Green fireballs
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Green fireballs were bright green lights seen moving across the skies of New Mexico and nearby states from late 1948 into the early 1950s, many of them close to sensitive atomic weapons sites. Their unusual appearance worried officials and scientists, led to secret conferences and the Air Force's Project Twinkle, and they remain one of the classic unexplained cases of the early Cold War.[1][2]
First sightings
Early reports came in late 1948. On 5 December 1948, two aircraft crews, one civilian and one military, reported green fireballs over New Mexico, and another aerial sighting followed on 8 December. On 12 December, Lincoln LaPaz, director of the University of New Mexico's Institute of Meteoritics and a leading meteor expert, saw one himself.[1][2]
LaPaz's investigation
LaPaz concluded that the fireball he saw "was not a conventional meteorite fall". He noted that the objects were an unusual vivid green, travelled on nearly flat paths, made no sound and left no meteorites, unlike typical meteors; on one occasion the path "drooped" near its end and the object broke into fragments that stayed bright green. Because many sightings clustered near Los Alamos, Sandia and other atomic facilities, he suspected they might be artificial.[1][3]
Official concern
In January 1949 an Army intelligence officer in Texas suggested the fireballs might be foreign radiological warfare experiments and called for a scientific board. In February 1949 a conference was held at Los Alamos, attended by members of the Air Force's Project Sign, physicist Edward Teller, geophysicist Joseph Kaplan and military personnel; they could not identify the source. Edward Ruppelt and historian Jerome Clark later wrote that further conferences were held in secret that year.[1][4]
Harvard astronomer Donald Menzel, later a leading UFO skeptic, reported seeing a green fireball near Alamogordo in May 1949; in a private letter at the time he described the phenomenon as real, though he later concluded it was an ordinary meteor.[1]
Project Twinkle
In December 1949 the Air Force set up Project Twinkle, a planned network of observation posts with cameras and instruments to photograph and measure the fireballs. It was never fully implemented because of shortages of money, equipment and staff, recorded little useful data, and was discontinued about two years later with the conclusion that the phenomena were probably natural.[1][5]
Explanations
Some UFO researchers consider the green fireballs artificial and possibly extraterrestrial. Scientific explanations include unusually bright meteors (bolides) whose green colour comes from elements such as magnesium or nickel, effects of nuclear fallout, and secret military projects. Green fireballs continue to be reported around the world, and most are identified as meteors.[1]
References
- Green fireballs — Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org · archived copy
- "Green Fireball Chronology" — Project 1947 · project1947.com · archived copy
- Edward J. Ruppelt, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects — Project Gutenberg · gutenberg.org · archived copy
- "UFOs: A History, January–June 1949" (Loren Gross) — CUFOS · web.archive.org · archived copy
- Project Twinkle final report — Project 1947 · project1947.com · archived copy
This page was last edited on 29 October 2026. Articles are written in our own words from the sources listed under References; disputed claims are attributed to the people who made them.
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