The Chesapeake Bay Case
Two of the most famous UFO cases, the Nash-Fortenberry and the Tombaugh sightings, have never been completely explained even though the witnesses were unusually competent, the incidents fully described, and the basic facts not in dispute. Although the probable type of mechanism involved is clear in each case, determining specifically what factors combined in exactly what way to produce the phenomenon has so far proved impossible. Neither case, however, supports the theory that the UFO had an extraterrestrial origin.
On the evening of July 14, 1952, a Pan-American DC-4 was flying from New York to Miami, carrying ten passengers and a crew of three including First Officer William B. Nash and Second Officer William H. Fortenberry. As a pilot spending much of his life in the air, Captain Nash had long been interested in the question of UFOs, and during the long night hours of over-water flights he had often cut down the cockpit lights to search the sky. In five years of watching he had observed hundreds of meteors, various types of auroral display, the lights of other aircraft, and the multicolored images of stars and planets distorted by refraction, but he had never seen any unidentifiable aerial phenomenon that appeared to be under intelligent control—until this particular night, when he was not watching for UFOs.
Shortly after 8 P.M. E.S.T. the plane was cruising on automatic pilot at about 8000 feet over Chesapeake Bay, and approaching Norfolk, Virginia. The sun had set and the night was almost entirely dark, although the coast line was still visible. Fortenberry, sitting at the right as copilot, was making his first run on this particular course and Nash, in the pilot’s seat at the left, was pointing out the cities and landmarks of the route. Nash had just called attention to the lights of Newport News and Cumberland, ahead and to the right of the plane, when at 8:12 a brilliant red glow suddenly appeared in the west, apparently between Newport News and the aircraft, and so low that it might almost have been on the ground. One of the men exclaimed, as have so many incredulous witnesses on first seeing a UFO, “What the hell is that?”
Figure 18. Reported movements of the Chesapeake Bay disks. A, Disks at first approach; B, they flip over and reverse order; C, they change direction and recede.
Looking through the front windows of the cockpit, they watched the unidentified light traveling northeast at incredible speed on a horizontal course roughly a mile below the plane. Almost immediately they perceived that the unknown was actually a procession of six red-orange lights, glowing like hot coals. Shooting forward like a stream of red tracer bullets, the line of lights moved out over Chesapeake Bay until they were only about half a mile away from the plane. They appeared to be sharply defined, large, circular disks, arranged in a narrow echelon formation—like a set of stairs tilted slightly to the plane’s right, with the leader at the lowest step, each following disk slightly higher and to the rear, and the last disk at the highest point (see [Figure 18]). Realizing that the line was apparently going to pass under the plane at the right on the copilot’s side, Nash flipped off his seat belt so that he could move to the window on that side. During this brief interval he was not able to see the objects, but Fortenberry kept them in view. As he later described their amazing behavior, all the disks simultaneously turned up on edge, like coins, so that the glowing surfaces were tilted to the right. Still on edge, they suddenly reversed their relative places so that disk 1 now occupied the last place in line and disk 6 became the leader.
This shift had taken only a brief second and was completed by the time Nash reached the window. Both he and Fortenberry then observed the disks flip back from the on-edge to the flat position. In the same fraction of a second, the entire line changed direction as abruptly as a ball bouncing off a wall and shot away to the west on a heading of 270 degrees. An instant later two similar disks darted out, apparently from beneath the plane, and joined the line as numbers 7 and 8 ([Figure 18]). The lights receded to the west, suddenly disappeared, immediately reappeared, abruptly began a steep climb to an altitude above that of the plane, then vanished not in sequence but in random order. The sighting had lasted for a period of twelve to fifteen seconds[[XII-1], [XII-5], [XII-6], [XII-7]].
After a quick check showed that no one else in the aircraft had observed the lights, the pilots radioed a message to the CAA station at Norfolk for forwarding to the Norfolk Navy Base, reporting eight unidentified objects traveling at speeds in excess of 1000 miles an hour. In Miami, next morning, Air Force officials questioned both witnesses. According to their estimates, the disks had moved horizontally about 2000 feet above the ground until their final climb and disappearance, were about 100 feet in diameter, and about 15 feet thick. Since they apparently traveled fifty miles during the twelve to fifteen seconds they were in view, their velocity would have been 6000 to 12,000 miles an hour.
Intelligence officials first checked the air traffic. Five jets from Langley Air Force Base, near Newport News, had been in the region at the time of the sighting, but they were ruled out as an explanation for the disks. Both pilots were informed that seven other persons, apparently on the ground, had reported unknown lights in the Norfolk area; the Air Force files contain no record of these reports and it is probable that some, at least, of these persons mistook the sunset-reddened jet trails for UFOs.