For several nights before the sighting, many residents in this part of Michigan had noticed a similar light that appeared in the northern sky each evening at about the same time and place, displaying various changing colors. The investigators were able to identify the shining unknown as the star Capella. The position of the lights coincided with that of the star for that time, date, and latitude. Capella was at lower culmination—that is, at the lowest point of its swing around the pole star, just skirting the horizon where its spectacular blue, yellow, and red twinkling is familiar to astronomers of the region. The pilot’s description, and the fact that he could get no closer to it even after a thirty-minute chase, confirmed this identification. Neither the brief blip that appeared on the plane’s radar nor the erratic returns picked up by ground radar had any relation to the star; they were merely phantom returns caused by weather conditions[VIII-2].
Like this Michigan sighting, many UFO problems are difficult to solve because they result from more than one cause. The observations seem at first glance to refer to a single phenomenon, although actually two or more unrelated phenomena are involved. On August 1, 1952, two days after the Michigan incident, such a puzzle arose with an impressive radar-visual-photographic sighting near Bellefontaine, Ohio[[VIII-2]]. At 10:45 A.M. C.D.S.T., the radar operator at the Air Defense Command post picked up an unidentified target north of Dayton, moving southwest at a speed of about 525 miles an hour. Two jets from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base were scrambled for an intercept and were vectored in by ground control. Since the ground radar was not equipped with height-finding devices, however, the operator could not direct the pilots to a specific altitude; he could only tell them whether they were nearer to or farther from the target.
When the jets had reached 30,000 feet, ground radar informed them that they were almost on target, which was still moving southwest at the same speed. A few seconds later, the returns from the jets and the UFO blended on the radarscope and the operator advised the pilots that they would have to continue the search visually. At this moment, unfortunately, the ground radar suddenly failed. Soon after communication between ground and air had ended, the lead pilot observed a silver-colored sphere several thousand feet above him. Both jets went after it but although they climbed to their maximum altitude, 40,000 feet, neither could get close enough to identify the object, which was still some 30,000 feet above them. One pilot, however, managed to expose several feet of film with his gun camera. At the same moment the warning light on his gunsight radar blinked on to indicate it detected a solid object. At this point the jets broke off the intercept and started back to Wright-Patterson Field.
Both pilots then realized that, although they had been chasing an unknown for some ten minutes, they were still northwest of the base in almost the same area where they had started the intercept. This surprising fact seemed to indicate that the unknown had slowed down from its original speed of 525 miles an hour, to hover in the sky nearly motionless.
In flying saucer circles, this series of events was regarded as an iron-clad case of a physically material UFO observed simultaneously by radar, the human eye, and the camera.
After sifting the evidence, ATIC investigators eventually found the more prosaic though complicated solution to the puzzle:
1) The object picked up on ground radar had actually been a jet plane, flying out of Cleveland. It had not been identified immediately because the Bellefontaine station had not received its flight plan. At 10:45 that morning the jet had been north of Dayton, flying at low altitude on a southwest heading, at a speed of around 525 miles an hour—the exact time, position, and speed of the radar unknown.
2) The pilots of the interceptors never saw this jet. What they saw, what their gun radar detected, and what their gun camera photographed was a twenty-foot radiosonde balloon that had been released from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base that morning shortly before the sighting. Ground radar, on the other hand, never picked up the balloon.
3) The chief reason for the confusion was that ground radar did not have a height-finding device. When the operator notified the pilots that his scope showed a blending of the returns produced by the pursuit jets and by the unknown, neither he nor the pilots had any way to tell whether the unknown was directly above or directly below the pursuing jets. At 30,000 feet the pilots were too high to see the Cleveland jet far below them. But they did see the balloon above them and naturally assumed that it was the object they were supposed to be chasing.
4) Since the ground radar stopped functioning at this point, the operator could no longer track the course of the unknown or of the interceptors. If the radar had been working, he would have seen that the target continued on to the southwest while the interceptors were searching in a different area to the north.