MY UFO EXPERIENCE: Radar Operator Witnesses UFOs in 'V - Formation'

My "UFO" Radar Contact Experience
Reader Submitted Report
[Unedited]
2-27-08

     In 1954, I joined the navel reserve in order to avoid the draft while I was in college. As a reservist, it was my duty to attend surface division meetings in Houston on a weekly basis and to participate in two weeks training duty once a year.

Of course, the first year it was Boot Camp in Waukegan, Ill. but after that I was able to "strike for" for the navy discipline I most liked. I choose Radar.

I liked radar because I understood the basic principles of it and wanted to be "in the know" of everything that was going on just as did the ships officers and Captain. The Combat Information Center (CIC) was the place to be for that. I was pretty happy with that type of service. Besides, I did not have to swab the deck!

The third year (summer of '57)) I was assigned training duty on the USS Columbus, a light cruiser, CA 74, departing out of Long Beach, CA.

We departed for a two week cruise in the Pacific and one night off Catalina Island I was watching the radar scope to make sure we knew where all the surrounding ship traffic was.

It must have been about 7 or 8 p.m. just after dark when a hard contact blip showed up on my screen. It did not drift on the scope as such hard contacts do if you are passing or overtaking anther ship. It just "Popped" up on the screen.

I reported the contact bearing as the others watching a gang of redundant surface radar scopes did. The surface radar gives bearing and range of the blip contact. The range was about 20 miles from the ship. This is out of human sight since the horizon on the ocean is only 8 miles away and this blip was well beyond that.

After a minute or two, another blip appeared (popped on as the first one did) along side the first one, not very far away from it. These blips just materialized in an abnormal way but were "hard" contacts indicating something was definitely there. Well, certainly subs surfacing could account for this.

By this time the CIC officers were observing the scopes and taking pictures. Then these two blips were joined by three more contacts making 5 total. Guess what? They were in V formation! Well, this was an exciting event for everyone since five subs in V formation would be very unusual. We thought there may be a radar malfunction common to all the surface radars hooked up to the same horizontally rotating antennae. But then there was this: the blips were showing on a completely different and independent air defense radar system with the antennae operating up and down vertically to check altitude of contacts. These blips were at 5000 feet and hovering in one spot!

The officers were running around taking pictures of the scope presentations and showing some concern. After about 10 or 15 minutes, the five contacts began to disappear, one at a time. They disappeared instantly just as they had appeared instantly. Both surface and air radars showed them disappearing in the same instant until they were all gone. No one saw them visually since they were over the horizon, but both of the independent radar systems indicated they were there, in V formation.

Needless to say. That event was the talk of the ship for a while. All the radars were checked and found to be operating normally. In talking to some of the "Old Salts" I found out that they had similar experiences before on other ships. Wow. Non-the-less, the event was recorded officially as a "Radar Phenomenon" in the ship's logs. No one said "UFO", but believe me, they were. They were unidentified and they were flying.

Since then, I have had a keen interest in this type of phenomenon and I have heard of many UFO stories where the "contact popped up on the scope", appeared and disappeared very quickly on all manor of radar systems, curiously similar to my first hand experience. If one can sift through the reported "Kook" stuff, there is, in my view, something to all of this. I think more and more scientists, pilots and professional people would now attest to this and I see that you have said, "They are real!" (Fastwalkers)

See Also:

Updated: White Sands Navy Radar Operator Saw Discs Circle V-2 Rocket Launches

St. Louis’ Radar System 'Sees' Multiple UFOs

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UFO Sighting 'No Hoax,' Experts Say

By Jason Freeman
The Neighborhood Star
4-3-08

     To this day, no one can say with any certainty what they were or where they were going.

Sure, there are theories.

The wing lights of a commercial airliner, flares tied to balloons, mistaken planets and even mass hallucination have been suggested as possible explanations for the sightings of three unidentified red lights that passed over the skies of Tinley Park in a rough V formation on the nights of Aug 21 and Oct 31 in 2004.

But Sam Maranto, state director for the Illinois Mutual UFO Network, doesn't put much credence into those theories.

"We're pretty well convinced that they were not hoaxes," he said. "It was something definitively unusual. We're not saying they were from outer space, but they certainly were non-conventional."

Maranto, along with UFO author Don Schmitt and Dr. Mark Rodeghier, director of the Center for UFO Studies, talked about the "Tinley Lights" phenomena as well as other local and national UFO cases this weekend in Tinley Park during a nine-hour UFO Symposium.

During Maranto's presentation, he played a video of the 2004 Tinley sighting that was shot by Crestwood resident T.J. Japcon.

"It was a perfectly clear night," he said. "The sky was crystal clear; not a cloud in the sky, and people were out in droves having block parties. On weekends, when people are out on nice days, you're going to have higher incidents of sightings."

Maranto fully rejects the theory that the lights were merely road flares tied to balloons.

"A 30-minute flare weighs a pound," he said. "Do you know how many balloons you'd need to take that thing off? Quite a bit - 32 regular balloons. Also, a flare burns at 3,000 degrees. What kind of moron would put an incendiary device in the sky? We would have found evidence of it."

"You would have been able to see smoke, but you don't see any in the footage," he added.

Most witnesses claim the three lights moved silently across the night sky in a V formation before suddenly winking out of sight, said Maranto.

"This very well may be one craft," he said. "Very large, triangular, V-shaped craft, many miles long, have been reported. We're talking miles long. The interesting thing about (the Tinley Lights) is that they never break that configuration. They maintain that signature, at least that's what we've seen in the footage we've reviewed."

Participant Guy Richards, of Rockford, Ill., said many people who report seeing UFOs are regular people who have nothing to gain by going public.

"In the 30,000 documented observations of things in the sky, most people (who report them) are not foolish or trying to con you," he said. "They're ordinary people who have seen something, and they'd like to have somebody tell them it's OK or explain it to them. They're just looking for some closure."

Many symposium attendees, like one man who wished to remain anonymous, said the information discussed during the event was, at the very least, something to consider.

"It's different, that's for sure," he said. "I'm not sure what to make of all this. Most of that footage, I've never seen before."

Maranto said the Tinley Park case, which also included a sighting in 2005, will eventually become legendary in the UFO community.

"It takes a long time to compile all this stuff, but by the time we get done, the Tinley Park case will be one of the best documented mass sighting cases of all time, thanks to people in the community," he said.

More . . .

See Also:

Monstrous Size V-Shaped UFO Reported in 1953

Intrigue Persists Over Lights in Sky

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