During the past five years, while on several extended tours of the country, I had the opportunity to examine the back newspaper files of many local libraries in search of news reports of unidentified flying objects. I was particularly interested in obtaining information on the wave of sightings that had taken place during the summer of 1947, since few records of newspaper reports for that period are available. My search began in Portland, Oregon, where I knew that many sightings had been made. Not until I had consulted the local papers for the period, however, did I realize just how numerous those sightings had been. Intrigued by these preliminary data, I continued to examine old newspaper reports in the libraries of other cities I visited. In city after city I discovered the same extraordinary fact: that UFOs had been seen and reported in incredible numbers in June and July of 1947. I was completely unprepared for the vast amount of descriptive detail that lay buried in local papers. That this material had gone unnoticed for so many years was not really surprising, however, since in 1947 the subject was a novel one and few had any reason to believe it would persist, as it has. Therefore, no records were kept, other than the Air Force's file of investigated reports. The public -- and many officials -- assumed that flying saucers were merely some sort of transitory phenomenon and would soon go away. While interest was high at the time of the sightings, it died out not long after the wave had subsided and was not revitalized until the following year, when a new flurry of reports was made. By that time, the 1947 reports were old hat and lay buried in the newspaper morgues of libraries around the country.
On subsequent trips and, particularly, during the period from July 1966 to June 1967, I searched for material from areas I had not visited before; I discovered that my earlier efforts had been just a beginning. I began sending copies of my notes to the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, in Washington, D.C., having been a member of that organization from its beginning early in 1957. These notes subsequently came to the attention of several people who felt, as I was beginning to, that the data were important enough to be made available to others involved in research on the subject. The material presented a vivid picture, and a far more complete one than had previously been available, of an important period of UFO activity -- a period that had hitherto been given little more than passing attention in the extensive literature on the subject. A special report was suggested as an appropriate means of making the data available. Fortunately, it was possible to write the report at an appropriate time -- the twentieth anniversary of the earlier events.
To supplement l'information que je recueillais alors que je voyageais, les archives de journaux à la Bibliothèque du Congrès furent consultées pour couvrir les régions que je n'avais pas visitées en voyage. En tous, plus de 140 journaux furent examinés, représentant plus de 90 villes et communes dans 49 états, le District de Columbia et le Canada. Les journaux du Montana ne purent être consultés, ne m'y étant pas déplacé ni n'ayant pu trouver de journaux pour cet état à la Bibliothèque du Congrès. Il y a, cependant, des références à plusieurs observations dans le Montana qui furent relayées comme dépêches par câble dans d'autres journaux.
Two other sources for references were also consulted. The Air Force's Project Blue Book, at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, has in its files approximately 60 official reports of sightings through the end of July 1947, and notes were made on about two-thirds of these; lack of time prevented a complete coverage of this material. NICAP files also include a number of first-hand reports of sightings from the 1947 period; some of these came from the files of the now defunct Civilian Saucer Investigations of Los Angeles, which were turned over to NICAP after that organization discontinued its operations. A number of these reports are included. A few references have come from UFO publications and magazine articles as well.
The completed report provides a chronological listing of more than 850 sightings made during June and July 1947. The sightings were made in 48 states, the District of Columbia, and Canada. This is basically a reference work and does not attempt to make a critical evaluation of every individual report, although certain cases have been selected as representing special aspects of UFO phenomena; these cases are given in more detail in Sections II, III, and IV. Newspapers have provided the basic source of information, Anyone who reads the papers regularly has few illusions about the reliability of news reports; if an account is not distorted it is as often pitiably short of hard-core facts. But these news accounts serve to demonstrate, if only as quantitative evidence, the extraordinarily widespread character of the 1947 UFO sightings. In a number of cases, Dr. James McDonald, senior physicist at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, University of Arizona, has been able to contact the original witnesses and has thereby provided some indication of the general reliability of these news accounts. Most important, it is evident in these newspaper references that among the early sightings certain patterns of UFO appearance and behavior, usually thought of as a later development, were in fact first observed and reported in the summer of 1947.
Although a great amount of material was found by this research, there remains even more; without having access to local newspapers where many sightings occurred, it was impossible to obtain essential facts about these incidents. If a thorough search could be made of all newspapers throughout the country for this period, the total number of published sighting reports would, at a conservative estimate, be more than doubled. It would be enormously helpful if future readers of this report would consult their local libraries to supplement the material already collected, and send additional information to NICAP.
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One other significant fact points to the magnitude of the 1947 wave: again and again in news accounts reference is made to the hundreds of calls newspapers received, whereas only a fraction of these reports later appeared in the news accounts.
In order to avoid confusion over certain terms, the following definitions may be helpful to the reader. As used in this report, the term "wave" is any sudden and pronounced increase of UFO sightings on a national scale, above what is ordinarily considered an average daily rate. According to an interview in the Christian Science Monitor for September 3, 1965, Dr. J. Allen Hynek, chief scientific consultant to the Air Force's Project Blue Book, said that in the official files the average daily rate of sightings for the first 18 years of reports was one to two sightings per day. (Both the Air Force files and NICAP's indicate that this rate has risen in the past two years). If an increase in sightings has apparently resulted from an undue amount of publicity over one or two reports, and on careful examination shows a large proportion of misidentifications of natural phenomena, it cannot be termed a genuine wave.
The 1947 wave, which was unquestionably genuine, was not the first or last wave in this country, nor have UFO waves been confined to the United States. A major wave occurred here in 1897, when large numbers of citizens reported seeing what were then called "airships;" and just one year before the 1947 wave another had taken place in northern Europe, when hundreds of observations of "ghost rockets" were made. In this country other major waves occurred in March and April, 1950; July and August, 1952; November, 1957; August, 1965; March and April, 1966; and possibly in February, 1967 -- but without the amount of news coverage usually associated with waves. All of these major increases in sightings should be examined in depth for similarities and differences as part of the over-all study of the UFO phenomenon.
There have been increases of sightings in geographically isolated areas on numerous occasions, many times as part off a major wave but at other times independent of it. These are called "concentrations." Notable domestic concentrations were reported in the Carolinas in February, 1953; the Ohio area, August, 1955; the Dakotas and Minnesota, November, 1956; northern California, August, 1960; New Mexico, April, 1964; Maryland and Virginia, January, 1965; New Hampshire, in September and October, 1965; and in Michigan and eastern Long Island, as part of the major national wave of spring, 1966.
When a wave of UFO sightings takes place, there is simultaneously a marked increase in news coverage of the subject. The degree of news space allotted to "flying saucers" appears to be commensurate with the intensity of the wave. The resulting condition, called a "flap," was defined succinctly by the late Edward J. Ruppelt, former head of Project Blue Book, in The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects (Doubleday and Company, 1956, p. l89): "In Air Force terminology a 'flap' is a condition, or a situation, or a state of being of a group of people characterized by an advanced state of confusion that has not quite yet reached panic proportions." The marked confusion, experienced by a very great number of people in the summer of 1947, unquestionably puts the UFO wave of that period into the category of a flap.
A "sighting" is any observation of some unexplained aerial phenomenon. A "report" is the oral or written record of a sighting. A "case" refers to a report, plus other elements that are associated with it, such as information about the observer, an account of the investigation, references to the report, or conclusions drawn from the information gathered. For the purposes of brief reference in this report, each sighting is assigned a Case Number in the Chronology (Section V). In reports of sightings that may be independent observations of the same phenomenon, each independent report has been assigned a separate case number; and in reports in which several different sightings are made at different time intervals, or in different locations, but by the same witnesses, each independent sighting has a case number. Though this system tends somewhat to increase the statistical records, it does simplify the procedure of referring to specific sightings.
I would like to express my appreciation to all who assisted me in the preparation of this report: to Dr. James F. McDonald for his encouragement and helpful suggestions, as well as for valuable additional data on a number of cases; to Major Donald E. Keyhoe and Mr. Richard Hall, who kindly made NICAP's facilities available to me; to the NICAP staff, especially Miss Beau Sinkler, who prepared the maps; to Miss Lynn Catoe, of the Library of Congress, for her generous assistance in library research; to Mr. Thomas E. Pyne of the Interstate Commerce Commission, now retired, who supplied essential information on time zones for 1947; to Lt. Colonel George P. Freeman, Jr., who arranged my visit to Project Blue Book in January, 1967, and to Major Hector Quintanilla and his staff for their courteous assistance; to those NICAP members who provided useful data, including Miss Judi Anne Hatcher, of Los Angeles, Mr. Dudley Robb, of Montreal, and Mr. Jerry Rice, of New York City; and, particularly, to Miss Isabel L. Davis, of Washington, D.C., for all her helpful suggestions and practical assistance.
Washington, D.C.
Octobre 1967