USAF pilots Lieutenant Wilbert S Rogers and Major Ezra S Ballard were flying a T-33 at 20,000 feet from Dover AFB, Delaware, to Mitchel AFB, New York, on a NNE course at 450 mph. Three miles northeast of Asbury, New Jersey, they saw a silvery metallic discus-shaped 30-50 feet diameter object at their 11 o'clock position, below their altitude. They viewed the object against the ground of the Sandy Point area. Rogers immediately turned left and descended to intercept the object which then banked, revealing its flat round profile, no appendages, and no tail. It curved more tightly on the turn than the T-33, covering an estimated 30-50 nautical miles in two minutes. It was seen projected against the ground near Red Bank and Freehold, New Jersey. The T-33 descended to 17,000 feet, accelerated to 550 mph, and covering about 120° of its 360° turn during the sighting. The object passed within about 8,000 feet of the T-33, descending from about 12,000 to 5,000 feet, and then headed at high speed out to sea near Point Pleasant at a 120° heading. It followed this course until it disappeared in the distance. Total time of the encounter was two minutes. 25 minutes earlier an unidentified object had been tracked from Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, travelling at supersonic speed. (Ballard; Rogers).

Ruppelt's account:

Then one day with the speed of a shotgun wedding, the long-overdue respectability arrived. The date was September 12, 1951, and the exact time was 3:04P.M.

On this date and time a teletype machine at Wright-Patterson AFB began to chatter out a message. Thirty-six inches of paper rolled out of the machine before the operator ripped off the copy, stamped it Operational Immediate, and gave it to a special messenger to deliver to ATIC. Lieutenant Cummings got the message. The report was from the Army Signal Corps radar center at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, and it was red-hot.

The incident had started two days before, on September 10, at 11:10A.M., when a student operator was giving a demonstration to a group of visiting brass at the radar school. He demonstrated the set under manual operation for a while, picking up local air traffic, then he announced that he would demonstrate automatic tracking, in which the set is put on a target and follows it without help from the operator. The set could track objects flying at jet speeds.

The operator spotted an object about 12,000 yards southeast of the station, flying low toward the north. He tried to switch the set to automatic tracking. He failed, tried again, failed again. He turned to his audience of VIPs, embarrassed.

"It's going too fast for the set," he said. "That means it's going faster than a jet!"

A lot of very important eyebrows lifted. What flies faster than a jet?

The object was in range for three minutes and the operator kept trying, without success, to get into automatic track. The target finally went off the scope, leaving the red-faced operator talking to himself. The radar technicians at Fort Monmouth had checked the weather--there wasn't the slightest indication of an inversion layer.

Twenty-five minutes later the pilot of a T-33 jet trainer, carrying an Air Force major as passenger and flying 20,000 feet over Point Pleasant, New Jersey, spotted a dull silver, disklike object far below him. He described it as 30 to 50 feet in diameter and as descending toward Sandy Hook from an altitude of a mile or so. He banked the T-33 over and started down after it. As he shot down, he reported, the object stopped its descent, hovered, then sped south, made a 120-degree turn, and vanished out to sea.

The Fort Monmouth Incident then switched back to the radar group. At 3:15P.M. they got an excited, almost frantic call from headquarters to pick up a target high and to the north--which was where the first "faster-than-a-jet" object had vanished--and to pick it up in a hurry. They got a fix on it and reported that it was traveling slowly at 93,000 feet. They also could see it visually as a silver speck.

What flies 18 miles above the earth?

The next morning two radar sets picked up another target that couldn't be tracked automatically. It would climb, level off, climb again, go into a dive. When it climbed it went almost straight up.

The two-day sensation ended that afternoon when the radar tracked another unidentified slow-moving object and tracked it for several minutes.

A copy of the message had also gone to Washington. Before Jerry could digest the thirty-six inches of facts, ATIC's new chief, Colonel Frank Dunn, got a phone call. It came from the office of the Director of Intelligence of the Air Force, Major General (now Lieutenant General) C. P. Cabell. General Cabell wanted somebody from ATIC to get to New Jersey--fast--and find out what was going on. As soon as the reports had been thoroughly investigated, the general said that he wanted a complete personal report. Nothing expedites like a telephone call from a general officer, so in a matter of hours Lieutenant Cummings and Lieutenant Colonel N. R. Rosengarten were on an airliner, New Jersey-bound.

The two officers worked around the clock interrogating the radar operators, their instructors, and the technicians at Fort Monmouth. The pilot who had chased the UFO in the T-33 trainer and his passenger were flown to New York, and they talked to Cummings and Rosengarten. All other radar stations in the area were checked, but their radars hadn't picked up anything unusual.

At about 4:00A.M. the second morning after they had arrived, the investigation was completed, Cummings later told. He and Lieutenant Colonel Rosengarten couldn't get an airliner out of New York in time to get them to the Pentagon by 10:00A.M., the time that had been set up for their report, so they chartered an airplane and flew to the capital to brief the general.

General Cabell presided over the meeting, and it was attended by his entire staff plus Lieutenant Cummings, Lieutenant Colonel Rosengarten, and a special representative from Republic Aircraft Corporation. The man from Republic supposedly represented a group of top U.S. industrialists and scientists who thought that there should be a lot more sensible answers coming from the Air Force regarding the UFO's. The man was at the meeting at the personal request of a general officer.

Every word of the two-hour meeting was recorded on a wire recorder. The recording was so hot that it was later destroyed, but not before I had heard it several times. I can't tell everything that was said but, to be conservative, it didn't exactly follow the tone of the official Air Force releases--many of the people present at the meeting weren't as convinced that the "hoax, hallucination, and misidentification" answer was valid.

...Lieutenant Henry Metscher, who was helping me on Project Grudge, had been sorting out the many bits and pieces of information that Lieutenant Jerry Cummings and Lieutenant Colonel Rosengarten had brought back from Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, and he had the answers.

The UFO that the student radar operator had assumed to be traveling at a terrific speed because he couldn't lock on to it turned out to be a 400-mile-an-hour conventional airplane. He'd just gotten fouled up on his procedures for putting the radar set on automatic tracking. The sighting by the two officers in the T-33 jet fell apart when Metscher showed how they'd seen a balloon.

The second radar sighting of the series also turned out to be a balloon. The frantic phone call from headquarters requesting a reading on the object's altitude was to settle a bet. Some officers in headquarters had seen the balloon launched and were betting on how high it was.

The second day's radar sightings were caused by another balloon and weather--both enhanced by the firm conviction that there were some mighty queer goings on over Jersey.

The success with the Fort Monmouth Incident had gone to our heads and we were convinced that with a little diligent digging we'd be knocking off saucers like an ace skeet-shooter.

On 10 and 11 September 1951, a series of incidents occurred in the area of Fort Monmouth, N. J, An initial sighting of an unidentified object was made on a radar set. Soon after the radar sighting, two Air Force officers in a T-33 aircraft unsuccessfully attempted to intercept an unidentified object. Later several more radar sightings were reported.

Status of Investigation

It has been tentatively determined that the T-33 pilots probably observed a balloon that had been launched a few minutes prior to their arrival in the area. Two of the radar sightings were returns from balloons and the others were probably due to weather phenomena and excitement of the student operators due to previous sightings. Only one radar return cannot be explained. The operator who observed this incident asserted the object was traveling over 700 mph because the radar set's automatic tracking would not follow the target. It is possible that the inability to track the object was due to his inability to properly operate the set under mental stress.

FORT MONMOUTH NEW JERSEY INCIDENTS

On 10 and 11 September 1951, a series of both visual and radar sightings were" reported from the Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, area.

VISUAL SIGHTING BY PILOT AND PASSENGER OF T-33 AIRCRAFT

A. Discussion

At approximately 1135 EDST an unidentified object was sighted by the pilot of a T-33 aircraft, an Air Force Lieutenant, enroute to Mitchell Air Force Base, New York, from Dover Air Force Base, Delaware. The object appeared to be over Sandy Hook, New Jersey, between 5000 ft. and 8000 ft. at 11 o'clock from the aircraft heading. The T-33 was approximately over Point Pleasant, New Jersey, at the time of the initial sighting. Upon seeing the object, the pilot started descending at 360° turn to the left in an attempt to intercept and identify the object. Approximately 45 seconds after the pilot first sighted the object, the passenger, an Air Force Major, who had been making a radio check, sighted the object. The object was then near Freehold, New Jersey, making a 120° turn toward the coast. The pilot continued his 360° turn but the object was lost as it crossed the coast. During the descending turn the speed of the T-33 increased from 450 to 550 mph and the altitude decreased from 20,000 ft. to 17,000 ft.

When first sighted, the object appeared to be descending over Sandy Hook, New Jersey. It then leveled out and maintained a constant altitude. The object was round and silver in color but did not reflect the sunlight. At one tine during the attempted intercept, it appeared flat. The size was judged to be 30 ft. to 50 ft. in diameter.

At approximately 1112 EDST, 10 September 1951, two balloons were released from the Evans Signal Laboratory, Mew Jersey, located at 40° 10' W and 74° 04' E. These balloons are 7 ft - 8 ft in diameter at time of release and expand on ascending. They ascend at an average of 800 fps and are painted silver for radar tracking. Experienced balloon observers state that "when viewed from certain angles they appear to be disc-shaped. At 1135 EDST these balloons would have been at approximately 18,000 ft., and would have moved to a position nearly in line with Point Pleasant, New Jersey, and Sandy Hook (wind SSW at 10-15 knots.)

Attempts were made to use the information obtained from the interrogation of the T-33 crew, and the data on the balloon launching to prove that the pilot and passenger of the T-33 had observed a balloon. However, not all of the data given was consistent with such a conclusion.

In an attempt to establish the fact that the object was a balloon, a flight path similar to the one given by the T-33 crew was assumed. The T-33 crew was interrogated twice and gave different flight paths and tracks of the object at each one. It is therefore assumed that due to the altitude and speed of the T-33, and the fact that crew was intent on tracking the object and could not pinpoint their ground track any closer than 5 nautical miles and thus it would be feasible to assume a flight path within 5 nautical miles of the given track. Since the two interrogations as to location of the ground tracks differed to some extent, the track marked on a chart included with signed statement is assumed to be most nearly correct. -

Referring to the assumed flight path on the enclosed overlay, at A, the object appeared to be over Sandy Hook. . It will be noted that a comparatively small object closer to the a/c would appear to be large if assumed to be over Sandy Hook. As the T-33 approached the balloon, the balloon appeared to be traveling at a high rate of speed. Several seconds must have passed after the initial sighting while the pilot decided that the object was not a conventional a/c and that he should attempt to identify it. During this period, it is assumed that the a/c continued on course making the object appear to be flying straight and level on a reciprocal heading. The fact that the object appeared to be descending when first sighted cannot be explained. The fact that only one of the two balloons was seen can be explained by the. fact that the observers concentrated on one balloon and did not notice the other one.

Forty-five seconds after the initial sighting, the passenger noted the object to be turning left near Freehold, New. Jersey. This can be explained by the fact that the T-33 was turning and the relative motion caused the balloon to appear to be turning. As the T-33 continued inland, the line of sight changed until the balloon was silhouetted against the sea or sky and being silver blended into the background and was lost. This 'disappearance" of balloons is a common occurrence with pilots tracking research balloons.

It is apparent from the above that several assumptions had to be made in order to show that the object was one of the balloons released at Evans Signal Laboratory, but the fact there was a balloon in the near vicinity and the fact that the pilot and observer were not sure of their exact track adds a great deal of credence to the assumptions. However, since assumptions were made, it cannot be concluded that the object was definitely a balloon.

II. RADAR SIGHTINGS FROK FORT MONMOUTH. MET.' JERSEY

A. Discussion

All of the radar sightings during this period were made by students at the Fort Monmouth training center. In addition to this, the students involved were taking a maintenance course. The instructor would put certain mechanical or electronic difficulty in the set and let the student find and remedy trouble. If the student became proficient in this phase, he was allowed to operate the set much the same as in tactical operations. No plotting records, logs or data of any type were kept. It should be stressed that these students were maintenance students, not operators.

1. On 10 September 1951 an AN/MPG-1 radar set picked up a fast-moving, low-flying target (exact altitude undetermined) at approximately 1110 hours southeast of Fort Monmouth at a range of about 12,000 yards. The target appeared to approximately follow the coast-line changing its range only slightly but changing its azimuth rapidly. The radar set was switched to full-aided azimuth tracking which normally is fast enough to track jet aircraft, but in this case was too slow to be resorted to. The target was lost in the northeast at a range of about 14,000 yards.

Upon interrogation, it was found that the operator, who had more experience than the average student, was giving a demonstration for a group of visiting officers. He assumed that he was picking up a high-speed aircraft because of his inability to use full-aided azimuth tracking which will normally track an aircraft at speeds up to 700 mph. Since he could not track the target he assumed its speed to be about 700 mph.

However, he also made the statement that he tracked the object off and on from 1115 to 1118, or three minutes. Using this time and the ground track, the speed is only about 400 mph.

No definite conclusions can be given due to the lack of accurate data, but it is highly probable that due to the fact that the operator was giving a demonstration to a group of officers, and that he thought he picked up a very unusual radar return, he was in an excited state, accounting for his inability to use full-aided automatic tracking. He admitted he was 'highly flustrated' in not being able to keep up with the target using the aided tracking. The weather on 10 September was not favorable for anomalous propagation.

2. On 10 September 1951, an SCR 584, serial number 433, tracked a target which moved about slowly in azimuth south of Fort Monmouth at a range of about 32,000 yards at the extremely unusual elevation angle of 1350 mils, (altitude approximately 93,000 ft.). This was proven to be a weather balloon. It was tracked at the request of the Commanding Officer of the Student Attachment to determine the altitude in order to establish who won a pool concerning what the altitude of a balloon which was sighted might be.

3. On 11 September 1951 at 1050 hours, two SCR 584's, serial number 217 and 315, picked up the same target northeast of Fort Monmouth at an elevation angle of 350 to 300 mils at a range of approximately 30,000 yards (approximate altitude 31,000 feet). The sets track automatically in azimuth and elevation and with aided range tracking are capable of tracking targets up to a speed of 700 mph. In this case, however, both sets found it impossible to track the target in range due to its speed and the operators had to resort to manual range tracking in order to hold the target. The target was tracked in this manner to the maximum tracking range of 32,000 yards. The operators judged the target to be moving at a speed several hundred miles per hour higher than the maximum aided tracking ability of the radar sets. This target provided an extremely strong return echo at times even though it was at maximum range, however, the echo signal occasionally fell off to a level below normal return. These changes coincided with maneuvers of the target.

This sighting proved to be a weather balloon. How it was determined is unknown but ATIC was informed that it was a balloon by AFOIN-TC telecom TT-252, dated 5 October 1951, CSAF Item #12, which stated: "Radar sighting was later identified as weather balloon. Target track was vertical. Later exploded and descended to ground."

4. On 11 September .1951, at about 1330, a target was picked up on an SCR-584 radar set, serial number 315, that displayed unusual maneuverability. The target was approximately over Navesink, New Jersey, as indicated by its 10,000 yard range, 6,000 feet altitude and due north azimuth. The target remained practically stationary on the scope and appeared to be hovering. 'The operators looked out of the van in an attempt to see the target since it was at such a short range, however, overcast conditions prevented such observation. Returning to their operating position, the target was observed to be changing its elevation at an extremely rapid rate, the change in range was so small the operators believed the target must have risen nearly vertically. Rhe target ceased its rise in elevation at an elevation angle of approximately 1,500 mils at which tine it proceeded to move at an extremely rapid rate in range in a southerly direction, once again the speed of the target exceeding the aided tracking ability of the SCR-584, so that manual tracking became necessary.

The radar tracked the target to the maximum range of 32,000 yards at which time the target was at an elevation angle of 300 mils. The operators did not attempt to judge the speed in excess of the aided tracking rate of 700 mph.

It is highly probable that this is an example of anomalous propagation as the weather on 11 September was favorable for this type of phenomenon. The students stated that they were aware of this phenomenon, however, it is highly probable that due to the previous sightings of what they thought were unusual types of aircraft, they were in the correct psychological condition to see more such objects.

III. CONCLUSIONS

A. The unidentified aircraft reported by the T-33 pilots was probably a balloon launched by the Evans Signal Laboratory a few minutes before the T-33 arrived in the area.

B. The 1110 EDST radar sighting on 10 September 1951 was not necessarily a very high-speed aircraft. Its speed was judged only by the operator's inability to use aided tracking and this was possibly due to the operator being excited, and not the high speed of the aircraft.

C. The 1515 EDST radar sighting on 10 September 1951 was a weather balloon.

D. The 1050 EDST radar sighting on 11 September 1951 was a weather balloon.

E. The 1330 EDST radar sighting on 11 September 1951 remains unknown but it was very possible that it was due to anomalous propagation and/or the student radar operators thoughts that there was a great deal of activity of unusual objects in the area.

Google map of this location.