Case file

The time of the sightings were listed as 17:20 and 17:22 and the source of the information was the APRO bulletin of September 1975. The author of this investigation was Donald Todd and he made note that the event happened near the time of a Wallops Island Aeronomy test, which was also visible. However, Todd states that these UFO sightings appear to be unrelated to that event because, according to him, many of the reports were made before the launch. These are the sightings that Todd collected.2

Analysis

While Todd rejects the possibility that these UFO reports were of the Aeronomy mission, one has to wonder if he was allowing his belief to get in the way of objectively looking at the reports he collected. According to the Space Chronology web site, the launch was at 1746 EST.4 Most of the descriptions match that of the Boron-Titanium-Aluminum cloud release experiment. The photograph on the next page was taken by Philip Harrington from Rowayton, Connecticut (near Norwalk) and was published in the May 1975 issue of Sky and Telescope.5 It shows how the object appeared in the initial phases of the event. It is a good match to what most of these individuals in Todd’s article were describing so it is difficult to reject this as the potential explanation. Something all of the witnesses had in common was that they were either in aircraft, with a clear horizon, or along the coast. Those that gave positional data indicated the object was to the south, or southeast, of them. Most indicated an eastward drift. 

The principle reason Todd rejected the Wallops island experiment was because he had multiple sightings that were before 1746 EST. All of these appeared to have been second hand sources and we don’t know how accurate they really are. In SUNlite 10-2, I noted that times were not accurate when witnesses reported observing a venting Falcon IX booster. In SUNlite 9-4, I noted a similar problem when I examined the NUFORC database for a fireball event on April 25, 2017. It is not unusual to have reports with time of the observations being off by 20-30 minutes. 

Another reason that Todd apparently rejected this explanation was the comment made by the witness, Mr. S. He stated that he could not confuse the two events. He had seen the blue sphere when he was driving his vehicle and later saw the “cloud”, that resulted as the chemicals were dispersed by upper level winds, from his home. He is right that the two observations would not appear the same but the initial start of the test would be a blue ball shaped object (see the photograph of the same event below). After several minutes, the gases would disperse and look completely different. One always has to be skeptical of witnesses who claim that “they know what they saw” and what they say they saw was something unknown to science. 

Conclusion

I can understand why Todd felt there might have been something else in the sky that night but the bulk of these observations he used appear to indicate that what was visible was just the chemical release from the Aeronomy mission. It is my opinion that any arguments against that explanation have been addressed and this case should be removed from the Weinstein catalogue. 

Quelle: SUNlite 1/2021