Meantime, saucer reports had begun to come in from all over the country. Some even came from abroad. Some of these 1950 sightings have already been mentioned in early chapters. Besides the strange affair at Tucson on February 1, there were several other cases in February. Three of these were in South America. One saucer was reported near the naval air station at Alameda, California. Some were sighted in Texas, New Mexico, and other parts of the Southwest.
In March, the wave of sightings reached such a height that the Air Force again denied the saucers’ existence. This followed a report that a flying disk had crashed near Mexico City and that the wreckage had been viewed by U. S. Air Force officials.
Scores of Orangeburg, South Carolina, residents watched a disk that hovered over that city on March 10. It was described as silver-bright, turning slowly in the air before it disappeared. The day before this, residents of Van Nuys, California, saw a bright disk moving swiftly four hundred feet in the air. Seen through a telescope, it appeared to be fifty feet in diameter.
Disks were reported at numerous places in Mexico, including Guadalajara, Juárez, Mazatlán, and Durango. On the twelfth of March, the crew and passengers of an American Airlines ship saw a large gleaming disk high above Monterrey airport in Mexico.
Captain W. R. Hunt, the senior airline pilot, watched the disk through a theodolite at the airport. This disk and most of the others seen in Mexico were similar in description to the one sighted at Dayton, Ohio, on March 8. This was the large metallic saucer that hovered high over Vandalia Airport, until Air Force and National Guard fighters raced up after it. The disk rose vertically into the sky at incredible speed, hovered a while longer, and then vanished.
Within twenty-four hours this mystery disk had been “identified” as the planet Venus. (It was broad daylight.) Newspapers quoted “trained astronomical officials in Dayton” as the source for this explanation.
Meanwhile the Mexican government newspaper, El Nacional, quoted “a famous and reputable astronomer” as saying the numerous disks reported over Mexico “carry visitors from Mars.”
One of the strangest reports came from the naval air station at Dallas, Texas. It was about 11:30 A.M. on March 16 when CPO Charles Lewis saw a disk streak up at a B-36 bomber. The disk appeared about twenty to twenty-five feet in diameter, Lewis reported. Racing at incredible speed, it shot up under the bomber, hung there for a second, then broke away at a 45-degree angle. Following this, it shot straight up into the air and disappeared.
Captain M. A. Nation, C. O. of the station, said it was “I the second report in ten days. On March 7, said Captain Nation, a tower control operator named C. E. Edmundson saw a similar disk flying so fast it was almost a blur.
“He estimated its speed at three thousand to four thousand miles per hour,” Captain Nation stated. “Of course, he had no instruments to compute the speed, so that’s a pure estimate.”