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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 Case Directory
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