The Ryan Case
An American Airlines plane had just taken off on a flight from Albany to Syracuse, New York, on the night of April 8, 1956. The sky was clear with a very thin overcast. At 10:15 E.S.T., while at about 6000 feet over Schenectady, Captain Ryan and his first officer sighted an unidentified flying object and reported it to Griffis Air Force Base. Bright orange in color, it glowed ahead of the plane in the northwestern sky. At first it seemed to be traveling at great speed, 800 to 1000 miles an hour. Then it appeared to slow down to the plane’s speed, about 250 miles an hour, and thereafter kept a steady distance ahead. The tower operators at the Albany and Watertown airports also saw the object, as did the crews of four other plane flights, who decided it was probably a star or a planet.
The shift supervisor on duty in the tower at Griffis Air Force Base, alerted by Captain Ryan, was able to observe the unknown through binoculars. He described it as apparently round, larger than any star, at an estimated altitude of 3000 or 4000 feet; when first sighted it looked white with an orange tint but after about ten minutes changed to orange with a red tint. During the twenty-three minutes he watched it, the unknown slowly descended over the horizon. Interceptors from Griffis Air Force Base were scrambled (Air Force jargon meaning to take off and pursue as quickly as possible) at 10:48 and 10:52, but returned to base without finding anything. Captain Ryan, having watched the object during most of the flight, landed his plane at Syracuse and made the customary report.
The newspaper accounts that followed caused a short-lived flying-saucer scare, but when officials from ATIC investigated they had no difficulty in solving the mystery. The evidence was plain and unmistakable. The object was the planet Venus. According to the reports of Captain Ryan and the other observers in the air and on the ground, the object was low in the northwest; estimates of its azimuth varied from 290 to 330 degrees. A plot of the planet’s actual position at 10:20 P.M., when the UFO was first picked up by the tower operator at Griffis Air Force Base, showed that Venus was slightly above the horizon at an azimuth of 301 degrees, and that it set at 304 degrees at about 10:42 (when allowance is made for the effects of atmospheric refraction)—the time the UFO disappeared from the view of the Griffis observers. Of the four other commercial and military pilots who reported the object, all described it as essentially stationary, and all positively identified it as Venus. In confirmation, the glowing light reappeared the following night at the same time and position. The intercepting jets had not been able to find the alleged UFO because by the time they left the ground, around 10:50, the planet had already set[IV-1].
There the matter should have ended. The puzzle was solved, and forgotten by all but a few saucer addicts. Some twelve months later, however, Major Donald Keyhoe reopened the case. As the new Director of the National Investigations Committee for Aerial Phenomena, commonly known as NICAP (see [Chapter XIII]), he charged the Air Force with concealing the true facts of the incident, and himself tried to get in touch with Captain Ryan to obtain information to support the charge. Receiving no answer to letters or telephone calls, Major Keyhoe then gave his story to certain government agencies. Using as evidence a newspaper account[[IV-7]] and interpretations of Captain Ryan’s remarks in a TV interview, NICAP alleged that the object sighted on April 8, 1956, had been a UFO; that the captain, on orders from Griffis Air Force Base, had abandoned his scheduled route to chase the unknown craft, had lost it somewhere over Lake Ontario, had then turned back and landed at Syracuse and, finally, that his flight log must have been falsified to conceal the facts of this pursuit[IV-8].
The original question, the identity of an unknown object, was all but forgotten. In letters, telegrams, and telephone calls to various officials of American Airlines, Congress, the Air Force, the Civil Aeronautics Board, and the Civil Aviation Authority, NICAP requested an official investigation of the incident. The first requests evoked no response but continued efforts were successful. After hints of publicity and of possible senatorial interest, the beleaguered agencies at last yielded to NICAP pressure and reopened the case. Captain Ryan, a reliable officer with twenty-three years’ experience as a pilot, was subjected to official interrogation. Busy government bureaus were forced to invest further time, money, and energy to confirm facts that had never been in doubt.
To the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), Captain Ryan replied that he had observed an unidentified object, but that he had not altered the course of his flight. He repeated this explicit statement to officials of the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) and of American Airlines. Airline records provided independent confirmation. Since the scheduled time of the flight between Albany and Syracuse had been 49 minutes, and the actual time elapsed on the night in question had been 48 minutes, he could not possibly have spent time in making a detour over Lake Ontario as alleged.
These declarations, according to NICAP, were worthless. They merely proved that Captain Ryan had given false answers to his questioners; that the government agencies involved knew the answers were false; and that a gigantic conspiracy existed to suppress the truth. Among those suggested as possible members[[IV-8]] were the American Airlines Company, the Civil Aeronautics Board, the Civil Aviation Agency, the United States Air Force, and possibly even the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council!
Saucer publications still list this sighting of Venus as an Unknown.