Sunnyvale hangar saucer claim

Sunnyvale hangar saucer claim

Date	1979
Topics	Military encounters (topic)
People	Leonard Stringfield
Testimony	Shellenberger testimony, p. 87
Year	1979 in UFO history
Timeline	1979 on the UAP Timeline
Sources	7

The Sunnyvale hangar saucer claim is a second-hand story collected by the crash-retrieval researcher Leonard Stringfield. According to a 2024 timeline submitted to Congress, a Navy chief petty officer and radar observer named Durward "Buddy" Hack said that in 1950 he had wandered through an unguarded door into a large hangar at the Naval Air Station in Sunnyvale, California. Inside he saw a large, round saucer with a row of windows.^[6] He disappeared without trace on a flight out of San Diego in 1952. His family passed the story on in 1979.^[6] The air station is the one now called Moffett Field, home of the vast airship hangars built for the Navy in the 1930s and 1940s.^[7] No document or other witness supports the account in the sources read here.

The account

The 2024 timeline compiled by Michael Shellenberger and submitted as written testimony to the House Oversight Committee gives the story in brief.^[6]

• The witness. He was a chief petty officer (CPO) and radar observer whose name the timeline spells both "Hack" and "Haak".^[6]
• The hangar. In 1950 he accidentally entered an unguarded door of a large hangar at the Naval Air Station in Sunnyvale.^[6]
• The craft. Inside he saw a large, round saucer with a row of windows.^[6]
• His fate. In 1952 he vanished without trace on a flight out of San Diego.^[6]
• How it surfaced. His family relayed the story in 1979.^[6]

The timeline cites the story to Stringfield's paper "Retrievals of the Third Kind", presented at the 1978 MUFON symposium, page 86.^[6] Stringfield first read that paper on 28 July 1978 at the Ninth Annual MUFON Symposium in Dayton, Ohio.^[1][3] A family account given in 1979 cannot have been part of the paper as first presented. It may come from a later printing: the paper was serialised in three parts in Flying Saucer Review from the July–August 1979 issue,^[3] and Stringfield's follow-up Status Report II appeared in 1980.^[1] The sources read here do not settle where page 86 belongs, and the original text was not available for this rewrite.^[5]

The earlier version of this article described the witness as a former Navy radar observer whose family told Stringfield the story in the late 1970s. The timeline names him, gives his rank, and adds that he disappeared in 1952, which means he could never have been questioned himself.^[6]

The air station

• Origins. In 1930 the city of Sunnyvale bought about 1,000 acres of farmland on San Francisco Bay and "sold" it to the federal government for $1 as a base for the Navy airship USS Macon.^[7]
• Names. The station was commissioned in April 1933 as NAS Sunnyvale. Its airfield was named Moffett Field later that year, after Rear Admiral William A. Moffett died in the loss of the airship Akron.^[7]
• Changes of hand. After the Macon crashed in 1935, the base passed to the Army as a training field. The Ames Aeronautical Laboratory was established there in 1939.^[7]
• Back to the Navy. The Navy took the base back in April 1942. It was briefly NAS Sunnyvale again before being renamed Naval Air Station Moffett Field.^[7]
• In 1950. At the time of the alleged sighting, the station's official name was therefore NAS Moffett Field, though it lay on land bought by Sunnyvale and had first been called NAS Sunnyvale.^[7]
• The hangars. Hangar One, built in 1931 for the Macon, covers 8 acres and is one of the world's largest freestanding structures. The Navy added the wooden Hangars Two and Three during the Second World War for blimp patrols.^[7]
• After the war. From the end of the war until the station closed, it was a base for land-based anti-submarine and maritime patrol aircraft such as the Lockheed P2V Neptune.^[7] The NASA Ames Research Center now owns and runs the field.^[7]

The earlier version of this article said Moffett's huge airship hangars have long attracted rumours of hidden craft. That is not covered in the sources read here.

Leonard Stringfield

• His early work. Stringfield (1920–1994) took a particular interest in crashed-saucer stories.^[1] In the 1950s he ran Civilian Research, Interplanetary Flying Objects (CRIFO) and its newsletter Orbit.^[1][2] He said his house was made a UFO reporting post for the Air Defense Command, codenamed "3-0 Blue".^[4]
• NICAP and Condon. He later advised NICAP on public relations and served the Condon Committee as an "Early Warning Coordinator".^[1]
• MUFON and CUFOS. From 1971 he was active in MUFON, becoming its public-relations man and a board member, and he was a regional investigator for the Center for UFO Studies.^[2]
• His day job. He worked as director of public relations and marketing for DuBois Chemicals in Cincinnati.^[1]
• His own sighting. Stringfield traced his interest to a sighting of three brilliant white lights from a cargo plane in 1945, while he was serving in the Pacific.^[4]
• His papers. He died of lung cancer in December 1994. In 2012 his 60 volumes of papers were donated to MUFON.^[1][4]

The crash-retrieval papers

"Retrievals of the Third Kind" was the first of Stringfield's self-published "Status Reports" on alleged crash retrievals. They ran from 1978 to 1994.^[1][5]

• Anonymous sources. The paper consisted mostly of numbered "abstracts" summarising stories from unnamed informants. Many of them came forward after reading Stringfield's 1977 book Situation Red.^[3]
• Hearsay. Stringfield admitted that cases "without names to back up the informant's testimony can be construed as hearsay". He asked readers to rely on his own credibility, built over 29 years of research.^[3]
• A long chain. The writer Charles Lear points to one abstract that Stringfield heard "first-hand" from the son of a man, who had heard it from his cousin, an Air Force major.^[3]
• Roswell. The paper also included the earliest published version of Major Jesse Marcel's account of the 1947 Roswell debris, given anonymously as "Major J.M.".^[2][3]
• Influence. Lear credits the paper with making crash-retrieval research respectable among ufologists.^[3]

The Sunnyvale story fits the pattern Lear describes: an unnamed or unreachable witness, a story relayed by others, and no way to check it.^[3][6]

Assessment

• Third-hand. The witness disappeared in 1952, and the account reached Stringfield through relatives decades later. As Stringfield himself acknowledged of such cases, it amounts to hearsay.^[3][6]
• No support. No Navy record, other witness or photograph is cited in the sources read here, and the timeline gives no details of the 1952 disappearance.^[6]
• A mismatch. The citation to a 1978 paper for a story relayed in 1979 is unexplained in the sources read here.^[1][3][6]

People and topics

• U.S. Navy — The U.S. naval service, whose pilots reported the UAP encounters revealed in 2017.
• Leonard Stringfield — Former Air Force intelligence officer and NICAP researcher who collected anonymous crash-retrieval accounts from 1978 to 1994.
• NASA — The U.S. civilian space agency, created in 1958.
• Crash retrieval — The alleged recovery of crashed non-human craft by governments.

On the Timeline

• Dale Graff and Wright-Patterson remote viewing (1979) — Dale Graff is said to have run a remote viewing program at Wright-Patterson, then moved to the DIA.
• Mississippi UFO resolution (1979) (February 1979) — A Mississippi resolution calling for a Senate UAP investigation dies in committee.

See every 1979 event on the UAP Timeline →

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia articles “Leonard H. Stringfield”, “Moffett Federal Airfield”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.