Venus, balloons, weird cloud formations, missile tests and lightning. Of these, Venus and balloons are the most infamous of abused identification choices but balloons, particularly weather balloons, have been a sore spot for civilian researchers and witnesses since the early days of the modern, post 1947, UFO era.
The July, 1947, headlines announced that the Air Force had recovered a “flying saucer.” At a press conference set up to address the story, which originated from an Air Force press release, a weather balloon was displayed and the press was told that it was this that was recovered. The press and public accepted the explanation until researcher, Stanton Friedman, investigated the case beginning in 1978 and found discrepancies and evidence of a cover up. The case gained so much notoriety, that New Mexico Congressman, Steven Schiff was moved to pressure the General Accounting Office for Air Force records related to the event. The Air Force took it upon themselves to investigate and, in 1995 released “Roswell Report: Fact vs. Fiction in the New Mexico Desert.” The authors of this 1000 page report came to the conclusion that what was recovered was not a weather balloon but a string of balloons that were part of a developing top secret project. The project was named, ”Project Mogul” and its purpose was to detect Soviet nuclear weapons tests. The report failed to convince most of those who adhered to the extraterrestrial cash theory.
Another UFO sighting that was explained away by the Air Force as a balloon occurred a little over a year after the Roswell case. On October 1, 1948, Lt. George F. Gorman of the Dakota Air National Guard, had a sighting and gave chase while flying an F-51. The case has become known as the “Gorman Dogfight” and is an oft-cited Project Blue Book case file. Gorman had been flying circles over a stadium in Fargo, North Dakota to log some flying time after a cross-country flight. He was preparing to land and the tower informed him of a nearby Piper Cub. At this point, what Gorman thought was the tail light of another plane passed him on the right. He informed the tower and was told there were no additional planes in the area. He flew towards the light and when he was within 1000 yards, he saw what he described as a light, “six to eight inches in diameter, clear white and completely round without fuzz at the edges” that blinked on and off. It then stopped blinking and made a sharp left turn and Gorman thought it was going to make a pass at the tower. Gorman put his plane into a dive but was unable to catch up with the object. It gained altitude, made a series of sharp turns and then headed straight towards Gorman, who dove under it at the last moment. The object circled 1000 feet above him, he went after it again and, once more, it headed towards him. This second time, the object shot up and Gorman followed it up to 14,000 feet where his plane power stalled, forcing him to give up the chase.
Two traffic controllers had visually observed the light from the tower and one reported that it was “traveling at a high rate of speed.” The Piper Cub pilot also reported seeing the light and described it as “moving very swiftly towards the west.” Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, then head of Project Blue Book, came up with the hypothesis that Gorman had chased a lighted balloon and that the movement of his plane had created the illusion that the balloon was moving. Ruppelt’s theory became the official explanation listed in the file and notable researcher, Dr. James E. McDonald would take strong issue with it in 1970. Besides McDonald, another researcher who had problems with the explanation was notorious skeptic, Dr. Donald H. Menzel. To reconcile this, Menzel decided that Gorman was chasing both a lighted balloon and “very probably, a mirage of the planet Jupiter.”
Of course, there were some sightings reported to the Air Force that were almost certainly balloons and one undated case shows up in a file labeled, “balloons” in a Blue Book file archived at the Black Vault website. There are pictures of two women holding up a large plastic bag and a description as follows: “Hot air balloon picked up in vicinity of the Colorado School of Mines, Golden, Colorado by law enforcement authorities after a rash of UFO sightings had been reported in the Golden, Colorado area. Balloon was made of thin vinyl plastic and had an aluminum foil saucer-shaped platform where the candles were inserted.”
In recent years, the increased popularity of miniature hot air balloons known as Chinese lanterns has spawned a great many UFO reports. These lanterns are basically paper bags with a candle suspended at the open end and are popular at weddings and other celebrations. There are many cases that have received news coverage and the following 2013 case from East Liberty County, Texas is fairly typical. On March 27, 2013, NBC News reported that, over the previous weekend, local police had responded to a 911 call reporting “red fireballs in the sky.” Officers and “a dozen locals” observed four lights in a row, a few thousand feet high, move silently and then disappear all at once. A second group of four lights appeared and they also vanished suddenly. Police contacted the National Weather Bureau, the Federal Aviation Administration and even the National UFO Reporting Center and no one could offer an explanation. The mystery was solved when the police were informed by members of a wedding party in the vicinity that what had been sighted were lanterns that had been released.
Finally, we come to Mylar balloons. These shiny balloons come in many shapes and sizes and could easily be misidentified when seen outside of a celebratory context. One can find every letter of the alphabet and numbers as well. It was a number-shaped Mylar balloon that caused considerable embarrassment for Chris Mellon and the civilian research group, To The Stars Academy. During a 2017 launch presentation, Mellon was at the podium describing the physics defying movements of a Tic Tac shaped UFO spotted by Navy pilots during the 2004 “Nimitz Incident.” Behind Mellon, on a huge screen, was a picture of a UFO that was vaguely the same shape as the object being described. On January 18, 2018, the British publication, Express, broke the story that the object pictured behind Mellon was, more than likely, a Mylar balloon in the shape of the number one. The picture was one of a series taken by British researcher, Steve Mera in Eccles, Manchester and he had been the first to determine the probable identity.
As disappointing as it might be to have an exciting UFO sighting discounted by a simple explanation, many serious researchers are disciplined enough to look at all possibilities. First, they try to prove that what was seen was not extraterrestrial or inter dimensional. If all possible explanations are exhausted, one is left with a remarkable sighting and a cause for celebration. Just be careful with the balloons when doing so.