1 May 1982
(News World, New
York City, New York)
Sources: U.F.O. Newsclipping Service, Plumerville, Arkansas
and AFU.se
The whole article:
“Are UFO’s real? Certainly, most of those people who
see them believe they are real. Even more convincing, UFOs are sometimes picked
up on radar. Following is a case that occurred at a time when no nation on
earth had any rocket or aircraft capable of doing what this object did. In
fact, we still don’t have such capabilities.
The USS Dyess steamed slowly through the night off the
Atlantic Coast,
keeping track of all air traffic within hundreds of miles to prevent any sneak
attack by the Soviet Union.
‘We were afraid the Russians were going to bomb Washington at that time because we had gone into Korea,’ said Dr.
Robert Wood, who was then a Navy lieutenant commander.
The Dyess, a radar picket destroyer, was about 125 miles southeast of Cape May, N.J.,
and Lt. Cmdr. Wood, the ship’s operations officer and an air controller, was
manning one of the radars at the time.
‘We were plotting all the aircraft going north and
south along the coast and inland as far as the Appalachians and any objects
that were comng [sic] in
from the northeast, the east and the southeast.
‘Every
aircraft had to have a certain set of parameters — distances, heights and
whatnot — on their point of arrival over us.
‘On this
particular night — it was about 11:30 one night in March 1951, I forget the
exact date — this object came in from the east and got within about 30 miles of us when it
just stopped dead.
‘It had
been moving rather slowly, about 85 to 90 knots. We didn’t have the
altitude-determining radar on at the time and we had to get one of the operators
to come up. When he did, we found the object was somewhere in the neighborhood
of 3,000 to 4,000 feet
altitude.
‘This
object gave us a blip on the radar screen about the size of a large aircraft, like
a DC8 or a DC9. I phoned the bridge and they informed the captain, who ordered
the ship to head out in the direction of the object.
We’d been
loafing along steaming in circles, and didn’t have all our boiler power on. We
did about as much as we could, about 22 knots, out in that direction.
‘We got to
within about 15 miles
of that object when it suddenly took off at a very high rate of speed. It was
going so rapidly that as the radar turned we could see the blip just jumping
across the screen.
‘We estimated
it was going 5,000
kilometers an hour or roughly 3,000 miles an hour.
‘Then,
when it got up within 35 or 40
miles south of Nantuckett, it suddenly just took off and
went straight up!
‘I called
the bridge and said, ‘We’re losing contact, the object is fading.’ And the
operator on the altitude-determining radar in the other end of the room said,
‘NO! I’ve still got it! It’s 100
miles high and it’s still going straight up!’
The object
then faded from the second radar.
Altogether,
they had tracked the object about 35 to 40 minutes, said Dr. Wood, who is now a
professor of astronomy and director of the observatory at Brevard
Community College in Cocoa, Fla.
‘We
reported it to the Pentagon but we never heard anything more about it.’
‘He
couldn’t explain what it was he tracked that night. He has long accepted the
idea that it was an unidentified flying object, whatever that may be.’
‘That was
in 1951,’
he said. ‘I knew radar and I knew what it could do. We didn’t have any aircraft
that could go that fast, especially after it came and hovered. And then when it
got up near Nantuckett it just went straight up and disappeared.
‘There
must be something there. There’s more than just smoke. There must be fire.’ ”
The article is written by the late journalist Bob
Pratt, who for years investigated the UFO phenomenon.
Wikipedia article: “USS Dyess (DD-880)”:
Quote from the Wikipedia article:
“USS Dyess
(DD/DDR-880), a Gearing-class destroyer, was a ship of the United States
Navy named for Aquilla James Dyess (1909–1944).”
The U.S. Navy destroyer USS Dyess (DDR-880) underway
on
15 January 1962, while serving with the U.S. Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean Sea. (text by Wikipedia) (wikimedia.org)
(wikimedia.org photo)
Satellite photo of Cape May, New Jersey
(tageo.com)
(tageo.com photo)
_underway_in_the_Mediterranean_Sea_1962.jpg)
Robert L. Hastings
