General Mills meteorologist and balloon expert Charles B Moore and four Navy crew on a balloon launch crew (Akers, Davidson, Fitzsimmons, Moorman) saw a white, round ellipsoid, shadowed yellowish on one side, length/width ratio 2.5x. It crossed the sky from the south (azimuth 210° elevation 45°) to the east at about 5°/sec angular velocity, passing near the sun (126° azimuth 60° elevation). It was tracked by Moore through a 25x ML-47 theodolite after it came out of the sun. The object seemed to turn to the north, maintained constant azimuth at about 20°-25° when it suddenly climbed from 25° to 29° elevation in ten seconds, and then disappeared by distance or dust obscuration.

AFOSI Summary:

Time: 1033; Number of Observers: 5; Reliability: very good; Area: White Sands, New Mexico; Direction: N; Altitude: 25° - 29°; Color: white light yellow; Duration: 60 seconds; Sound: none; Shape: ellipsoid; Speed: tremendous rate of speed; Disappearance: disappeared due to distance.

One yellow ball, about 150 feet across, was observed in clear weather by five experienced male military witnesses with a theodolite near a missile for over 60 minutes (Akers; Moore, Charles B; Davidson; Fitzsimmons; McLaughlin; Moore; Vaeth). No sound was heard.

Ruppelt's account:

On several occasions during 1948 and 1949, McLaughlin or his crew at the White Sands Proving Ground had made good UFO sightings. The best one was made on April 24, 1949, when the commander's crew of engineers, scientists, and technicians were getting ready to launch one of the huge 100-foot-diameter skyhook balloons. It was 10:30A.M. on an absolutely clear Sunday morning. Prior to the launching, the crew had sent up a small weather balloon to check the winds at lower levels. One man was watching the balloon through a theodolite, an instrument similar to a surveyor's transit built around a 25-power telescope, one man was holding a stop watch, and a third had a clipboard to record the measured data. The crew had tracked the balloon to about 10,000 feet when one of them suddenly shouted and pointed off to the left. The whole crew looked at the part of the sky where the man was excitedly pointing, and there was a UFO. "It didn't appear to be large," one of the scientists later said, "but it was plainly visible. It was easy to see that it was elliptical in shape and had a 'whitish-silver color.'" After taking a split second to realize what they were looking at, one of the men swung the theodolite around to pick up the object, and the timer reset his stop watch. For sixty seconds they tracked the UFO as it moved toward the east. In about fifty-five seconds it had dropped from an angle of elevation of 45 degrees to 25 degrees, then it zoomed upward and in a few seconds it was out of sight. The crew heard no sound and the New Mexico desert was so calm that day that they could have heard "a whisper a mile away."

When they reduced the data they had collected, McLaughlin and crew found out that the UFO had been traveling 4 degrees per second. At one time during the observed portion of its flight, the UFO had passed in front of a range of mountains that were visible to the observers. Using this as a check point, they estimated the size of the UFO to be 40 feet wide and 100 feet long, and they computed that the UFO had been at an altitude of 296,000 feet, or 56 miles, when they had first seen it, and that it was traveling 7 miles per second.

I don't know what these people saw. There has been a lot of interest generated by these sightings because of the extremely high qualifications and caliber of the observers. There is some legitimate doubt as to the accuracy of the speed and altitude figures that McLaughlin's crew arrived at from the data they measured with their theodolite. This doesn't mean much, however. Even if they were off by a factor of 100 per cent, the speeds and altitudes would be fantastic, and besides they looked at the UFO through a 25-power telescope and swore that it was a flat, oval-shaped object. Balloons, birds, and airplanes aren't flat and oval-shaped.

Astrophysicist Dr. Donald Menzel, in a book entitled Flying Saucers, says they saw a refracted image of their own balloon caused by an atmospheric phenomenon. Maybe he is right, but the General Mills people don't believe it. And their disagreement is backed up by years of practical experience with the atmosphere, its tricks and its illusions.

When the March issue of True magazine carrying Commander McLaughlin's story about how the White Sands Scientists had tracked UFO's reached the public, it stirred up a hornets' nest. Donald Keyhoe's article in the January True had converted many people but there were still a few heathens. The fact that government scientists had seen UFO's, and were admitting it, took care of a large percentage of these heathens. More and more people were believing in flying saucers.

The Navy had no comment to make about the sightings, but they did comment on McLaughlin. It seems that several months before, at the suggestion of a group of scientists at White Sands, McLaughlin had carefully written up the details of the sightings and forwarded them to Washington. The report contained no personal opinions, just facts. The comments on McLaughlin's report had been wired back to White Sands from Washington and they were, "What are you drinking out there?" A very intelligent answer--and it came from an admiral in the Navy's guided missile program.

By the time his story was published, McLaughlin was no longer at White Sands; he was at sea on the destroyer Bristol. Maybe he answered the admiral's wire.

The Air Force had no comment to make on McLaughlin's story. People at ATIC just shrugged and smiled as they walked by the remains of Project Grudge, and continued to "process UFO reports through regular intelligence channels."

He was in charge of a Navy unit involving four enlisted personnel; they had set up facilities to observe and record local weather data preparatory to the Special Devices Center Skyhook operation. The instrumentation on hand consisted of a stopwatch and ML-47 (David White) theodolite, a tracking instrument consisting of a 25-power telescope so mounted as to provide elevation and azimuth bearings.

At 10:20 A.M. the group released a small 350-gram weather balloon for observation of upper wind velocities and directions. Moore told me that he followed the balloon with a theodolite for several minutes, after which he relinquished the tracking instrument to a navy man with the admonition "not to lose it or he'd be in trouble." Moore then picked up the weather balloon with his naked eye, and shortly thereafter, looking back at the man at the theodolite, he noticed that the instrument was pointing elsewhere.

Using a few choice navy expletives, Moore was about to snatch the instrument from the man and direct it at the weather balloon when the man said, "But I've got it in here." Moore looked and saw a whitish ellipsoidal object in the field of the theodolite. The object was moving east at a rate of 5 degrees of azimuth change per second. It appeared about 2-1/2 times as long as it was wide. It was readily visible to the unaided eye and was seen by all the members of the group. In the theodolite it was seen to subtend an angle of several minutes of arc.

As it became smaller in apparent size, the object moved to an azimuth reading of 20 to 25 degrees, at which point the azimuth held constant. Coincidentally, the elevation angle suddenly increased, and the object was lost in the telescope. It disappeared in a sharp climb — thus resembling other Daylight Disc cases — after having been visible to Moore and his group for over a minute.

The sky was cloudless; there was no haze. The object left no vapor trail or exhaust. No noise of any kind was heard in connection with the sighting, and there were no cars, airplanes, or other noise generators nearby that might have blotted out sound coming from the object. As the day progressed, many airplanes flew over and near the balloon launching site, and Moore's group was able to identify them by appearance and engine noise. They saw nothing again that day that bore any resemblance to the white elliptical unidentified object. To a man of Moore's training, this was a "real" event.

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