6th Air Division History, July 1952: A Bomber Crew Chases a MacDill Object
The 6th Air Division's July 1952 history records a crew climbing to 20,000 feet over MacDill after the tower reported high-altitude objects on July 22, an object tracked at 41,000 feet, and a historian's scornful asides.
What this record is
This is the monthly history of the 6th Air Division, a Strategic Air Command bomber division at MacDill Air Force Base, Tampa, Florida, for July 1952. The division historical officer, WOJG C. A. Whittle, and the division historian, T/Sgt. Leonard F. Ryan, prepared it. It runs to 86 pages: a short narrative in three chapters (administration, personnel, and operations and training) followed by supporting documents, photographs and a list of commanders. It was classified SECRET and declassified in 1978. Most of the month’s news concerns the B-47 Stratojet. After two crashes, one near Marianna, Florida, on July 22, the division commander, Maj. Gen. Frank A. Armstrong Jr., grounded all B-47s, and the 305th Bomb Wing’s switch from B-29s was put on hold. The history is in the UAP transfer because of a passage headed “Flying Saucers” in the operations chapter.
What it says about UFOs
Three pages of 86 mention flying saucers: pages 9, 11 and 13 of the PDF. That is a real share of a narrative that is only thirteen pages long.
Page 9 records an actual incident. Major Frederick G. Terrell of the 364th Bomb Squadron, 305th Bomb Wing, took off on July 22 at 1955 hours in aircraft number 7273 on a routine proficiency flight, with Captain Wallace G. Hynds Jr. as co-pilot. At 2245 hours the MacDill tower reported unidentified flying objects at high altitude and asked for an investigation. Terrell climbed to 20,000 feet and circled the MacDill area for an hour and a half, until an object was seen about 20,000 feet above his aircraft, moving at high speed. The history says the report was filed “under existing directives” and that the object was tracked at 41,000 feet at about 400 knots. It adds: “What it was has not been determined.”
The historian then editorializes. Division aircraft normally did no more than try to track high-altitude objects, and so “no official cognizance is taken of the popular notion of the flying saucers.” He tied the saucers to the Orson Welles radio hoax, which he misnames “Invaders From Mars,” and wrote that popular credulity kept the reports coming, with nothing concrete to support the idea of saucers from another planet, “probably Venus,” aimed at the earth or at MacDill.
Page 11 continues in the same vein. Saucers encountered without contact were handled under normal administrative procedures and reported as “unidentified objects.” The historian summarized a 1951 book, footnoted as Frank Scully’s Behind the Flying Saucers, which claimed that saucers had been recovered with crewmen about thirty-six inches tall. He noted that it was now regarded as a hoax and cited a debunking article, “Flying Saucers and the Little Men,” in True for September 1952. He closed with a speculation of his own: that saucers could be built on the jet principle of Hero of Alexandria, and that the Air Force might be testing model saucers, complete with weighted model crewmen, at its test centers.
Page 13 adds one line: on July 27 there were more reports of unidentified objects in the sky near Tampa, one of them carried by what the historian calls a usually reliable newspaper, the St. Petersburg Times.
Context
July 1952 was the height of the biggest UFO wave in Air Force history. The first weekend of radar and visual sightings over Washington, D.C., came on July 19 and 20, just days before the MacDill chase, and the second on July 26 and 27, the same day as the Tampa reports. Under Air Force Letter 200-5 of April 1952, units were to report sightings promptly to the Air Technical Intelligence Center, the home of Project Blue Book. See the summer 1952 UFO wave, the Washington, D.C., sightings and the history of Project Blue Book.
Status
The July 22 entry is the valuable part: a named crew, a time, altitudes and a tracked speed, all recorded by the unit and filed through channels. The history does not say how the object was tracked or by whom, and it gives no follow-up. A high, fast target at night over Tampa in July could have many explanations, and the history does not try to choose one. It says plainly that the object was never identified. The rest of the passage is the historian’s own opinion, and it is useful mainly as evidence of how dismissive some Air Force writers were in the middle of the wave. His misremembered “Invaders From Mars” and his model-crewmen theory are his, not the division’s.