Ira Eaker's 'I Once Saw a Flying Saucer' and the Air Force's 1966 UFO Kit

What this record is

This file is a small collection, not a single document. It appears to come from the papers of General Ira C. Eaker, the wartime commander of the Eighth Air Force, who retired as a lieutenant general and in the 1960s wrote a syndicated newspaper column. The 39-page PDF contains the typescript of one of those columns, “I Once Saw a Flying Saucer”, marked “Week of April 18, 1966”; clippings of the column as it ran in at least half a dozen newspapers; a Project Blue Book public information package dated 1 February 1966; a covering memo from the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force; and what remains of the March 1966 report of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board committee that reviewed Blue Book.

The typescript is on pages 2 to 4 of the PDF. Pages 5 to 11 are newspaper clippings. Pages 15 to 26 are the Blue Book package. Page 27 is the memo, and pages 29 to 33 are the Scientific Advisory Board report, which is barely legible in the scan. Pages 12 to 14 and 34 to 39 are blank. The file was unclassified. The Air Force included it in the UAP transfer because nearly all of it is about UFOs.

What it says about UFOs

UFOs are the subject of almost every page with text: the three typescript pages, the clippings, the Blue Book package and the committee report.

The column. Eaker opens with the House Armed Services Committee session of 5 April 1966, which he says was attended by Secretary of the Air Force Harold Brown and Chief of Staff General J. P. McConnell and in which questions about flying saucers “lasted nearly two hours”. His reading is political. Few congressmen, he writes, believed that the recent spate of sightings was a danger to security, “But this is an election year.” He then passes on the Air Force’s figures as McConnell gave them: a task force set up as early as 1948, more than 10,000 sightings investigated in 18 years, no verification of extraterrestrial objects that could threaten security, and 663 sightings still listed as unexplained, largely because of insufficient or conflicting information. He summarises the Scientific Advisory Board committee of six civilian scientists: it found no evidence of a threat, noted that professional astronomers scanning the sky had reported no UFOs, and suggested that the Air Force contract with leading universities to share the work, a proposal he says was “now under consideration”.

The centre of the column is Eaker’s own sighting (page 3 of the PDF). Flying west over New Mexico at dawn on a spring day in 1935, in a small single-seat open-cockpit fighter, he was watching a dark cloud bank when “a golden disc” larger than his own aircraft burst out of it. As it approached it turned blood red and gave off phosphorescent spines “like a giant iced-up porcupine”. He found himself taking evasive action without meaning to. Then, as it passed above and to his right and the angle and light changed, it was revealed as an aluminium-coloured DC-3 transport, iced up and catching the low sun. Had it entered a cloud before he recognised it, he writes, he “should now and always believe in the reality of my beautiful flying saucer.”

The column ends with two further points. Some flying objects, Eaker notes, stay unidentified for reasons of national security: about ten years earlier, airline pilots had reported a strange black aircraft at very high altitude in the western skies, and the mystery was solved only when a Soviet missile brought down a U-2. And he quotes McConnell: “If we could find one extra-terrestrial vessel,” it would guarantee support for air and space defence, and “Medals, fame and our gratitude therefore await any citizen who brings us a flying saucer.”

The clippings. Pages 5 to 11 show the column carried by the Copley News Service under different headlines. The legible mastheads include the Joliet Herald-News of 17 April 1966 (“UFOs Concern of Congress, Especially in Election Year”), the Daily Breeze of 19 April, the Amarillo Daily News of 22 April (“Ice-Encrusted Plane Provided UFO Effect”), and the Wichita Falls Times and the San Diego Union of 24 April (“Air Force Would Hail UFO Proof”), along with the Daily Report of Ontario-Upland, California. Editing varies from paper to paper. The Wichita Falls version prints “28 years” for 18, and the Ontario-Upland version turns the DC-3 into a “DC-8”.

The Blue Book package. Pages 15 to 26 are the standard public information kit that Blue Book sent to inquirers, dated 1 February 1966. The fact sheet (pages 16 to 19) says the program had run since 1948 under the names Sign, Grudge and Blue Book, that its procedures were set by AFR 200-2, and that its objectives were to determine whether UFOs posed a threat and whether they showed any unique scientific information or advanced technology. It describes three phases: investigation by the nearest Air Force base, analysis by the Blue Book office at Wright-Patterson and public release through the Secretary of the Air Force’s Office of Information. It sorts cases into identified, insufficient data and unidentified. It spends a page each on how stars and planets, satellites, aircraft and balloons get reported as UFOs, noting balloons up to 300 feet across that can appear saucer-shaped in low sunlight. Its conclusions (page 19) are three: no UFO had indicated a threat, no evidence showed unidentified sightings represented technology beyond present knowledge, and no evidence showed they were extraterrestrial vehicles. It cites former House Armed Services chairman Carl Vinson as saying hearings were unnecessary, and invites anyone with evidence to write to the Blue Book information office.

Page 20 lists items “not available to the public”, including AFR 200-2 and JANAP 146, and states that the Air Force had no UFO films or photographs and “no longer possesses” old Sign, Grudge and Blue Book Special Report No. 14 material. Page 21 is a reading list: astronomy primers alongside Menzel and Boyd’s “The World of Flying Saucers”, Hynek and Anderson’s “Challenge of the Universe” and Jacques Vallee’s “Anatomy of a Phenomenon”. Pages 22 to 24 are statistical tables compiled between November 1965 and January 1966, too garbled in the OCR to quote, and pages 25 and 26 are an American Meteor Society fireball report form.

The memo. Page 27 is a memo of 7 April 1966, two days after the hearing, from Brigadier General William C. Garland, Deputy Director of Information in the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force, to “General Eaker”: “Inclosed is some information on UFOs that I hope you may find useful. Drop by and see us when you have time.” Eaker’s figures and his account of the advisory committee match what the Air Force was saying publicly, and the memo suggests where they came from.

The advisory board report. Pages 29 to 33 hold the “Special Report of the USAF Scientific Advisory Board Ad Hoc Committee to Review Project ‘Blue Book’”, dated March 1966. The OCR recovers only the cover, a contents list (introduction, discussion, conclusions and recommendations, a Tab A memorandum from a Major General whose name the OCR renders as “LeBaill”, almost certainly Director of Information E. B. LeBailly, and an agenda) and a membership page naming Brian O’Brien as chairman. The rest is unreadable in this scan.

Context

The House hearing Eaker describes followed the Michigan sightings of March 1966, which Blue Book consultant J. Allen Hynek partly attributed to “swamp gas”, to widespread ridicule (see the Michigan ‘swamp gas’ sightings). The published record of the 5 April hearing is usually summarised as testimony from Harold Brown, Blue Book chief Major Hector Quintanilla and Hynek, so Eaker’s naming of McConnell deserves some caution. The university study that Eaker says was “under consideration” became the Condon Committee at the University of Colorado later in 1966, and its report in turn led to Blue Book’s closure in 1969. For the program’s full history see Project Blue Book, and for the regulation cited in the fact sheet, the transfer’s 1962 edition of AFR 200-2.

Status

This file documents how the Air Force’s public case on UFOs reached a mass readership in spring 1966: the official figures and conclusions, supplied by the Secretary’s information office, retold by a respected retired general with a personal anecdote that makes the Air Force’s point for it. The anecdote carries the argument that misidentification explains most sightings. Its details deserve a caveat. The Douglas DC-3 first flew in December 1935 and entered airline service in 1936, so a DC-3 over New Mexico on a spring morning in 1935 is not possible. Eaker may have misremembered the year or mistaken a DC-2 or another Douglas transport for a DC-3 thirty years later. That does not undercut his point about how the mind fills in an unfamiliar sight. It also shows how witness memory drifts over the years, even in an experienced pilot.

The file adds no new sightings. What it adds is a clear view of the Air Force’s 1966 information package in full, a sense of how that message was placed in the press and a copy, if a nearly illegible one, of the O’Brien committee report that set the Condon study in motion.

Sources

• National Archives catalog entry: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/659965414
• PDF of the record: https://catalog.archives.gov/medialz/electronic-records/rg-615/656595571/00891775_I_Once_Saw_A_Flying_Saucer-Project_Blue_Book.pdf
• Series: Records from the Department of the Air Force Relating to Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/656595571
• National Archives, Record Group 615 UAP records: https://www.archives.gov/research/topics/uaps/rg-615
• Unidentified Flying Objects: Hearing by the Committee on Armed Services, House of Representatives, April 5, 1966 (GovInfo): https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/CHRG-89hhrg50066O