On the night of March 24 an Eastern Airlines pilot reported the UFO to the Miami Traffic Control. An observer in the control tower at the airport could see the object, but lost sight of it when he took up a plane to chase it. On the following night the Cocoa-Titusville Airport reported a similar object. A pilot in the air sighted the unknown and, about an hour later, encountered a turbulence unlike anything he had experienced in sixteen years of flying. Cruising in the region the next day, he observed a burned-out area on the ground below the place where the UFO had been. On the night of March 27, a ground observer watched the unknown through binoculars as it moved rapidly from west to north and gradually disappeared in the northwest.
Most of these witnesses were veteran airmen, well able to recognize conventional phenomena in the night sky. Studying their reports, officials at Patrick Air Force Base decided that the similarity of the descriptions warranted further investigation. In the preliminary study, an Intelligence officer took up a B-57 aircraft in the vicinity of Fort Pierce, while ground radar at Patrick Air Force Base kept his plane under constant surveillance. At 7:20 P.M., when at 25,000 feet, he saw the UFO, a white light three times brighter than the brightest star. It appeared in the western sky and was moving north to south. When viewed with the naked eye, the light looked like a star that dimmed and brightened in a regular cycle; through binoculars it also displayed the red and green navigation lights of a plane. Soon after the visual sighting, the ground radar informed the investigating pilot that the object was approximately fifty nautical miles from his plane and was a jet airliner bound for Miami; the jet was observed for approximately ten minutes as it descended toward the Miami airport. The investigating plane remained in the air and, about five minutes after the jet had landed, observed a second, similar, high-intensity light that appeared in the western sky, moving from north to south. The radar at the Miami air-traffic control center positively identified this light as a Delta Airline jet, Flight 833, proceeding southeast. From these facts the officers concluded that the UFOs seen in Florida that week had been produced by commercial jet airliners[XII-1].
Two questions remained: How had the experienced pilots and ground observers failed to recognize so familiar a phenomenon as a night-flying jet? What accounted for the unprecedented turbulence experienced by one pilot, and the burned-over ground below the region of the sighting?
The first question was soon answered. ATIC investigators telephoned the Federal Aviation Agency and learned that experiments with a new type of anti-collision beacon were being carried out from various field offices, and that several jet airliners as well as some turboprop aircraft were using the new light. The standard beacon was a rotating sodium light, whose color is yellow. The new beacon was an intense white light which, viewed at a slant, becomes a spectacular phenomenon even more brilliant than Venus or Jupiter seen rising or setting through a hazy atmosphere. Since the witnesses were not familiar with the appearance of the experimental beacons, they had not recognized the newly equipped jets.
The answer to the second question came later, an example of the “luck” required to solve some of these UFO puzzles. Major W. T. Coleman, then Air Force Information Officer for the UFO project, was flying over the Fort Pierce region on the afternoon of April 29 in calm, clear weather when his plane ran into moderate turbulence of the short-wave type, “like riding in a car over a washboard road.” The wind-shear component was not large enough to explain the turbulence, and though a cold front was approaching from the Gulf of Mexico, it was still far out on the edge of the western horizon. Then, being a native of Florida, he suddenly remembered that muck fires were fairly common in the Everglades region, which lay below the plane. Peering down at the glades, he noticed a very large muck fire. He concluded:
“Now, as typical with a cold front situation, the surface wind was blowing from the east pushing the smoke and heat toward the west coast of Florida. This relatively warm air naturally was lifting in the surrounding cool air. When the continuing warm air rose rapidly to the higher altitudes it ran into the reversed upper winds (high altitude westerly). In the process of being lifted the smoke filtered and cleared, yet the air remained relatively heated. It was moved directly across our course, thereby causing turbulence.”[[XII-4]]
The fires explained both the turbulence reported during the week of the UFO sightings and the burned-out area below the region of turbulence. Thus these Florida UFOs were not spacecraft watching the earth, but were a special effect created by the chance combination of unrelated factors: a new and unfamiliar anti-collision beacon, an advancing cold front, and fires in the Florida swamps.
Inversions in California
An unusually complex combination of events produced an epidemic of UFO sightings in northern California during the week of August 12 to 20, 1960. Nearly every night dozens of reliable citizens throughout Tehama County and the Mount Shasta region (long famous for its mysterious lights) reported UFOs at various times and of various descriptions: round, bright, metallic UFOs glowing with a reddish-purple fluorescent type of light, cigar-shaped UFOs trailing a long fiery exhaust, oval UFOs with red lights at each end and white lights in between, yellow-colored UFOs like a flying railroad car with flashing red lights at each end and white lights glowing at the windows. Radios roared with static and radar sets were plagued with phantoms, as the state was apparently invaded by a whole fleet of patrolling saucers.
The most important factor in these sightings was the weather; prolonged and extensive temperature inversions prevailed in the area all that week. From southern Oregon through northern California multiple inversions of 3 to 18 degrees occurred nightly. Under these conditions, practically any light shining into the night was apt to be projected upward as a mirage and to perform weird antics. Determining what was the particular light source of some specific phenomenon is almost impossible.