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Investigated by Project Blue Book for Seeing a Formation of UFOs in 1967

March 20, 2021
ExoNews Editor

Article by Bill Love March 9, 2021 (wkdq.com)

• Bill Love (pictured above), a DJ for WKDQ radio in Evansville, Indiana, reports that a string of UFOs were sighted in February by Evansville Police officers. The same lights were also reported in Louisville, Kentucky. This made Love recollect an incident in 1967 on his first night as the midnight DJ at WHOO radio in west Orlando, Florida.

• As Love was broadcasting an Atlanta Braves baseball game, the WHOO station phone began ringing with callers asking about strange lights in the sky over the western part of the city. Love went outside and looked up in the clear night sky. He could see the lights. Several were traveling in formation very fast and would frequently change colors. They could dip and swerve faster than any plane. Love went back inside and answered more calls about the lights.

• In 1967, the Vietnam War was raging, and it was not uncommon to see heavy air traffic out of nearby McCoy Air Force Base. Also Cape Canaveral was sending space rockets up frequently. Love called McCoy AFB but they had no comment. They did take Love’s name and number there at the radio station.

• The next day Love got a call from the radio station receptionist to let him know that an Air Force officer was waiting in the lobby to see him. Love raced to the station and was greeted by a very stern US Air Force major representing Project Blue Book, the official US air force UFO investigation program. The major asked Love questions about the UFO’s proximity to the high radio towers on the property, and how large Love would estimate that the lights were.

• The AF major had Love fill out a multi-page questionnaire. At the end of our interview Love asked him, “Did anyone at McCoy AFB see the lights”? The major smiled, bid Love a good day and walked away. Love never heard from him or the military again.

• Project Blue Book was ended by the Air Force two years later in 1969. The main goal of the Blue Book investigation was to determine whether UFOs posed any threat to US national security. It was determined that they were not. Love’s report to Project Blue Book was only recently declassified along with never-seen photographs and home movies from decades ago. This fascinating evidence of “non-threatening” UFOs can be seen at the National Archives website.

Unidentified flying objects or UFOs are back in the news again. During the first week of February a couple of Evansville Police officers saw a string of strange lights while sitting in their patrol car. The same lights were reported in Louisville. These reports brought up memories for me of something I saw in 1967. It even made the official US Government investigation of UFOs.

In ’67 I was working as the 6PM to midnight DJ on a radio station in Orlando Florida. Here I am standing in front of the studio and transmitter building of radio station WHOO on my first day at work.

The important thing to know is that the transmitter and broadcast studio that you see in the polaroid were located together on the very flat west side of Orlando with not too many lights to pollute the night sky. The station was 50,000 watts east-west directional which meant several very tall towers were located within a few hundred feet of the building.

The Milwaukee Braves baseball team had recently moved to Atlanta and on the night I spotted my UFOs we were carrying a Braves game. I had plenty of time to kill as I waited to insert local commercials into the broadcast. Suddenly the phone lit up. This was odd because not that many people could have been listening to the Braves getting clobbered again. Caller after caller asked about strange lights in the sky over the western part of the city. I knew McCoy air force base was located just a few miles away and since the Vietnam war had heated up in ’67, heavy traffic in the sky wasn’t uncommon. Also Cape Canaveral was sending space rockets up frequently. But the calls didn’t stop. More and more people wanted to know what these strange sights in the night sky were.

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Virginia Rocket Launch Site is About to Grow With the Most Successful Startup Since SpaceX

October 15, 2020
ExoNews Editor

Article by Christian Davenport October 2, 2020 (washingtonpost.com)

• Over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, down past Chincoteague toward the southern tip of the Eastern Shore, sits an isolated spit of shoreline near a wildlife refuge. Wallops Island, Virginia is home to one of the most unusual and little known rocket launch sites in the country.

• Wallops Island contained a naval air station during World War II. In the late 1950s, with the dawn of the Space Age, the air station morphed into the Wallops Flight Facility, serving as a test site for the Mercury space program. The facility has now reinvented itself yet again as a modern commercial space industry rocket hub launching national security missions for Rocket Lab, and is soon to launch missions to the International Space Station for Northrop Grumman. The Wallops facility is poised to become the second busiest launch site in the country, behind Cape Canaveral, which itself is on track to launch 39 rockets into orbit this year.

• Over the last 25 years, the state of Virginia has pumped $250M into the ‘Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport’. In addition, NASA has made $15.7M in upgrades to the site, including a mission operations control center, which opened in 2018. The state also contributed $15M to repair a launch pad after an Antares rocket exploded in 2014.

• Perhaps the most successful space upstart since Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Rocket Lab first considered Cape Canaveral. But Wallops was the winner because it had a facility nearby where the company could process its payloads, get the satellites ready for launch and then mate them to a rocket quickly. “The whole facility is designed for rapid launch,” said Rocket Lab CEO, Peter Beck. “And that’s a real requirement out there right now from our national security and national defense forces, to have an ability to respond to threats quickly.”

• At 60 feet tall, Rocket Lab’s ‘Electron’ rocket may be about a quarter of the size of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. But the company hopes it will be a workhorse, launching once a month from Wallops, in flights that should be visible up and down the Mid-Atlantic. The Electron rocket has already had 14 successful launches to orbit from its launch site in New Zealand, earning a reputation for quick turnaround in an industry where getting rockets ready to fly was once a months-long endeavor. The Pentagon and NASA have taken notice.

• NASA has hired Rocket Lab to launch a small satellite to the Moon in 2021 to gather data about the thin lunar atmosphere, as a precursor for human missions. Instead of launching large, expensive satellites that stay in orbit for years and are targets for potential adversaries, the Pentagon is interested in putting up swarms of smaller, inexpensive satellites that could be easily replaced. Both NASA and DARPA are looking at Rocket Lab’s Wallops facility as a launch base having the desired short turnaround time between launches.

• While the number of launches at Wallops now is relatively low, the cadence could grow dramatically, especially as Rocket Lab gets going. And Gen. John “Jay” Raymond, chief of space operations for the US Space Force, has made it clear the department wants to rely heavily on the private sector. “We have developed a significant amount of partnerships in the national security space business,” said General Raymond during a recent event. “We share some of those partners. We share an industrial base.”

• Wallops wants to capitalize on the growth says Dale Nash, CEO and executive director of Virginia Space. “[W]e can get a few more launchpads close together in here.” “We’re urbanizing.” “One launch a month will not be a big deal.” “Once a week, once we get going, won’t be a big deal either. … We have the capability to grow to 50 or 60 launches a year.”

• Richard Branson has also gotten into the small rocket business with ‘Virgin Orbit’ that would launch a small rocket by dropping it from the wing of a 747 airplane. But while the space industry has made strides, there are still more failures than successes, especially in the early attempts to build small rockets. Rocket Lab has been the unlikely success story. Founded by Peter Beck in 2006, it today has a significant backlog of launches.

• Initially, Beck said, the company planned to ditch its rockets in the ocean, as had been the practice for decades. But like SpaceX, Rocket Lab intends to recover its first stages so they can be reused for future flights for greater efficiency. But instead of flying the boosters back to land and then firing the engines to slow it down, as SpaceX does, Rocket Lab is going to have its booster deploy a parachute to slow it down as it falls back through the atmosphere. Then it would have a helicopter retrieve it with a grappling hook.

• In addition to the NASA moon mission, Beck has long been intrigued with Venus, and planned to send a probe there to look for signs of life. The Venus mission, tentatively scheduled for 2023, would be largely self-funded and launch most likely from New Zealand. “If you can prove that there is life on Venus, then it’s fair to assume that life is not unique but likely prolific throughout the universe,” tweeted Beck.

WALLOPS ISLAND, Va. — Over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, down past Chincoteague toward the southern

tip of the Eastern Shore, sits an isolated spit of shoreline, near a wildlife refuge, that is home to one of the most unusual, and little known, rocket launch sites in the country.

Born as a Navy air station during World War II, it has launched more than 16,000 rockets, most of them small sounding vehicles used for scientific research. But the Wallops Flight Facility, which at the dawn of the Space Age played a role as a test site for the Mercury program, is about to reinvent itself at a time when the commercial space industry is booming and spreading beyond the confines of Florida’s Cape Canaveral.

After the Federal Aviation Administration last month granted Rocket Lab, a commercial launch company, a license to fly its small Electron rocket from the facility, Wallops could soon see a significant increase in launches as the company joins Northrop Grumman in launching from this remote site. While Rocket Lab is largely focused on national security missions, Northrop Grumman launches its Antares rocket to send a spacecraft to the International Space Station on cargo resupply missions at a rate of about two a year, including a picture-perfect launch from the Virginia coast Friday at 9:16 p.m. Northrop also launches its Minotaur rocket from Wallops.

Rocket Lab wants to launch to orbit as frequently as once a month from Wallops, which would make the facility the

second busiest launch site in the country, behind Cape Canaveral, which is on track to fly 39 rockets to orbit this year.

Hoping to give birth to another rocket hub on the Eastern Seaboard, the state of Virginia has over the last 25 years pumped some $250 million into what it calls the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport, most of that coming in the last decade, said Dale Nash, the agency’s CEO and executive director of Virginia Space. NASA has also made some significant upgrades to the site, including a $15.7 million mission operations control center, which opened in 2018.

The state also contributed to the $15 million it took to repair a launchpad after an Antares rocket exploded in 2014.

The efforts paid off when Rocket Lab, perhaps the most successful space upstart since Elon Musk’s SpaceX, announced last year it would launch its Electron rocket from here. Once NASA signs off on the company’s autonomous flight abort system, it should be cleared to launch, with a mission coming potentially before the end of the year.

Initially, Rocket Lab looked at Cape Canaveral, of course. But there are already a lot of big companies stationed there — Boeing, the United Launch Alliance and SpaceX. Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin is renovating a pad there while building a massive manufacturing facility nearby. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

“We ran a competitive process,” Peter Beck, Rocket Lab’s chief executive, said in an interview. In the end, Wallops was the winner because it had a facility nearby where the company could process its payloads, get the satellites ready for launch and then mate them to a rocket quickly.

“The whole facility is designed for rapid launch,” Beck said. “And that’s a real requirement out there right now from our national security and national defense forces, to have an ability to respond to threats quickly.”

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Wernher von Braun and the Roswell Incident

March 12, 2020
ExoNews Editor

Article by Christina Stock March 2, 2020 (rdrnews.com)

• At the end of World War II, the U.S. Government brought a number of prominent German scientists to America under what was called ‘Operation Paperclip’. One of these scientists was the now legendary Wernher von Braun (pictured above), who functioned as a key figure in the design of American rocket technology, including the Saturn rocket that first took us to the moon in 1969.

• When a UFO crash occurred northwest of Roswell in early July 1947, President Harry Truman needed to make some quick decisions. As we all know, he ordered the military to cordon off the area and take control of the crash site. Truman also decided to bring in civilian scientists to examine the crashed UFO. This may have included Robert Oppenheimer and Wernher von Braun. In his book, “Is E.T. Here?”, UFO researcher Robert Trundle indicates that von Braun was indeed one of the scientists Truman brought in on the Roswell UFO crash.

• In the book, Trundle cites an account given by Clark McClelland, astronaut and former science officer with the Kennedy Space Center, who describes a memorable exchange he once had with von Braun. During one of many meetings of Cape Canaveral launch crews, McClelland and von Braun stepped outside onto a patio for a chat. The conversation drifted to the 1947 Roswell incident. Von Braun and his colleagues were working at the White Sands Testing Range near Roswell, testing captured V-2 rockets. McClelland asked von Braun whether the rumored Roswell UFO crash really happened.

• On condition that McClelland wouldn’t repeat any of it while von Braun was still alive — a pledge which McClelland kept — von Braun told McClelland that in fact he had been asked to help inspect the crashed UFO. Von Braun described the craft’s material as being a thin, unfamiliar substance more resembling some sort of skin than metal. Some pieces were like silvery chewing gum wrappers, von Braun said.

• [Editor’s Note] Wernher von Braun died in 1977. In 1978, investigative reporter Stanton Friedman interviewed former Air Force intelligence officer Major Jesse Marcel, a Roswell eye witness who said that it was no weather balloon that crashed in the desert, but a UFO. Thus, the legend of the Roswell UFO crash entered the public zeitgeist. And the silvery ‘chewing gum wrapper’ like material that von Braun mentioned? Jesse Marcel hid several sheets of it in his hot water heater at his home in Houma, Louisiana. It may still be there today. (see ExoArticle here)

When the UFO crash northwest of Roswell occurred in early July 1947, President Harry Truman, upon receiving that fateful phone call in the wee hours, must have needed to make some quick and shrewd decisions about what to do. As we all know, this obviously ended up including a cordoning off of the crash site and the control of that site by the military.

Some other actions must have been needed as well, notably including the decision to bring in some civilian scientists to examine what had to be the most remarkable object ever encountered in human history.

Various speculations and inferences over the years have been made as to who some of those experts might have been, for example, my own conclusions about consultation with Robert Oppenheimer. In addition, another interesting choice has come to light.

At the end of World War II, the U.S. Government brought a number of prominent German scientists to America, in what was called Operation Paperclip. One of these scientists was the now legendary Wernher von Braun, who functioned as a key figure in the design of American rocket technology, including the Saturn rocket that first took us to the moon in 1969.

Recently, UFO researcher George Filer has explored, published in his online journal Filer’s Files, an account given by Ufologist Robert Trundle in his book, “Is E.T. Here?” to the effect that von Braun was one of the scientists Truman brought in on the Roswell UFO crash. Trundle cites an account given by Clark McClelland, astronaut and former science officer with the Kennedy Space Center, who describes a memorable exchange he once had with von Braun.

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Tag: Cape Canaveral

Investigated by Project Blue Book for Seeing a Formation of UFOs in 1967

Virginia Rocket Launch Site is About to Grow With the Most Successful Startup Since SpaceX

Wernher von Braun and the Roswell Incident