78th Fighter Wing, 1964: A Bay Area UFO Wave and a 'Flying Sub'
An air defense wing history notes a jump in UFO reports around San Francisco Bay in 1964 and files a newspaper story about a glowing 'flying submarine' that Hamilton's radar never detected.
What this record is
This is the quarterly history of the 78th Fighter Wing (Air Defense) and Hamilton Air Force Base in Marin County, California, north of San Francisco. The wing flew F-101 interceptors under the 28th Air Division (SAGE) and Air Defense Command, and it was commanded by Col Charles D. Chitty, Jr. The catalog dates the file December 1964, but the title page (page 3 of the PDF) and the narrative show that it covers the quarter ending 30 September 1964, which is July to September.
The PDF has 490 pages. About 30 are narrative. The rest are attachments: orders, a base police procedure, a summer training yearbook for Air Force ROTC cadets, rosters, correspondence about noise complaints, and a thick sheaf of local newspaper clippings. The file was unclassified, marked For Official Use Only, and that marking was removed in 2016. It went into the UAP transfer because of one paragraph and one newspaper clipping.
What it says about UFOs
The UFO content is one short paragraph on page 45 of the PDF and one clipping on page 299. The paragraph sits in the community relations section, between jet engine run-up noise and forest fires. It reports a “noticeable increase” in UFO sightings during the quarter, particularly in August. The sightings came from throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and followed no pattern the wing could see. The reports were screened and forwarded to Wright-Patterson AFB “in accordance with applicable directives”. The paragraph adds that Hamilton got some unfavourable publicity from what it calls a misleading article in the San Rafael Independent-Journal about a UFO incident, and it points to Tab L.
According to the attachment list on page 61, Tab L seems to hold clippings from the Independent-Journal of 22 September 1964 and the San Francisco News-Call Bulletin of 23 September 1964. Page 299 carries two short, undated stories that fit that description. The first, headlined “Flying Sub Eludes Radar At Hamilton”, reports a large, glowing object seen crossing the sky around dawn, from Redwood City as far north as Eureka. According to United Press International, three patrolmen on their way to work in Alameda said it looked like a “flying submarine”. Other witnesses called it cigar-shaped. A Cloverdale man described a sphere like the sun wrapped in smoke. The article’s point was that Hamilton’s radar, which watched the sky for enemy aircraft and missiles, had not detected the object. Base officials said they had had only two calls about it. San Rafael police thought it might have been a jet whose appearance was changed by smoke from the Sonoma County fires.
The second story, “A Shining Mystery”, reports police in Redwood City and San Rafael saying much the same. It also records that Vandenberg AFB had fired an intercontinental ballistic missile down the Pacific range at 6:10 a.m. Vandenberg officials said the launch could not have been seen in the Bay Area.
The history says nothing more. It does not say whether the dawn sighting was among the reports forwarded to Wright-Patterson, and it records no investigation by the wing.
Context
In 1964 the Air Force handled UFO reports under AFR 200-2 and sent them to Project Blue Book at Wright-Patterson. That is the “applicable directives” route this history describes. An air defense wing had its own reason to care about a story like this. The Independent-Journal was asking why a radar built to catch Soviet bombers had missed something hundreds of people saw, and the history treats the episode as a public relations problem rather than an intelligence one.
Status
The record shows how a fighter wing experienced UFO reports in 1964: as a steady flow of paperwork to pass up the line, and now and then as bad press. It adds a contemporary newspaper account of a dawn sighting over northern California, saved in an Air Force file. Nothing in it resolves that sighting. There is an obvious candidate, all the same. A missile or its exhaust plume climbing into sunlight at dawn, while the ground below is still dark, can look like a glowing, elongated object to observers hundreds of miles away. The same newspaper page reports a Vandenberg launch minutes before the 6:15 sighting. Vandenberg’s statement that the launch could not have been seen argues against that explanation, the witness timing argues for it, and the record does not settle the question.