UFO Paper: “Nuclear Connection Project: NCP Paper: NCP-22: UFOIS: The UFO Sighting Wave of 1957”

(NICAP.org)

Quote from the UFO paper:

“Date: Thursday, 3 January 2013

Up until 1957, the American view of UFOs was basically that of a phenomenon of lights in the sky observed by inexperienced witnesses.

Not all intelligence people were that calm about it, but concentrating on defense and the Soviets, made it easier to ignore it. But in early November the UFOs brought about a series of close encounters never before seen in the United States, providing another major stress that the military did not need. The minority group at Wright-Patterson AFB and the Pentagon, the UFO debunkers, would have to handle that matter on their own. They had Soviet Sputniks and ICBMs on their minds.

Project Blue Book received 1,006 reports of UFO sightings in 1957. This was the third highest UFO sighting year in the 1947 through 1969 time period of official Air Force investigations. The year of 1957 was highlighted by the Levelland, Texas sightings which occurred in November.

America’s third major sighting wave of 1957 peaked in the first week of November 1957, with at least 30 accounts of electrical devices experiencing temporary failure in connection with a UFO sighting. The files of Project Blue Book show 330 reports for that week, while the files of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) list almost 90 unexplained reports.

Out of 529 *U* Database listings for 1957, 208 were in November and 323 in North America. The busiest days 5 and 6 November (67 total listings) coincided exactly with the Taurids meteor shower. This is the only major wave to do so but if one looks at the data there is no direct connection, only a coincidence. The three busiest states were California (41), Texas (37) and New Mexico (33).

The most striking feature of this sighting wave was the concentration of ‘electromagnetic effect’ cases around the west Texas town of Levelland. There were at least eight such reports in the space of 2.5 hours in an area to the west, north and east of Levelland. Project Blue Book sent a single investigator to Levelland to check the reports. His explanation, accepted as the official Air Force conclusion, was that: ‘... the major cause for the Levelland case was a severe electrical storm. The storm stimulated the populace into a high level of excitement. This excitement reflected itself in their reactions to ordinary circumstances, and resulted in the inflation of the stories of some of the witnesses concerning their experiences.’ Ten years after these incidents, atmospheric physicist Dr. James McDonald completed a study and determined that there had been no storm in the area, and thus no source of excessive moisture to interfere with the automobiles' electrical systems. With no ‘severe electrical storm’ to ‘stimulate the populace into a high level of excitement,’ the official explanation falls apart.

Francis Ridge,
Coordinator, 
The Nuclear Connection Project”

http://www.nicap.org/ncp/ncp-ridge8.htm

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realtvufos.blogspot.com/2019/11/ncp-supplemental-web-page-e-mail.html

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The Pentagon (2008), Arlington, Virginia
(wikimedia.org photo)