Gorman dogfight, Fargo

North Dakota Air National Guard pilot George Gorman, flying a P-51 at night, reported chasing a small blinking white light for about 27 minutes as it out-turned, out-climbed and twice came at him head-on. The tower controller saw a light through binoculars, and the pilot and passenger of a Piper Cub also saw a light, without seeing any shape. Project Sign's study, released through PURSUE, recounts the chase, and in 1949 the Air Force attributed it to a lighted weather balloon released from Fargo, with the apparent manoeuvres produced by Gorman's own turns. Ruppelt counted it among three 1948 'classic' cases.

Lighted weather balloon; apparent manoeuvres from the pursuing aircraft's own motion

• DocumentDOW-UAP-D094Release 4

  DOW-UAP-D094, Analysis of Flying Object Incidents in the United States, 1949

  USAF Air Intelligence Division Study No. 203, dated 28 April 1949 -- per the AARO Comment, a later, cleaner revision of DOW-UAP-D093 with substantively similar content. Reports approximately 210 incidents reviewed, discusses the U.S. Weather Bureau's Richmond, Virginia station, where trained observers sighted strange metallic disks through a theodolite on four occasions in 1946-47 (before public 'flying saucer' news coverage began), and repeats the domestic-vs-Soviet flying-wing hypothesis with added specifics, including an intelligence claim that a Soviet jet night-fighter regiment (Horten XIII-derived) was based at Kuzmikha, near Irkutsk, defending an atomic energy plant.

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• Document65_HS1-834228961_62-HQ-83894_Section_007Release 1

  65_HS1-834228961_62-HQ-83894_Section_007

  Covers roughly 1952-1954, the contactee era. Its most developed thread concerns Cincinnati resident Thomas Eickhoff, who in June 1954 told the FBI he had met self-described contactees Truman Bethurum (who claimed contact with a woman from the planet Clarion) and George Hunt Williamson, and was helping organize a large paid public meeting; the FBI's response instructed the field office to tell Eickhoff the Bureau had no jurisdiction over flying-disc claims, could not vouch for or against the group, and that participating would not shield him if fraud were later found. A related letter asks the FBI directly whether George Adamski's 1953 book 'Flying Saucers Have Landed' (co-written with Desmond Leslie, describing Adamski's claimed contact with a man from Venus) has 'any foundation in fact'; the surviving reply is not present in the sampled pages. The section also carries a routine Seattle field-office policy memo on how sighting reports (saucers, parachute landings, submarines) are disseminated to military intelligence without FBI evaluation.

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• Wikipedia: Gorman dogfighten.wikipedia.org