From: Brad Sparks
Subject: Updated and edited analysis, Oak Ridge / Maryville, Tenn., case of June 20-21, 1952
To: NICAP Research
Oak Ridge / Maryville, Tenn., case of June 20-21, 1952(local time was June 20), is one of a few stock BB bs "balloon UFO" cases, dragged out in BB briefings for years as evidence of stupidity of "fooled" pilots when in fact the BB treatment was a sham and a fraud.
This Oak Ridge
case was the second of 4 or 5
Ruppeltian "duel of death" pilot
cases. It was so similar to the
Gorman case that Ruppelt called it
"striking." The other "duel of
death" cases included Mantell (implied by
Ruppelt as being on his list), Gorman of
course, then this Oak Ridge case, then the
F-94 over Hanford/Odessa, Wash., Dec
10-11, 1952, and lastly the TBM over
Cuba, Sept 24, 1952 (yes, Ruppelt
presented them a bit out of order).
Ruppelt claimed the F-47
pilot Lt. James Wilson, while on combat
air patrol, thought he was
"dog-fighting" a blinking white UFO but
was actually "dueling" with a lighted
weather balloon located, Ruppelt
claimed:
"... right at the
spot where the pilot
encountered the light" (Ruppelt
1956/1960, p. 44, emphasis added) (see
“dog-fighting” phrase in Ruppelt
teletype in the BB files, quoted
below).
Except the F-47 would
have had to time-travel back in time 3/4
hour to be at or 10-20 miles from the
"spot" when the balloon was actually
there.
Ruppelt claimed that
"The similarity to the Fargo
[Gorman] case was striking"
(Ruppelt 1956/1960, p. 44) so the Gorman
case was to be falsely debunked too, and
so he said:
"In the case involving the
ground observer and the F-47 near the
[Oak Ridge] atomic installation, we plotted the
winds and calculated that
a lighted balloon was right at
the spot where
the pilot encountered the light."
(Ruppelt 1956/1960, p. 44, emphasis
added)
That is a complete
bald-faced falsehood by Ruppelt,
which can’t be explained away as some
BB underling who goofed up the
case, because
Ruppelt was directly
involved, having personally drafted and
sent the weather station teletypes in
the BB file on this Oak Ridge
case. There is no such
"plot" map or "calculation" in the
BB file and none is referenced in
any actual not fictitious BB
document. The
slow-moving balloon never got more than
4 miles from Maryville airport and the
F-47 flew at least 20 miles from that (a
25-mile radius from Maryville, as stated
in the ADC 30th Air Division teletype
report).
The weather balloon and
its light could not possibly have been
seen at night by the naked eye from such
distances. In fact, when the F-47
pilot sighted the UFO at 10:58 PM he was
10-13 miles away from the balloon's
launch site but the balloon light had
already blacked out 3/4 hour earlier
when it burst at about 10:15 PM and
crashed to the ground. The F-47
flying at nearly 300 mph covered over 80
miles in the 17 minutes of UFO "ramming
attacks" as Ruppelt called them (Ruppelt
1956/1960, p. 43).
Moreover, the UFO was
a blinking light whereas
the balloon light was a tiny steady light, another
devastating fact Ruppelt covered
up.
Many people imagine that
a "lighted balloon" must mean some huge
possibly 10- to 30-foot balloon envelope
lighted up by some kind of floodlamp or
searchlight, or an arc-light inside the
balloon, when no such floodlight could
possibly have been carried on or inside
a flimsy 100-gram balloon of very little
lifting capacity. Weather
“balloons” – the round envelopes –
themselves are not lighted up.
The light is a tiny little
chemical-battery light, or a candle,
a couple inches in size or less,
hung from a string below the
balloon – which,
again, is not lit up.
These early era lights
do not blink. Weather balloon
lights in the 1950’s could not be seen
by the unaided eye more than a mile away
– weather observers used
theodolite telescopes with
much greater range than the unaided
human eye. Balloon
trackers know exactly where to look
in the sky since the lumbering slow
balloons are not traveling 100’s of
miles per hour like aircraft and UFO’s
and are easy to track. This myth
of the "lighted balloon" was a fraud
perpetrated by Blue Book debunkers to
explain away troublesome UFO cases.
Ruppelt also deceitfully
concealed the fact that two
weather observers at
the Maryville McGhee-Tyson airport
were tracking the balloon at
10-10:15 PM and of course did not
see any F-47 "dog-fighting" their
balloon at 10:58-11:15
PM. Well, how
could they when the F-47 never showed up
until 3/4 hour after their
balloon crashed to the ground? Why
would they even stay out looking long
after their balloon was gone? Can
BB even tell time??
Ruppelt teletyped the
ADC 30th Air Division on June 24, asking
(emphasis added):
"Did the ground observer [at
Oak Ridge GOC post] see F-47
'dog-fighting'?"
Reply on June 26: "Ground
Observer did not see
F-47 [at all]."
Ruppelt likewise
teletyped the Oak Ridge Weather Station
on June 24, over the names of Col.
Donald Bower and the ATIC Commander Col.
John O’Mara to add heavy pressure to the
request, “urgently” asking (emphasis
added):
"Urgently need info ... If info
is available, desire to know whether
or not [weather] observers noted a/c
[aircraft F-47] near balloon,
height, and time balloon burst, and
highest altitude reached by balloon."
Bob Myers at Oak Ridge
Weather Station telephoned Col. Bower,
Ruppelt's boss, with preliminary
info. Then the Meteorologist in
Charge, J. Z. Holland, canvassed the
neighboring weather stations and replied
in detail in writing on July 17, with
detailed balloon data / winds aloft, and
balloon light failure data from
Maryville’s McGhee-Tyson Airport – the
balloon that Ruppelt later decided had
“attacked” the F-47 as seen by the
stupid F-47 pilot in Ruppelt’s
physically impossible scenario.
But no observer reported any
sighting of the F-47 “near balloon” and
they were specifically asked (see above,
Weather Station and GOC).
Oops. Ground truth facts refute
debunker bs, tripping up BB badly.
How can there possibly
be any one such “spot” anyway when the
F-47 was traveling at nearly 300 mph
over a 17-minute period, covering a
distance of over 80 miles? Were
the F-47 and the balloon both just hovering for
17 minutes at this one “spot”??
Even the balloon at its actual measured
speed would have moved 4 miles from any
such “spot,” 4 miles being the distance
the balloon actually traveled at its
average speed in the wind of about 19
mph. Or was the “balloon”
traveling at nearly 300 mph, too, like
it was a powered aircraft?? Was
the weather balloon really a powered
aircraft?? Wouldn’t that make the
so-called balloon in fact no balloon at
all but a UFO?
But Ruppelt goes on, it
does not end there, it extends into a
barely-restrained sarcastic commentary
on stupidity of pilots in general who
are too ignorant to recognize a balloon
when they see one and are thus so easily
"fooled":
"Gorman fought a
lighted balloon too [sic!].
An analysis of the sighting by the Air
Weather Service sent to ATIC [sic! ATIC
did not exist in 1949] in a letter dated
January 24, 1949, proved it.
The radioactive F-51 was decontaminated
[sic] [snide sarcasm by Ruppelt] by a
memo from a Wright Field laboratory....
"Why can't experienced
pilots recognize a balloon when they
see one? If they are flying
at night, odd things can happen to their
vision. There is the problem of
vertigo as well as disorientation
brought on by flying without
points of reference [sic!*].
Night fighters have told dozens of
stories of being fooled by
lights." (Ruppelt 1956/1960, pp.
44-45, emphasis added)
[NOTE: There are no
"dozens" of night fighter stories of
"fooled" pilots, in fact not a single
one is known excepting the bogus 4
nighttime "duel of death" cases in
Ruppelt's book, where the pilots were
not actually "fooled."] [*In the
Oak Ridge case there were many points of
reference including the city lights of
Knoxville and stars visible above the
city through 50% cloud cover.]
Paraphrasing Ruppelt
against him: Why can't debunkers
tell the truth and act like honest
skeptics when they see evidence of a
UFO? Apparently, an honest skeptic
finds it difficult to remain a skeptic
unless they simply just evade unpleasant
facts or outright misrepresent
them. Only by dishonesty can
"skeptics" – in their own minds at least
– defeat the massive evidence for the
hated and reviled UFO and hence they are
not skeptics in that case but
ideological debunkers.
There is no amount of
evidence that will ever convince
debunkers, because it is not about
evidence, facts or truth for them, but
about defeating a hated enemy, the UFO
phenomenon and its advocates.
This case was never
considered a UFO Unknown by Blue
Book. It was always an IFO, either
a balloon or the planet Mars (Menzel
later chose the nutty Mars theory for
this Oak Ridge UFO). As we will
see below, this case will now have to be
considered an Unknown, albeit not a best
evidence case.
There is this unspoken
mindset that weather balloons are just
launched all over everywhere willynilly
for the fun of it, for no apparent
reason – except of course to
debunk and destroy UFO cases, seemingly
the weather balloon's only
function. In actuality, weather
observers track weather
balloons in order to gather the
recorded weather data. The
weather data, in turn, is itself a
record proving the location
of the balloon minute-by-minute
throughout the balloon ascent,
but only used selectively by BB solely
for the purpose of destroying the UFO
case while suppressing this witness
evidence of the weather observers who
never see any aircraft chasing their
balloon.
In these kinds of
debunkings-by-balloon there is often a
strange mental lapse in not bothering to
examine the actual weather data from the
balloon allegedly involved even if it
was sitting within the BB file on the
case, as if BB was afraid to find out
the balloon tracking data might prove
the balloon was not at the right
location at the right time.
As noted already,
Ruppelt failed to mention that the
balloon, of course, had been tracked
by the weather observers at
McGhee-Tyson Airport,
Knoxville-Maryville, directly located
some 10-13 miles from where the F-47
pilot would, 3/4 hour later, initially
sight the UFO, but those observers saw
no F-47 fighter "dog-fighting" their
balloon – the F-47 with UFO of course
were separated by 3/4 hour in time from
the balloon. (The F-47's initial
location was 10 miles NNE of Maryville,
exactly over Knoxville.) And more
importantly Ruppelt failed to mention
that weather balloon lights were steady
and non-blinking and in this specific
case had gone out 3/4 hour before the
F-47 sighting even started.
It was a moonless night so there was no
other way to see the balloon than by its
own light.
Balloon-based debunking
misleadingly draws on the layperson’s
misunderstanding that imagines that a
“lighted balloon” must therefore be a
large, bright white, luminous sphere
(the “balloon”), maybe 10 to 30 feet in
size (UFO-sized), somehow entirely
lit up by some kind of powerful arc
light perhaps inside the
balloon globe. There is not enough
lift in such flimsy balloons and not
enough lighting power – we are talking
about widespread knowledge of some
100,000 such balloons launched yearly
over decades with no possibility of
error in this blunt fact of weather
observation.
The horrific
Anti-History Channel tv series "Project
Blue Book" graphically illustrates the
officially-misled popular mindset about
"lighted weather balloons" as gigantic
white globes or pear-shapes with no
visible means of lighting from the
balloon itself (the balloon obviously
cannot lift the heavy floodlights in the
hangar nor the immense power sources
that would be needed). See PBB
show's image, below, from a hangar, of a
20-foot white balloon all lighted up
like a glowing UFO. Other tv
scenes show this fake 20 feet of lighted
balloon dog-fighting Gorman's plane like
it was a powered aircraft, even shown
damaging Gorman's plane like some heavy
metal armored object hit it! In
fact the weather balloon was a few feet
in size and nowhere near
Gorman.
In fact, the actual
light on a simple weather balloon is
either a single burning candle a
few inches in size or a small
penlight flashlight dangling
several feet below the balloon envelope
(balloon usually only several feet in
diameter not 10-30 ft) and aimed
at the ground and the ground weather
observers looking up – the
lights are not aimed up at the
balloon itself. (There
were also even cheaper lights with a
bare bulb attached to a chemical battery
activated with water at time of
release.) There is nothing to
light up the entire diameter of a
10-30-foot or a several-foot balloon
envelope at night except faint moonlight
– if there is any at all.
Does this “balloon
explanation” in fact actually require
a powerful UFO-like light to light it
up?? How ironic.
FOOTNOTE: Experienced former Army weather observer Jan Aldrich points out that the electric lights were usually not even the relatively expensive penlight flashlights, but cheap water-activated batteries connecting to a bare little flashlight bulb hanging on a wire and pointed downward.
The exact time of the launch of
the 100-gram lighted pilot balloon was 10:00 PM
(CDT/EST) and "the lighting unit failed" and
went "out" (undoubtedly when the balloon burst)
at about 10:15 PM at about 15,000 feet altitude
only 4 miles away from the McGhee-Tyson airport
launch site (which site was at almost exactly
one thousand feet above sea level).
But the UFO sighting began long
after the balloon blacked out, some 43 minutes
later at 10:58 PM with the first of several
"ramming attacks" by the blinking light on the
F-47, then on patrol at 10,000 feet. These
attacks continued for 17 minutes until 11:15 PM
when the fighter was at 22,000 ft and the UFO
departed on its last attack. Clearly the
balloon was not located at 10,000 to 22,000 ft
where the F-47 was located but had burst and was
on the ground during the entire time of the
sighting from 10:58 to 11:15 PM. The F-47
was 15+ miles from the broken balloon’s location
on the ground when the UFO disappeared.
Regardless of the case
explanation – which case now must be considered
an Unknown – Ruppelt withheld these facts
clearly stated in the BB file and which had been
elicited by multiple teletype inquiries drafted
and sent by Ruppelt personally.
Lying about cases like Oak Ridge
/ Maryville that he personally investigated, in
order to debunk them as IFO's is what a debunker
does. Ruppelt knew the balloon was long
gone but he used magic balloons to debunk not
only Oak Ridge / Maryville but likewise also in
the Gorman and Mantell incidents with the
stupendously powerful UFO-like balloons he
invented in these latter cases, in which the
actual flimsy or puny balloons were also located
nowhere within view of the pilots, neither
Mantell or Gorman.