On June 19 radar at Goose AFB in Newfoundland picked up some odd targets.  The targets came across the scope, suddenly enlarged, and then became smaller again.  One unofficial comment was that the object was flat or disk-shaped, and that the radar target had gotten bigger because the disk had banked in flight to present a greater reflecting surface.  ATIC’s official comment was weather.

Goose AFB was famous for unusual reports.  In early UFO history someone had taken a very unusual colored photo of a “split cloud.”  The photographer had seen a huge ball of fire streak down through the sky and pass through a high layer of stratus clouds.  As the fireball passed through the cloud it cut out a perfect swath.  The conclusion was that the fireball was a meteor, but the case is still one of the most interesting in the file because of the photograph.

Then in early 1952 there was another good report from this area.  It was an unknown.

The incident started when the pilot of an Air Force C-54 transport radioed Goose AFB and said that at 10:42P.M. a large fireball had buzzed his airplane.  It had come in from behind the C-54, and nobody had seen it until it was just off the left wing.  The fireball was so big that the pilot said it looked as if it was only a few hundred feet away.  The C-54 was 200 miles southwest, coming into Goose AFB from Westover AFB, Massachusetts, when the incident occurred.  The base officer-of-the-day, who was also a pilot, happened to be in the flight operations office at Goose when the message came in and he overheard the report.  He stepped outside, walked over to his command car, and told his driver about the radio message, so the driver got out and both of them looked toward the south.  They searched the horizon for a few seconds; then suddenly they saw a light closing in from the southwest.  Within a second, it was near the airfield.  It had increased in size till it was as big as a “golf ball at arm’s length,” and it looked like a big ball of fire.  It was so low that both the OD and his driver dove under the command car because they were sure it was going to hit the airfield.  When they turned and looked up they saw the fireball make a 90-degree turn over the airfield and disappear into the northwest.  The time was 10:47P.M.

The control tower operators saw the fireball too, but didn’t agree with the OD and his driver on how low it was.  They did think that it had made a 90-degree turn and they didn’t think that it was a meteor.  In the years they’d been in towers they’d seen hundreds of meteors, but they’d never seen anything like this, they reported.

And reports continued to pour into Project Blue Book.  It was now not uncommon to get ten or eleven wires in one day.  If the letters reporting UFO sightings were counted, the total would rise to twenty or thirty a day.  The majority of the reports that came in by wire could be classified as being good.  They were reports made by reliable people and they were full of details.  Some were reports of balloons, airplanes, etc., but the percentage of unknowns hovered right around 22 per cent.