Hi. I need to tell you about something that happened back in the summer of '57. My name's Walter, and I was one of the electronic warfare officers on an RB-47 out of Forbes Air Force Base here in Topeka. We had a six-man crew that night, and what we experienced, well, it's been over forty years and I still can't explain it. This was the early morning of July 17th. We took off around 9 PM the night before on what was supposed to be a routine training mission. We had gunnery exercises planned over the Texas Gulf area, navigation exercises over the open Gulf, and then some electronic countermeasures work on the way back. The whole crew was getting ready to ship out to Germany, so this was one of our final stateside runs. I was the number three monitor in the back of the aircraft. There were three of us back there manning the ECM equipment. My buddy Frank was on the number two monitor, and John was on number one. Up front we had our pilot, Larry, copilot Mike, and our navigator Tom. Six of us total.
So we complete the first two parts of the mission without any problems. Beautiful night, clear weather, flying at about 34,500 feet doing around 500 miles per hour. We're coming back across the Mississippi coast near Gulfport, and that's when Frank picks up something strange on his equipment. Now, Frank's monitor was an ALA-6 direction finder. It doesn't send out signals like radar, it just listens for electronic emissions. He's trained to pick up enemy radar installations, you know what I'm saying? And he detects this signal at about 2800 megacycles coming from behind us and off to the right, out over the Gulf. At first he thinks maybe his scope is 180 degrees out of alignment. The signal's moving up his scope like it would if the equipment was backwards. But then he watches this thing move all the way around our aircraft. It goes up the right side, crosses over in front of us, then down the left side. Frank told me later he was completely baffled because no ground radar could do that. We're flying at 500 miles per hour, and whatever this is, it's keeping pace with us and circling us.
Frank doesn't say anything to the rest of us at this point. He's trying to figure out if his equipment's malfunctioning. The signal fades out as we head north. We make our scheduled turn to the west over Jackson, Mississippi, getting ready to start our simulated ECM runs against Air Force ground radar units. Then at four ten in the morning, Larry up in the pilot seat sees something. He spots this intense light coming at us from the left, same altitude as us. He thinks at first it's another aircraft, but it's just a single brilliant blue-white light, and it's closing fast. Real fast. He gets on the intercom and tells us to brace for evasive maneuvers. But before he can do anything, this light shoots across in front of the cockpit from left to right. Mike, our copilot, he sees it too. Larry told me it moved faster than anything he'd seen in twenty years of flying. It crosses our flight path in the blink of an eye and then just blinks out at about our two o'clock position. Gone. Just like that.
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