Cheyenne Mountain and Lake Kickapoo sighting (1986)
From the UAP Encyclopedia, the open encyclopedia of UFO and UAP history · 🗓️ Event
Contents 8
| Date | December 1986 |
|---|---|
| Topics | Crashes & retrievals (topic) |
| People | Howard Blum |
| Testimony | Shellenberger testimony, p. 100 |
| Year | 1986 in UFO history |
| Timeline | 1986 on the UAP Timeline |
| Sources | 5 |
In his 1990 book Out There: The Government's Secret Quest for Extraterrestrials, journalist Howard Blum described a December 1986 incident in which a Navy officer at U.S. Space Command's centre inside Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado, saw an uncatalogued object on a computer display. Blum gave her name as Cmdr. Sheila Mondran.[1][2]
The book
Blum had joined The New York Times as a reporter in 1986 and had twice been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Out There, published by Simon & Schuster, centred on what Blum described as a secret, government-funded "UFO Working Group" set up in 1987, one of whose aims was to judge whether the MJ-12 papers were genuine.[2][3]
The incident
According to Blum, shortly before Christmas 1986 the display showed a strange object crossing the Navy Space Surveillance System, an electronic "fence" stretching across the southern United States, making sudden dives and climbs at great speed.[1] The fence's master transmitter, at Lake Kickapoo in Texas, was said to be the most powerful continuous-wave station in the world.[4]
Criticism
Reviewing the book in the Los Angeles Times in September 1990, sceptic Philip Klass said the surveillance fence could not have detected such manoeuvres and gave no real-time display at Space Command. He said neither he nor Space Command could find a record of a Cmdr. Sheila Mondran, and he listed errors in Blum's description of the Cheyenne Mountain complex, among many others in the book. Another reviewer found the book gripping and well researched but inconclusive.[1][3]
Assessment
Blum's sources were anonymous, and no official record of the working group or the sighting has been released.[1]
People and topics
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- U.S. Navy — The U.S. naval service, whose pilots reported the UAP encounters revealed in 2017.
- Cheyenne Mountain — The NORAD command complex in Colorado.
- Unidentified anomalous phenomena — The U.S. government's current term for unidentified objects in the air, in space and underwater.
- The New York Times — The newspaper that revealed AATIP in December 2017.
- Howard Blum — Journalist and author of Out There (1990).
- Unidentified flying object — An object in the sky that can't be identified; the older term for UAP.
- Disinformation — False information spread deliberately to mislead.
On the Timeline
- Steve Millard's Silicon Valley study group (10 November 1986) — A Silicon Valley investor hosts a private UAP study group including Vallée.
- Bruce Maccabee's CIA talk (1987) (7 July 1987) — Navy physicist Bruce Maccabee says he lectured about UAP at CIA headquarters.
See every 1986 event on the UAP Timeline →
References
- Philip J. Klass, review of Out There, Los Angeles Times (Sept 1990), text via Discmaster · discmaster.textfiles.com · archived copy
- Howard Blum — Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org · archived copy
- Carl Wyant, review of Out There, NZ Skeptics (Nov 1991) · articles.skeptics.nz · archived copy
- Air Force Space Surveillance System (formerly NAVSPASUR) — Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org · archived copy
- archive.org · archive.org · archived copy
Further reading
- NORAD — Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org · 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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