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Teen-Age Times of Friday-Sunday, March 24-26, 1950. Credit: D. Marler.

This story could be told in two ways. Starting with the problem and ending with the solution, or the reverse. In the case of this controversial UFO photograph from the early years of the flying saucers craze, I will not follow the chronology of when researchers became aware of the facts but the historical sequence, that is, when things developed, although they were known later. La Voz de España, March 22, 1950 edition. Credit: J.C. Victorio Uranga. La Voz de España was a Francoist newspaper edited in San Sebastián city, province of Guipúzcoa, in the north of Spain, 20 km from the frontier with France. The cover page of the issue of Wednesday, March 22, 1950 shared its selected news with this amazing headline: “Flying Saucers [Platillos volantes]

By Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos UFO FOTOCAT BLOG 310-18

over San Sebastián”. It reported that at 3:30 pm on the prior Sunday, Mr. Mauricio Basurco, a dental technician, and his two twin sisters saw “something black” through one window of their apartment. “Immediately I thought of the flying saucers fad,” the man said. This object was lost to sight between roofs. One of the ladies went to the kitchen’s window and from there they witnessed two more objects. “They didn´t look like airplanes to us,” Mr. Basurco claimed. They were oval-shaped with a black stripe in the middle emitting sparks around. They crossed a cloud bank and reappeared on the background of the blue sky. Now, their shape was “black and they looked like a gramophone record.” Then, five more objects bobbed up, three of which marched almost altogether, “as in a squadron”. The sighting lasted 5-6 minutes.

In my view, this is the unsuspected prelude, never told before, to a long story.
The Teen-Age Times was a short-lived1 weekly magazine for youngsters edited in Dublin (Ireland). Sensationalism-bound, the March 24-26, 1950 edition carried on its cover page an extraordinary and exclusive news feature: Russians had developed a “suspension bomb” that would be “swinging like a red star over your city,” and this could somehow be related to the apparition of flying saucers. This piece was signed by “Nobel Price”. Hand in hand with the information was a photograph of nothing less than “the first sensational picture of The Flying Saucers.” Two bomb shells, indeed…if true. Regarding the so-called suspension bombs, nobody heard about this anymore. Regarding the picture, we will judge it later.

The present article has been motivated by David Marler, a US UFO researcher who was investigating this picture for a long time. ...
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In 1896, newspapers throughout the United States began reporting accounts of mysterious airships flying overhead. Descriptions varied, but witnesses frequently invoked the century’s great technological achievements. Some sources reported dirigibles

By Greg Eghigian smithsonian.com 2-1-18

powered by steam engines. Others saw motorized, winged crafts with screw propellers. Many recalled a flying machine equipped with a powerful searchlight.

As technologies of flight evolve, so do the descriptions of unidentified flying objects. The pattern has held in the 21st century as sightings of drone-like objects are reported, drawing concern from military and intelligence officials about possible security threats.

While puzzling over the appearance of curious things overhead may be a constant, how we have done so has changed over time, as the people doing the puzzling change. In every instance of reporting UFOs, observers have called on their personal experiences and prevailing knowledge of world events to make sense of these nebulous apparitions. In other words, affairs here on earth have consistently colored our perceptions of what is going on over our heads.
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The Soviet Union has taken an about face on Flying Saucers [UFOs]. After dismissing them as "fairy tales" and an "American hoax," it has created a government commission to investigate the many sightings over Russian territory and to find out what they are.

BY The Statesman Journal 11-27-1967

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... Dr Edward Condon, physicist, is in a sense looking for UFOs. He heads a team of scientists investigating reports of UFOs, which some persons believe are visitors from distant planets....

The Morning Call 7-23-1967

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General Curtis LeMay was a larger than life figure who rose to prominence through his command of bombers in the second World War, and and afterwards for his development of the United States’ armed warfare during the Cold War. For an overview of his military career, see the biography at the Air Force’s site.

By Curt Collins thesaucersthattimeforgot 9-26-17

To UFO buffs, Gen. LeMay is best known for his role in the anecdote that Senator Barry Goldwater told....


Gen. Curtis LeMay, asked what he thought about flying saucers, replied:

"The best information in my opinion on them is to be found in a book written by an Englishman explaining numerous such mysteries. He says that the first flying saucers were seen in Egypt about the year 3,000 B. C."

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[...]      Hastings’short-and-sweet documentary is actually well done and uses believable graphics and re-enactments that tone down the

By Andrew W. Griffin www.reddirtreport.com 8-1-17

usual “cheese” level you can get with “fringe” documentaries of this nature. Hastings makes it clear that this is no joke and that if the unknown individuals piloting these mysterious craft can disable nuclear weapons – or, more scarily – trigger launch countdowns, only to stop them at will – it is something humanity needs to address openly and honestly.

And when Hastings is asked why these UFOs are interfering with humankind's civilization-ending weapons arsenal, he suggested that "they" are warning humanity not to "play with fire."

We agree. And seven years ago, CNN took the topic seriously enough to provide coverage of a Washington press conference addressing the subject of UFOs and their links to nukes. Sobering stuff.
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Detroit Times / 2-25-1959

... Clearly visible off the left wing was were what appeared to be three saucer-shaped orange-yellow lights moving along with the plane.

Flagship News 3-9-1959

"They aren't stars," continued the captain, "and no airplanes have colors like that," He told his passengers to "make up your own minds what they are."
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Trainee engineers from the former Royal Aircraft Establishment
put the nation on high alert in 1967 with their flying saucers

Masterminds of a national alien hoax cooked up in Farnborough in 1967 are holding a reunion on the eve of its 50th anniversary. A band of mischievous trainee engineers from the MoD’s ( Ministry of

By Fergus McEwan www.getsurrey.co.uk 8-27-17

Defence ) Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE) in Farnborough were behind the audacious prank.

The ringleaders, aged just 21 at the time, came up with the idea to raise money for charity as part of the college’s Rag Week.

They also wanted to see how the authorities would react if there was an alien invasion, and to find out just how prepared Britain was.
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"They appeared to be of a bright, shiny metal, like polished silver. Both were the same size and traveling at the same rate of speed, which was much slower then the jets that shot by shortly after I filmed the discs. Suddenly they stopped. It weas then I remembered the camera ...."

It just might be the most famous home movie ever shot in Montana. It's been uploaded by multiple sources, but this clip from the little-known 1956 film "U.F.O." shows Great Falls Electrics baseball

By helenair.com 8-21-17

team general manager Nick Mariana describing his home movie of what is purported to be two unidentified flying objects in the skies over the Electric City in August 1950.
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As happens all too often, as I’m searching for something else, I stumble onto a document that helps explain information I had found in the past. Brigadier General Arthur Exon, who was the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base commander, a position similar to that of a mayor, told me during an interview on May 19, 1990, that he was responsible for dispatching aircraft to carry investigators to important UFO sightings. He said: Well, the way this happened to me is that I would get a call and say that the crew or the team was leaving and

By Kevin Randle A Different Perspective 8-15-17

they knew… there was such and such a time they wanted an airplane and pilots to take “X” number of people to wherever, you know. They might be gone two or three days or might be gone a week. The would come back and that would be the end of it. So, there would be certain people in FTD [ATIC evolved into FTD in 1961] that would lay the missions on… I know they went out to Montana and Wyoming and the northwest states a number of times in a year and a half… They went to Arizona once or twice.

These special teams, or these people, would apparently come from around the United States and their assignment was to investigate a UFO sighting according to Exon. He didn’t have much in the way of details about these special flights, but the implication I took away from this was that the teams, or the team members, were a specially trained group who were investigating UFOs at a higher level than Project Blue Book. It was clear that they weren’t part of the Blue Book operation.

We (Don Schmitt and I, who first interviewed Exon) asked if the men were assigned to Wright-Patterson. Exon said, “No. They would come from Washington, D.C.” He also said that the team would be made up of eight, maybe fifteen people, the number probably dictated by the sighting they were investigating. The idea was that if anyone checked, they would learn that the team had been dispatched from Wright-Patterson as a way of disguising the nature of this somewhat secret activity.

During my interview with Exon, I wanted to know if he knew who the controlling agency or agencies were. I thought FTD was one of those agencies, but Exon said, “I don’t know they were controlling but I know where the assignments came from.”

I asked, “That was basically your control? FTD?”

He said, simply, “Yeah.”

The conclusions that I drew, and the conclusions that Don drew, were that teams, controlled at a different level, but that were not assigned to Blue Book were called in for special investigations. This, according to Exon, was in 1960 and 1961.

But it turns out, according to the documentation that I have just found, this assumption is not true. Oh, the documents were there in the Project Blue Book files for anyone to find who scanned through the boxes and boxes of data as it is contained on microfilm. As, I say, I was looking for something else when I found this.

According to the documents, in a draft of a staff study that was declassified in 1969 but suggested in a document dated December 17, 1958, that:

To provide a flexible investigative force which will not cause a particular drain on any one office within ATIC [think FTD at this point] the Commander has approved the establishment of a volunteer force which will work under the direction of the Aerial Phenomena Group of the Air Science Division when actually engaged in field investigation of UFO sightings. The general ground rules for their employment are as follows:

A total group of from 18 to 20 volunteers will be selected from company grade officers [lieutenants and captains] and NCO’s presently assigned within ATIC. This group will for the most part be people who do not have much opportunity to travel during the normal course of their duties. Once selected they will be given a 20 hour course of instruction in interrogative and investigative procedures and will be checked out on equipment pertinent thereto [the class syllabus was included in the documentation]. Once trained two of these individuals will be placed on alert each week to undertake such investigations as may arise during the week. Orders required for TDY [temporary duty] travel will be processed by the Aerial Phenomena Group citing funds programmed by that Group for such travel. A separate project nick-named “Horse Fly” [which is the first time that I have heard of this project] will be established to provide military airlift for investigators to and from the nearest Air Force installation to point of UFO sighting. Flyaway kits of equipment will be issued by and specific flight arrangements will be made by the Aerial Phenomena Group.

It is estimated that each investigator can plan on about 5 TDY trips of 3 days duration per year.

The officer who signed the document was William E. Boyd, who was a colonel at the time and listed as the Chief of Staff at ATIC. Although what I found was a draft, there was additional discussion about this later but it apparently was implemented. While the suggestion is that the alert teams would be made up of two individuals, there was nothing in the original document to suggest that the deployment teams were restricted to the two people on alert. This sounds suspiciously like the teams that Exon spoke about when he talked to me, though he seemed to have overestimated the size. They didn’t come from Washington, D.C as he suggested, but they were not all consolidated in a single office within ATIC. They would come from a number of locations within ATIC to deploy into the field.

Given that the documents were originally classified (confidential, I believe), and given the nature of the assignment, I don’t believe that there was any reason for Exon to have denied the request for the assets needed. It would have come from inside ATIC [or later FTD], or possibly from the Pentagon, authorizing the use of military equipment to move the personnel into the field. Since it involved specific intelligence, which in this case would be a UFO sighting or landing, there would be no reason to brief Exon on the specific mission. The request would have the proper authorization, and in fact, given the nature of it, and the various authorizations approved, there would be no reason for Exon to handle this personally. Someone on his staff could certainly have made the arrangements and if there were questions about the authorizations, those might have been bumped up to Exon for resolution, but I doubt that would be necessary. This suggests the reason that Exon was rather vague on the nature of the assignments. He wouldn’t be doing the work himself, one of his staff did, and Exon was probably briefed on this, as he would be on other aspects of the operations at Wright-Patterson that fell under his area of authority. At the time, this would not have been a big deal, but the routine movement of assets to a location where their expertise would be of value.

This means, I suppose, that we shouldn’t draw any specific conclusions about the nature of these teams, simply because we now know about their formation, their purpose, and their deployments. They were sent to investigate UFO sightings that would require the expertise that these officers and NCOs brought to the table based on their 20 hours of classroom work so that they knew, at least in a rudimentary sense, what they were doing.

What I don’t know at this point is where their reports would have been sent. Probably to the Aerial Phenomena Group, which would have been housed at ATIC and then FTD when the name change came about. All I really know is that the teams were formed and were apparently deployed on a number of investigations. While all this is interesting, it seems to lessen the importance of the information supplied by Exon, but it does give another avenue of investigation. It will be interesting to see if I can find the results of those investigations that Exon mentioned.
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One day, we were instructed to complete, in class, a manual and test on Air Force security. Working diligently from page to page of the booklet, dated 1 January 1968 and entitled, "Air Force Standard Communications Security Education Program (Transmission Security)," I at last reached page 56–where I suddenly encountered a strange sight indeed. Under the heading, "Proper communications Security Procedures," was a drawing depicting two unmistakably saucer-shaped craft, armed and firing no less. Below the drawing a caption read: "Information concerning radically new and extremely important weapons or equipment should be classified Top Secret.

By Robert Barrow APRO Bulletin April 1980

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For those who like sci-fi, this abandoned village in Taiwan is definitely for you.

By Sophie Williams Daily Mail 8-9-17

Video footage shows an abandoned village where people lived in 'spaceships' until the late 1960s and early 1970s.

It's thought that this village was abandoned due to a nearby redevelopment.
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Every so often, a cry goes out from some well-known UFOlogist about the lack of "progress" in UFOlogy. The cry is often echoed by others, typically with great wailing and gnashing of teeth. Solutions are proposed, but ultimately nothing changes. As those of you who follow the UFO Blogs and postings already know, the most recent cry of this kind comes from the Spanish UFOlogist Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos. Olmos has been researching UFOs for fifty years now, and since the year 2000 has been

By Robert Sheaffer badufos.blogspot.com 6-19-17

concentrating his efforts on FOTOCAT, a world-wide catalog of UFO photo events. Many researchers have assisted with this collection, myself included. Olmos is well-respected among UFO Realists (those who attempt to adhere to facts (more or less) in investigating UFOs, as opposed to the Unrealists who are always ready to believe exciting UFO stories with little or no proof). In Jacques Vallee's autobiographical Forbidden Science (Volume 2), he mentions in an entry for 1970 that he has been corresponding regularly with Olmos concerning reported Spanish landing cases. In fact, Vallee mentions Olmos several times in that volume. You won't find anyone with better UFO street cred than that.
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This month is the 70th anniversary of the beginning of a new epoch, when the flying discs invaded our skies for the first time…officially. For some, it began in 1946 with the “ghost rockets” in Sweden, or in the IIWW theatre with the “foo fighters”, or with the “phantom airplanes” of 1912-1913, whilst others would go back to the “airships” of the late XIX century, or to ancient times. But, we all know that it was since the US press attached the “flying saucer” tag to this subject that a large-magnitude phenomenon emerged. One that has had a heavy impact on the general population all over the world. The way I wish to commemorate this ephemeris is by writing down my present vision about the UFO phenomenon, after 50 years of personal

By Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos UFO FOTOCAT BLOG 6-9-17

study, centering on the nature of the supposed evidence that has been collected in all these 70 years of UFO phenomenology. These are the views of a sincere investigator of a mystery that seems to play with us, until we realize that we have simply allowed ourselves to be led astray by a number of surrounding circumstances and influences. What seems at first sight absurd, really is illogical, irrational, incoherent ... finally inadmissible.

I have prepared an essay on the foundation of what can only be a portent or a chimera: the true level of certainty, proof and conviction, that is, the evidence. And I have asked Indiana University emeritus professor Thomas Bullard to accompany me in this global evaluation of the UFO problem with his own thoughts. We agree for the most part but we also have a degree of disagreement. But we both recognize that advancement and progress in this study will only happen when ideas are confronted in a framework of respect and tolerance.

For bibliography quotation purposes, the formal reference to this article will be as follows:
Ballester Olmos, V.J. & Bullard, T.E. (2017), “The Nature of UFO Evidence: Two Views,”




It is exactly 70 years since the society of the United States was thrilled and shaken by the first report of “flying saucers”. This was the early sighting by Kenneth Arnold on June 24, 1947. It also started a phenomenon ufologists would later call “wave”, a huge avalanche of reports throughout all the nation’s newspapers. It was short-lived and profiled as a sharp Gaussian curve developed over only three weeks: following the initial sighting’s press coverage, news interest ignited, peaked, reached a saturation point and quickly declined. This aftermath triggered two important developments: (1) the stories were disseminated all over the globe, taking on a life of their own in every country, and (2) the Army Air Force (later, USAF) jumped on the matter, beginning to investigate the visions of flying saucers (later, unidentified flying objects or UFOs).

Seven decades of UFO history have provided countless facts and histories, actions and reactions, military and civilian initiatives, Congress and Parliamentary hearings, symposia, scientists and laypersons declarations, and countless UFO-related portrayals in media, cinema, television, publishing and advertisement, daily bombarding and influencing the citizens. Not to mention the millions of supposed UFO reports that emerged from the public and the feedback they yielded. Not to neglect the important effect produced by thousands of UFO proponents all over the globe, people that James Carrion, ex-CEO of MUFON, the top UFO organization in the world, characterized as “self-proclaimed investigators or investigation journalists, whose modus operandi is to perpetuate the mystery, not to solve it”. Seen from a European perspective, this diagnostics is right on target.
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'The Close Encounters Man' tells the unlikely story of how the government's astrophysicist debunker became the phenomenon's most expert defender.

If you're jonesing for an extraterrestrial, you should check out "The Close Encounters Man" by Mark O'Connell.O'Connell, a writer for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and founder of the UFO blog High Strangeness, set out to write "a UFO book people wouldn't need to hide from other people."

By J. W. McCormack www.vice.com 5-30-17

He found his ideal subject in J. Allen Hynek, the astronomer hired by the United States Air Force in 1948 to debunk the reports of strange objects in the sky flooding in from across the country. Eventually Hynek broke with his handlers and became the first scientist to lend credence to the UFO phenomenon. ...
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Some people believe that aliens exist, but is it okay if Christians believe the same thing? The answer is "no," according to Dr. Danny R. Faulkner of Answers in Genesis.

By JB Cachila www.christiantoday.com 6-3-17

"The thought that aliens might be living on other planets may sound innocent enough. But lurking underneath are some deep theological dangers," he wrote on their website.

Faulkner said Christian belief about extraterrestrials is no trivial matter. He noted though that the Bible makes no mention of "ETs or flying saucers." If there is life on other planets, then that must mean God made them, too.

"From the Bible, we know that this is not how life came about on the earth. Rather, God especially created life on this planet," he said. "It would be inconsistent to believe that God created life on earth but that life arose naturally on other worlds."
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A "FORMER pilot" for John F Kennedy has been filmed saying the
assassinated president had seen government evidence of aliens and UFOs.

The man, who ... is seen speaking to camera about a conversation with the president. He described the pair discussing a newspaper article that mentioned UFOs.

By Jon Austin www.express.co.uk 5-31-17

The man, who is not named in the clip ... says the president asked him what he thought, so he threw the question back at JFK.

He said: "JFK responded, 'well I asked you first'."

The man then said he did not think humans could be alone in the universe.

He claimed JFK replied: "You're right young man, there is considerable knowledge as far as the being of UFOs and the ET phenomenon that we are aware of today."

Unacknowledged claims to expose years of coverups within the US government over the alleged truth of alien visitations of Earth being kept hidden from the public.
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1. Flying unidentified objects (Flying Saucers) have been the subject of Air Force observation and analysis because of the possibility that such objects might conceivably be an attack on the U.S. If they are not, it is

By The CIA 10-13-1952

conceivable that the enemy might take advantage of the confusion created by the Flying Saucers to use at his convenience some air weapon against the United States.
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