5.07.2024

June 26, 1954 - Idaho Falls, Idaho

June 26, 1954--Idaho Falls, Idaho. Brilliant light source flared up over AEC station, climbed out ofsight. [XII]1

There is no amplifying information for this comment. In section XII is a table with the following description:

Brilliant light flared up above AEC station, hovered several seconds, then zoomed up out of sight.2

There is no footnote as to where the information comes from.

Sources

A check of the Blue Book records reveals no cases for this incident. This indicates that the source was probably a news clipping. Loren Gross documented the instance with a brief paragraph in his history.

At 40 minutes after midnight, June 26th, an Atomic Energy Commission test station located in eastern Idaho was suddenly lit up by a blinding glow that exploded in the night sky, illuminating the countryside for miles around the facility. Night-shift workers Kelly Brooks and A.L. Tayor told the Idaho Falls Post-Register the source of the dazzling radiance was motionless for a few seconds and then shot vertically at a tremendous velocity.3

At least we have a source in this description but Gross used Keyhoe as his source of information not the newspaper. Donald Keyhoe repeated the story in his book, “The Flying Saucer Conspiracy”.4 He mentioned two witnesses, Kelly Brooks and A.L. Taylor and gave the date as June 26th.

I checked the newspaper archive and they had the Post-Register for that time period. However, I could not find a mention of the sighting in the newspaper in late June/early July. A search revealed that the story was reported on August 1 and gave the date of the event as July 31. The story matches what Keyhoe described in his book.

A mysterious spectacular light that suddenly exploded, hung momentarily in the air, then zoomed skyward out of sight was seen by at least a dozen AEC workers early Saturday morning at the Idaho AEC National Reactor Testing station west of the city.

At least a half dozen reports have been received in recent months of mysterious lights at the NRTS site but this is the first time it was detected by more than one at a time.

Giving the version were Kelly Brooks, Shelley, and A. L. Taylor, 365 S. Eastern Ave., who were in one of two cars traveling towards Idaho Falls that were near the scene of the phenomenon. Besides Brooks and Taylor, were Kenneth Tuck, John WIllis, Jay Hill L. Pritchard, and William Summer, Idaho Falls in the two cars. They said unidentified occupants in two other cars in front also saw the light.

The cars were traveling within a mile of the Central Facilities Area of the NRTS on Highway 26 at 12:40 a. m. at the time.

“It seemed like a big floodlight suddenly turned on,” said Brooks.

“It looked like an explosion. It hung for a moment, then the center turned sort of a blue color. It went up in the air in a cigar-like shape with a tail at the rear and disappeared. It lit up all the car’s on the highway.

“I can’t say how large It was, but it was much bigger than an airplane. We all talked about it but can’t figure out what it was.”

A similar story was given by Taylor.

“It was the strangest thing I’ve ever seen,” he said. “It looked like the flash bulb of a camera exploding, only much larger. It seemed to have a greenish-blue light. I guess it must have lit up an area 6 or 8 miles around. It appeared to be 50 or 60 feet above the ground. It was bright enough so that we saw all of the cars in front of us. They all slowed down to watch. The light hung in the air, then went up and disappeared. We know it wasn’t any big light from the AEC.”5

It appears that Keyhoe got a newspaper clipping from an individual, who wrote the wrong date on it. After that, people just copied Keyhoe without checking on the primary source of information. With a new date, I again checked the Blue Book files but still found no case file for this event or any other sighting in the region related to it.

Analysis

The AEC test station described was the Idaho Falls site out in the desert about an hour from the city. The Navy used to operate several test reactors there for training purposes of its nuclear power students before assignment to the fleet. The first Navy reactor (S1W) was the prototype for the USS Nautilus and started operations in 1953. I am not sure if the individuals described in the article were associated with this plant or not. There were also other reactors being built in the area so they could have been related to those programs.

The amount of information in the article is limited but the event sounds a lot like a very bright fireball meteor. The only item in the report that makes one question that explanation is that they reported it was motionless for a very brief period of time. Based on  their descriptions, I would say it was only a second or two that it “appeared” motionless. The brilliant flash, the motion upward, and the description of the object as a “cigar-shaped” object, are all consistent with a bright meteor report. The brilliant flash followed by reduction in brilliance, probably gave the impression of a pause in motion. One has to also consider the fact that all the witnesses were in moving vehicles. That is going to tend to result in misleading observations.

Conclusion

Like much of what is in the UFO evidence, the information about the sighting is based solely on a news clipping and no detailed investigation. Additionally, the individual providing the clipping did not even get the date right and nobody bothered to follow-up prior to listing it as “evidence”. This was probably a bright meteor and should be removed from the “UFO evidence” category.

Quelle: SUNlite 3/2024