This interview was conducted in July 1998 for use on my radio program Spacecraft News. We ask Colonel Lloyd about his experience as a bomber navigator during the 1950's while serving with the Strategic Air Command. Colonel Lloyd is retired from the Air Force and has a successful business and lives a very happy and productive life. 

I want to thank the colonel for allowing us to print this interview. Colonel Lloyd's only reason for talking now is in the hope it will inspire others with similar experiences to come forward. So if any of you have had similar experiences, call me and we'll do an interview. 

Franklin Carter: Would you tell me your Air Force background? I know you were in the Air Force, I've told people you were a retired Colonel - would you please give me your background during the time of this sighting? 

Colonel Lloyd: I was a First Lieutenant on RB-36s with the 718th Squadron out of Ellsworth Air Force Base near Rapid City, South Dakota. As memory, serves, I think this would probably be the latter part of 1956. We were flying this RB-36 and I was in a substitute position as a navigator on this aircraft. Somewhere in the neighborhood of around northern South Dakota, or maybe southern North Dakota, at a high altitude of somewhere below 40,000 feet, on the left scanner in the aft compartment, called on the intercom to tell us that there was an object flying off our left wing in formation with us. 

We looked out and most of the crew did--those that were still awake - and there was this very obviously a flying saucer. It had a dome on top that was some kind of an observation dome that had some portholes around it and it was circular in shape, I would say approximately 100 feet in diameter, and flying just a few hundred yards off our wingtip in formation with us, which it did for quite some period of time - several minutes, I would say. We called a radar site on the ground to get confirmation and they said there was something out there, and they did confirm that there was an object flying in formation with us. 

We took pictures of it. We had all been issued Haine cameras and binoculars and a special reporting form in conjunction with a project called Project Blue Book, and the Air Force was the lead agency, as I understand, for Operation Blue Book back in those days. We had a discrete frequency that we could report these sightings to, and we did. There was quite a number of members of the crew that observed this sighting. 

Our crew at that point was about 22 members. 

When we got on the ground, we had to turn in all of our logs, equipment, photographs, everything to an intelligence unit called Reci-Tech which was a central processing unit for the whole wing. We were debriefed by an Intel officer, reminded that we all held top-secret clearances, and that we couldn't reveal any of this information for a period of 12 years. Then, several weeks later, we were debriefed again by some officers from higher headquarters who reminded us also of the same 12-year period, and in fact, when I was discharged back in 1960 from the active Air Force into the active reserves, I was also reminded again of the 12-year period to not reveal any of this information. 

Anyway, many years had passed and I had forgotten most of this incident until just a few years ago, in fact, four years ago, when I had another sighting. 

FC: All right, I want to go back in your RB-36. This was a reconnaissance bomber. Tell me about the equipment that was on it, if this is not violating your secrecy agreements. 

CL: No, it's long since become no violation of anything. We carried huge amounts of photographic equipment on board: gang cameras in the compartment that had been - the RB had - the normal bomber had three bomb bays and the RBs had only two bomb bays. The forward bomb bay compartment had been reconfigured to be a pressurized compartment and that's where we held all the cameras - big cameras. I'm talking BIG cameras! The strips of film would be probably 12 inches wide, and we could photograph the whole continent of Africa in one pass. With our oblique cameras and our gang cameras and then we had radar cameras on our radar sets. We had electronic countermeasures equipment, we would carry weather analysis equipment for drops out of the aircraft. We could do every form of reconnaissance that you could think of. 

FC: So you were a very well ordered and very high level technical crew in the Air Force, and the Air force did debrief you, they know that you took these photographs, they took your film, so somewhere in this world there are probably copies of those photographs that you took of this disk that flew off your side. Would you suspect there probably is? 

CL: Somewhere, somewhere I would think there would be. I would think - as I said, all of us were issued, under Operation Blue Book, these little hand cameras, which in addition we could take - were just like 35-mm cameras, and we could take pictures of anything that we saw. 

FC: Well, Colonel, I really do appreciate you sharing this information with us, and I want to come back again and interview you about your sighting about three or four years ago, but that's for another time, and I really do appreciate you for taking time to talk with us about this and letting us hear about this. Thank you so much!