Dow Chemical
and the Scientific Analysis of UFO
Debris
by Joel Carpenter
Most students of the history of UFOs are
familiar with the famous Ubatuba, Brazil case of 1957,
in which metallic debris said to have been retrieved
after the explosion of a UFO was determined to be
magnesium metal of unusual composition. Few researchers
are probably aware of another, surprisingly similar
incident that occurred in the US at the dawn of the
modern UFO phenomenon. This incident directly or
indirectly involved a host of people and organizations
that were later to have a major impact on the study of
UFOs in the United States, and points out that there is
still much to be learned concerning the early
investigation of the phenomenon by the military, the
intelligence community and even, perhaps, by the
corporate world.
Project Blue Book's detailed case file on the second
incident tells a weird and fascinating tale. According
to Dow documents preserved in the file, the event
began just after 5:00 on the afternoon of July 9,
1947, when a forty-five year old electrician named
Raymond Lane and his wife were picking huckleberries
near Midland, Michigan. A strange sizzling noise
abruptly drew their attention to a bizarre mass of
bright white, fiery sparks hovering about a foot above
the ground and about a hundred feet away. It reminded
them of a Fourth of July sparkler, but it was much
bigger -- the size, as they later put it, of a bushel
basket. The fireball burned brilliantly for about
fifteen seconds before dying out. When the smoke
drifted away, there was nothing left except some hot,
light-and-dark-colored metallic-looking debris on the
sandy soil. Lane collected fragments of the material
in a tin can and considered whom to tell.
The mysterious fireball had appeared in a uniquely
appropriate place. Midland happened to be the home of
one of America's most well-equipped materials analysis
facilities: the laboratories of Dow
Chemical company, well known for its
metallurgical expertise and a world leader in
magnesium technology.
Shortly after World War I, Dow metallurgists had
developed an alloy that the company called "Dowmetal"
-- refined magnesium to which was added about six
percent aluminum and one-half percent manganese.
Dowmetal was widely promoted for automotive and
aviation uses and was highly profitable for the
company, eventually giving it a virtual monopoly on
magnesium production in the US. In 1933 the company
was approached by Belgian scientist Jean Piccard with
a request to design and build a Dowmetal cabin for a
record-setting high-altitude balloon flight. The
design was highly successful and eventually enabled
flights to over 70,000 feet. During World War II Dow's
extremely lightweight, strong magnesium alloys became
an indispensable ingredient of aircraft and missile
structures. The company also became a contractor for
an unusual flight test program that had a direct link
to Project SIGN, the Air Force's 1948 UFO research
establishment.
See: Dow and Boundary Layer Control
One of the most significant figures behind Dow's
success was a chemist named John Josef Grebe
[pronounced "gree-bee"]. Born Hans Josef Grebe in
Uerzig, Germany in 1900, he emigrated to Ohio in 1914
and became a US citizen in 1921. Grebe graduated from
the Case School of Applied Science in 1924 and was
immediately hired by Dow. Considered a genius by his
colleagues and known as the "Idea Man," Grebe was
given free rein to work on projects of his own
devising. He established the company's Physical
Research Laboratory, an organization that produced a
steady stream of valuable inventions, particularly in
the field of plastics. Chemists under his direction
were responsible for the discovery of several
now-universally used plastics, such as styrene,
Styrofoam, and polyvinyl chloride, and also developed
a synthetic rubber that was vital to the US military
in World War II.
Grebe even perfected a method of extracting magnesium
from sea water, a process that became Dow's main
source of the metal. After Japan's surrender Grebe was
assigned to work with the Oak Ridge nuclear
laboratory, and in 1946 he was an observer at the
Operation Crossroads nuclear tests. He also worked
closely with the US Army's Chemical Corps on the
highly classified toxicological and radiological
warfare programs (in fact, by 1948, Grebe would
be named the Chemical Corps' chief technical advisor).
The morning after the fireball incident, Lane took
his can of sandy debris to Robert S. Spencer, a senior
researcher in Grebe's laboratory, whom Lane had met
when he was a Dow employee some years before. Spencer
contacted Edward Fales, the company's internal
security chief, and together the men went to the site
to investigate. Lane told the Dow officials that he
thought the object had been a flying saucer, or
possibly a meteorite, and that some small lumps of
silvery metal in the debris he had scooped up might be
platinum. (Ironically, there is no evidence that he or
anyone else ever reported seeing an object in flight
prior to the appearance of the fireball). Spencer
immediately arranged to have the material analyzed.
The Spectroscopy Laboratory quickly reported that the
shiny pellets in the material were largely silver
mixed with a few percent silicon, which probably came
from the sand on which the molten material had
solidified. The sample was checked for radioactivity,
but did not blacken photographic plates. According to
a report by Fales,
Preliminary tests of the material show
the contents to be as follows: ordinary sand, not
radio active [sic], but giving off an
ammonia gas. A silver nugget, almost pure except for
sand mixed in it, not radio active. Melted or fused
sand which gives off ammonia, has little droplets of
silver melted in the sand and some other material
which is not radio active. The fused sand has some
characteristics of the Los Alamos sand [i.e.,
the glassy material created by the Trinity nuclear
explosion] but is not believed to be the same.
By the end of September the Lab had run more
spectrographic tests on a small quantity of a fine,
light, ash-like powder laboriously sifted from the
debris. The powder turned out to be a material called
thorite, which was discovered to be somewhat
radioactive. The remaining portion of the debris yielded
traces of iron, aluminum, magnesium, and other metals.
There was also evidence of a significant amount of
magnesium hydroxide, which some analysts took to be the
remains of the combustion of a sizable amount of
magnesium.
Interestingly, Dow handled the case as a purely
internal matter at first. Fales' inquiries concerning
Lane led him to conclude that he was a somewhat
peculiar individual who was known to have basic
technical expertise. On balance, the incident seemed
likely to be the result of some kind of home-made
fireworks experiment. The FBI was eventually contacted
and an agent conducted a basic inquiry. As will be
seen, there was no Air Force involvement with the case
in 1947.
Activity surrounding the Midland fireball incident
became dormant by the autumn of 1947 but was revived
dramatically a year later, when on September 17, 1948,
Grebe, then working with the Chemical Corps at
Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland, requested an update on the
investigation from Dow. An examination of Fales'
dossier set him to speculating. In an October 11 memo
to one of his Army superiors, he wrote that
The only technical point that would
tend to discredit the report in a very slight way is
that the particular spectrum analysis that was made
of the sand that was supposed to have been picked up
with the sample of the fused mineral matter, which
contained nuggets of silver, had a different
analysis from the sand picked up in the general
area. It had rained, however, in the meantime, which
would remove any magnesium hydroxide that might have
been around.
As a whole, it would appear to me that, every
bit of evidence found should be considered
seriously as an indication that a self-consuming
missile capable of producing a considerable amount
of smoke and fire and leaving behind only the
minimum residue required to produce a battery and
radio transmitter is feasible and was probably
observed.
This concept - that the small Midland fireball had
represented the self-destruction of some kind of
instrumented projectile - marked a drastic change in the
official approach to the incident, bringing it in line
with the fears in 1946 and 1947 that some anomalous
meteor-like events were actually a type of
"self-consuming missile" experiments.
See: Ghost
Rockets
See: Green
Fireballs
It is not apparent from the available source material
exactly why Grebe chose this juncture to reopen the
case, but there are indications that similar studies
were being performed at the time on other samples of
apparent UFO debris that were considered to be
possibly the remains of missiles. For example, on
November 26, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover sent a memo
to the Air Force's Director of Special Investigations
(IG), concerning a
case similar to the Midland incident.
Just two days before Lane's 1947 experience, a group
of people near the village of West Rindge, New
Hampshire had been surprised by the sudden appearance
of wisps of smoke and flame rising from nearby lawns
and fields. Many small burned areas were discovered to
be scattered in a 200-foot diameter circle and seemed
to have been caused by hot fragments of metal that
apparently had fallen from the sky. A witness turned
several of the fragments over to a Professor "Rentges"
of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for
analysis. (This was typical phonetic FBI spelling --
"Rentges" was apparently J. Francis Reintjes
of the MIT Servomechanisms
Laboratory where Project Whirlwind, a powerful
digital computer that would become the prototype for
the SAGE national air defense network, was under
development at the time). Reintjes expressed the
opinion that the material, which had obviously been
subjected to "terrific heat," resembled the lining of
the rocket engines of German V-2 ballistic missiles he
had seen in New Mexico. Four of the collected
fragments, when pieced together, appeared to have been
part of a hollow cylinder eight inches in diameter and
having a wall thickness of three-sixteenths of an
inch. The West Rindge material had been subjected to
spectrographic analysis recently, Hoover reported, and
was determined to be ordinary cast iron that "had been
subjected to a very high degree of heat."
Additionally, in a letter titled "Flying Object
Incidents in the United States", dated November 3,
1948, Col. Howard McCoy of Air Materiel Command's
Technical Intelligence Division informed Chief of
Staff General Hoyt Vandenberg that his Project "Sign"
flying saucer analysts had interviewed Dr Irving
Langmuir of General Electric concerning the
possible origin of the objects, and that "it is
planned to have another interview with Dr. Langmuir in
the near future to review all the data now available,
and it is hoped that he will be able to present some
opinion as to the nature of the unidentified objects,
particularly those described as 'balls of light.'"
Study of this particular type of flying object -
apparently a tiny, remote-controlled or
internally-guided probe - had gained urgency after the
October 1, 1948 incident in which an Air National
Guard pilot had engaged in a long nighttime dogfight
over Fargo, North Dakota with a small, fast-moving
blinking light that was apparently under intelligent
control. It seems probable that this effort to
carefully analyze fragments of suspected flying
saucers was part of the escalating attempt to
establish whether there was any credible evidence of a
foreign terrestrial origin of the objects - an
approach that achieved its highest expression with the
publication, on December 10, 1948, of the Top Secret
Air Intelligence Division Study 203, "Analysis of
Flying Object Incidents in the US". This study
examined the possibility that flying objects reported
over the continental US represented Soviet
reconnaissance, training or provocation missions.
Meanwhile, John Grebe had taken his theory about the
Midland case to the highest levels of Army missile
research. In the middle of October he met with Col.
Holger Toftoy, Army Ordnance, the commander of Project
Hermes, the Army's multifaceted guided missile program
based at White Sands, New Mexico. Shortly after the
Nazi surrender Toftoy had supervised the removal of
some one hundred V-2 missiles from underground
factories and had them transported to White Sands.
Under Project Paperclip, the German rocket engineers
who had created the V-2, including Wernher von Braun,
were moved to Fort Bliss to work with Toftoy's
Ordnance team and General Electric, the contractor for
Project Hermes, in reconstructing and launching the
missiles.
Toftoy's
log for October 18, 1948 records Grebe's
surprising presentation:
Conference attended by Cols Toftoy,
Roberts & Bainbridge (CC), Maj J.F. Gay &
Dr. J. J. Grebe, (Chemical Corps), and Dr. Mugson.
Chemical Corps reported analysis of fragments picked
up from '"flying saucer" which vanished with a
brilliant flash and bang near Midlin [sic],
Michigan. Sand and clinker recovered from the
locality contained nuggets of fairly pure silver and
some thorium. The thorium was sufficient to give
radio activity [sic] approximately 10 times natural
background which could possibly be ascribed to
thorium coated filaments in electronic equipment,
although the quantity seems excessive. There was
evidence also of mechanism [magnesium] which had
been completely oxidized. Dr. Grebe advanced his
hypothesis that small missiles of the order of 1 to
3 feet in diameter might be responsible, coming from
distant sources. He considered that a rapidly
rotating disc of mechanism [magnesium] and/or
aluminum might have enough energy if properly
utilized to propel the disc several thousand miles,
and might be completely destroyed by burning in air.
Remaining traces of silver and thorium might be
ascribed to electronic control system. After
discussion, it was agreed that Col Roberts should
request the Bur of Standards group to investigate
some of the mechanisms which might conceivably
propel discs of this general type and TU will keep
in close touch with these calculations (CMH). A
meeting next Monday, 25 Oct, can be arranged with
Dr. Grebe if indications are favorable. Dr. Grebe
also briefly described a theory of his that a
fish-shaped object with a modified tear-drop cross
section would take off along the long axis and
change position in flight to fly at an angle more
like a flying wing. No wings or other aerodynamic
surfaces that produce drag would be required.
Grebe clearly envisioned the Midland object
as a small, unmanned vehicle containing 1940s
state-of-the-art vacuum tube based electronic equipment,
and given that he specified its range as "thousands of
miles," he apparently believed that its source was the
Soviet Union. The intriguing vision of a fast-spinning,
flywheel-like object that would destroy itself at the
end of its trajectory was novel, to say the least, but
Grebe had a good reason for this idea. One of Dow's most
secret and most vital wartime projects had been the
development of a structural housing for the miniature
radio transmitter that formed the heart of the "VT" -
the proximity fuse.
The radar like VT fuse was designed to detonate an
artillery shell at the exact moment that it passed
within lethal range of its target, such as an aircraft
or missile - or in anti-personnel applications, just
as it descended to within a few yards of the ground.
To do so, it incorporated a tiny radio transmitter and
receiver built from highly miniaturized and ruggedized
vacuum tubes. These tubes had to survive shock and
acceleration amounting to thousands of g's when fired
from a heavy gun, as well as the enormous centrifugal
force of the shell's stabilizing spin. Dow's
contribution was the design and production of a
special plastic housing for the tiny tubes, and the
project was carried out in such secrecy that most of
the technicians on the project only learned of its
exact function at the end of the war.
(The proximity fuse design effort was headquartered
at the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics
Laboratory in Maryland and was directed by Merle Tuve,
whose administrative assistant was an astronomer named
Josef Allen Hynek.) Grebe's saucer concept amounted to
something much like an artillery shell, possibly
combined with an aerodynamic shape that would allow a
degree of flight after the device arrived in the
vicinity of its target. The VT shell had incorporated
a novel battery that was energized when its chemicals
mixed due to the shock of launching, and Grebe
believed that the disc-missiles used something
similar. Presumably the self-destructing feature would
prevent US analysts from recovering intact specimens
of the vehicle.
The "Bur of Standards group" referred to in the memo
was the National Bureau of Standards' Ordnance
Development department, a secret guided missile
research establishment operating within the
weights-and-measures agency, which had worked closely
with the Army and Navy during WWII under the direction
of Harry Diamond and Dr. A. V. Astin.
The Ordnance department's first products were highly
classified miniature radio components for the
proximity fuse. Diamond's group, along with Hugh
Dryden, from the Bureau's Mechanics and Sound
department, also developed some of America's first
"smart weapons" during the war, including the "Robin,"
a television-guided bomb, the "Pelican," a
passive-radar-homing glide bomb, and the "Bat," a
1,000-pound radar-guided anti-ship glide weapon.
To help pack more and more electronic components into
missiles, the Bureau had perfected increasingly
miniaturized vacuum tubes, and by the end of the war,
its technicians helped invent a process for literally
painting circuitry onto insulating substrates, the
forerunner of modern printed circuits.
The Director of the Bureau of Standards since
November 1945 was Edward U. Condon. The New
Mexico-born physicist had been J. Robert Oppenheimer's
roommate at the University of Göttingen, Germany, in
the 1920s. He co-founded the MIT Radiation
Laboratories and did fundamental work on radar theory
and application at Westinghouse. When General Leslie
Groves set up the Los Alamos laboratory of the
Manhattan Project in 1943, he had asked Condon to be
associate director under Oppenheimer. Later Condon had
been a member of the executive committee of the
National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics (NACA), the
forerunner of NASA.
When Condon left the Bureau of Standards in 1951, it
was to become head of research and development at
Corning Glass Works, a corporate relative of Dow (via
the Dow Corning partnership). In light of the Air
Force - sponsored University of Colorado UFO study in
the 1960s which Condon directed (and during which his
personal antipathy to the subject became legendary),
it is tempting to speculate that Condon's involvement
with UFOs actually might have begun a decade and a
half earlier.
Unfortunately, there is as yet no evidence that the
Bureau of Standards "disc propulsion study" that
Toftoy advocated actually was undertaken. Interviews
with several surviving members of the Bureau's
Ordnance and Electronics departments have uncovered no
recollection of any such project. Grebe's theory did,
however, make enough of an impression at senior
military levels that a report quickly reached General
Vandenberg's office. Vandenberg cabled Project Sign on
December 2 inquiring about Sign's investigation of the
case. Project Sign admitted in a December 21 teletype
that it had no details on the Midland incident and
sheepishly requested copies of Grebe's report from the
Chief of Staff.
Interestingly, there is some evidence that the Bureau
of Standards was involved with yet another case
concerning magnesium from a UFO. In 1952, five NBS
scientists allegedly analyzed a fragment of metal
supplied by Cdr. Alvin Moore, USN, who said that it
had fallen on his property during the July 1952
"Washington, DC Invasion". The scientists subjected
the material to a battery of tests, including
spectrographic analysis, and concluded that it was an
artificially produced artifact. It was composed mostly
of magnesium, had a specific gravity of 3.48 and was
filled with millions of microscopic iron particles.
Like the West Rindge fragments, it appeared to be a
section of a cylinder, which when complete would have
been 10.4 inches in diameter. Cdr. Moore decided that
Project Blue Book should know about the discovery. He
mailed it to Captain Edward Ruppelt, who sent it on to
the Battelle Memorial Institute, where Howard Cross
gave it a cursory examination.
There are hints that Harry Diamond Laboratories,
which eventually spun off from the Bureau of Standards
to become part of the Army Research Laboratories,
conducted a study of radar UFOs at some point in the
early 1960s, but hard evidence is unavailable to date.
Dow's 1947 analysis of magnesium debris from a
suspected UFO crash near its own headquarters
foreshadows the company's involvement with the far
more famous Ubatuba material. These fragments first
surfaced in September 1957 (although other accounts
exist - see Sources),
when they were mailed anonymously to a reporter for a
Rio de Janeiro newspaper, who in turn passed them to
Dr Olavo Fontes, the Brazilian representative of the
Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO). Coral
and Jim Lorenzen, APRO's directors, were
impressed by an analysis performed at a laboratory in
Brazil, and upon obtaining the samples, Coral Lorenzen
arranged to have Dow's magnesium experts study them.
The fragments probably reached the US immediately
after the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik on
October 4, and it seems likely that there was
suspicion in some US circles that the Ubatuba episode
could be related in some way to Soviet
intercontinental ballistic missile experiments. Soviet
Premier Khrushchev had boasted in August that his new
ICBM could strike any point on earth, and now it had
been used to launch a globe-circling satellite. In the
feverish atmosphere of the post-Sputnik US defense
community, no one could afford to overlook
intelligence leads -- even tenuous ones. On December
1, 1957, US Army ground search parties were called out
in Alaska after sightings of unusual meteors raised
suspicions that part of the Sputnik launcher rocket
had entered the atmosphere there.
See: The
Last
Ghost Rocket: Did the Sputnik 1 Launcher Fall in
Alaska?
The unusually high purity of the UFO-related
magnesium detected by the Brazilian laboratory may
have set off alarms in the US, and part of the debris
was conveyed to Dow for analysis. Similar searches for
fragments of downed Soviet spacecraft became quite
frequent in the 1960s and 70s and would become known
as "Moon Dust" events.
See: Moon Dust events
In 1967, under the auspices of the Air
Force-sponsored UFO study based at the University of
Colorado and headed by Edward Condon, investigator Dr.
Roy Craig obtained a portion of one of the Ubatuba
fragments in order to subject it to neutron activation
analysis. Since the Brazilian analysis in 1957 had
indicated that the material was extremely pure
magnesium - purer than terrestrial technology could
produce, according to APRO - Craig contacted Dr. R. S.
Busk, head of Dow's Metal Products Department.
During or shortly after World War II, Dow had
developed a sublimation refining process under which
magnesium was heated to vapor and condensed in a vacuum
chamber. After three such cycles, the material, for all
practical purposes, was pure magnesium with only the
most minute residue of other elements. Busk supplied
Craig with triply-sublimed material as a reference
sample, and while doing so, mentioned Dow's earlier test
of the Ubatuba material. In a letter to the author,
Craig recalled that
[P]ersonnel at the Dow laboratories
were interested in UFO-related materials. They were
most cooperative in furnishing pure magnesium
samples and doing whatever analytical work I
requested relating to the Ubatuba magnesium samples.
I was surprised to learn that, years previously
[possibly as early as 1958 - JC], they had done
metallographic studies of the very samples of
Ubatuba magnesium I was then asking them to analyze.
They showed me the results of their earlier work,
which they still had on file, and repeated the work
for me.
Interestingly, Craig himself had worked for Dow for
eight years at the Atomic Energy Commission's Rocky
Flats Weapons Plant in Colorado, which was a Dow-managed
facility that John Grebe had helped establish. Craig did
not know Grebe, but they had mutual friends. He had
never heard of the Midland case, and, perhaps not
surprisingly, has no recollection of Condon describing
any earlier involvement with UFO research.
The neutron activation analysis Craig oversaw showed
that, in contradiction to the Brazilian claims, the
Ubatuba sample contained more impurities than the
triply-sublimed sample, and could in fact have been
made by terrestrial technology. Controversy over the
significance of the particular constituents of the
Ubatuba sample continues, as does analysis of the
material using the latest techniques.
1958 advertisement for Dow magnesium cruise
missile components
Grebe continued to work on nuclear projects at Dow
until he retired. He died in Sun City, Arizona in
1984. His younger brother Carl, a scientist himself,
recalls discussing flying saucers with John in the
1940s, and though they never discussed the Midland
incident in detail, he agrees with John's former Dow
colleagues that the spinning, self-destructing missile
described in the Toftoy memo is exactly the kind of
idea that Grebe's fertile mind would produce. The
parallels between the Midland and Ubatuba incidents,
separated by a decade and by thousands of miles, are
striking. Were both incidents simply hoaxes, or is
there still more to be learned about Ubatuba? Even Dr.
Olavo Fontes observed, in his report on the Brazilian
analysis of the Ubatuba fragments, that
The mystery of that sudden explosion
probably will never be solved. It may have been
produced by the release of some self-destructing
mechanism to prevent the machine from falling into
our hands and thus giving us the chance to learn its
secrets.
Sources
Cochrane, Rexmond C., Measures for Progress. A
History of the National Bureau of Standards, NBS
Special Publication 275. Washington, DC: U.S.
Government Printing Office, 1966
Ray Boundy and J. Lawrence Amos, eds, A History of
the Dow Chemical Physics Lab: The Freedom to Be
Creative. New York: Marcel Dekker. 1990
Brandt, E. N., Growth Company: Dow Chemical's
First Century. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State
University Press, 1997
US Air Force Project Blue Book "July 9, 1947
Midland, Michigan" case file
Col Holger Toftoy daily log, October 1948
Note: While the Ubatuba material is typically
said to have first surfaced in September 1957, some
sources link its origin to much earlier Brazilian
"mystery crashed airplane" stories from the pre-WWII
period. Until better information is available, I
assume that the 1957 version is correct.
Ubatuba
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