Mach 3 radar target alert (1957)

Mach 3 radar target alert (1957)

Date	20 September 1957, from about 3:05 p.m. to about 3:34 p.m. EDT
Radars	Montauk Point air-defence radar, Long Island, New York; Benton Air Force Station, Pennsylvania
Track	From the Atlantic about 242 miles east of Montauk, west across New York and Pennsylvania, ending over Ontario about 70 miles west of Buffalo
Reported speeds	From about 800 mph to brief peaks Sparks puts near 19,000 mph; the CIA memo cited about 2,000 knots (2,300 mph)
Response	National air-defence alert; F-102 interceptors from Kinross AFB, Michigan, and Truax AFB, Wisconsin; White House, CIA and Intelligence Advisory Committee briefings
Official finding	NORAD evaluation (25 September 1957): no unequivocal explanation; equipment malfunction and interference "most probable"
Status	Listed as an unknown in Brad Sparks's catalogue of Project Blue Book cases
Topics	Military encounters (topic), Government programs (topic), Congress & law (topic)
People	Herbert Scoville, Brad Sparks, Christopher Mellon
Testimony	Shellenberger testimony, p. 59
Year	1957 in UFO history
Timeline	1957 on the UAP Timeline
Sources	6

On the afternoon of 20 September 1957, air-defence radars in the northeastern United States tracked one or two extremely fast, high-flying targets coming inland from the Atlantic. They set off a national air-defence alert two weeks before the launch of Sputnik, only eight days after the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) had become operational.^[1] The case went to President Dwight D. Eisenhower and the top level of the intelligence community. A CIA memorandum the next day judged a Soviet operation highly improbable, and NORAD's own evaluation blamed equipment malfunction or interference.^[1][2][3] Researcher Brad Sparks has since argued at length that the evidence points to real objects. He lists the case as an unknown in his catalogue of Project Blue Book cases.^[1][6]

The tracks

The account below follows Sparks's reconstruction, which draws on the NORAD report and on CIA and FBI records.^[1]

• Montauk pickup. Shortly after 3:05:48 p.m. EDT, the Montauk Point radar on the eastern tip of Long Island picked up a target about 242 miles out, at an azimuth of about 110° (east-southeast).^[1]
• Speed and height. Over the next couple of minutes Sparks calculates speeds mostly between about 4,000 and 7,000 mph, with a brief burst far higher. Montauk and the 26th Air Division first estimated the altitude at about 50,000 feet.^[1]
• IFF reply. Montauk's IFF (identification friend or foe) equipment interrogated the target and received replies. Sparks says their timing and position matched the radar returns.^[1]
• Disappearance and prediction. The target vanished from Montauk's scope at about 3:08 p.m. Montauk projected its last speed, about 2,300 mph, west-northwest. The 26th Air Division passed that "dead reckoning" prediction to the Benton radar station in Pennsylvania.^[1]
• Benton, first track. At 3:17 or 3:18 p.m. Benton picked up a target of about 920 knots (about 1,060 mph) roughly where predicted. It was treated as the same object and kept Montauk's track number, BB-6.^[1]
• Beam transition. Between 3:23 and 3:24 p.m. the target passed from one of Benton's radar beams to another on a different frequency, at about 6° elevation and 155 miles range. From those figures Sparks works out an altitude of about 102,000 feet.^[1]
• End of the first track. Track BB-6 ended at 3:28 p.m. over Ontario, about 70 miles west of Buffalo, heading about 266°. Extended, that line points toward Strategic Air Command (SAC) headquarters at Omaha, Nebraska, roughly 800 miles on.^[1]
• Second track. At 3:24 p.m. Benton picked up a second target, BE-111, about 150 miles behind the first and on a similar course. It was tracked until about 3:34 p.m. at about 1,380 mph, and Sparks notes that it gave no IFF reply.^[1][2]

The UAP Discovery case summary gives the overall range as 800 to 12,000 mph and 50,000 to 135,000 feet over about 30 minutes. It adds that the first object initially seemed headed toward Eisenhower's Summer White House at Newport, Rhode Island.^[1][2] Sparks's 2016 catalogue entry is shorter and more conservative. It describes a 2,300 mph target at 50,000 feet, tracked for about a minute at Montauk and nine minutes at Benton, with speeds of 1,500 to 4,500 mph. It also queries the "alleged" 11-minute gap between the two radars.^[6] The catalogue numbers the case 1233, while the UAP Discovery page cites "Case 1253, pp. 249–250", apparently from a different edition. The two Sparks texts also give different designations for the Montauk radar.^[2][6]

The response

• Interceptors. At about 3:10 p.m. two F-102 interceptors were scrambled from Kinross Air Force Base in Michigan, now Chippewa County International Airport. Two more were later sent from Truax AFB near Madison, Wisconsin. Neither pair made contact; by the time the Truax jets were up, both targets had disappeared.^[1][2]
• Alert. NORAD alerted the White House, SAC, the Air Force Command Post and Air Defense Command.^[1]
• The President. Brigadier General Andrew Goodpaster, Eisenhower's staff secretary and defence liaison officer, was briefed that night. He then briefed the President at the Summer White House, which Sparks thinks was more likely in person than by phone. A follow-up briefing was scheduled for Monday 23 September, apparently at that morning's National Security Council meeting.^[1]
• Intelligence chiefs. The Intelligence Advisory Committee's Watch Committee, which looked for warning signs of a Soviet attack, discussed the incident on 21 September. The full committee met in executive session on 24 September.^[1][6]
• FBI memo. An FBI memo of 24 September, from R. Roach to A. H. Belmont, records the Watch Committee and IAC proceedings. The scan of the FBI file on the Internet Archive could not be read for this article.^[2][4]

Sparks says the President was told the target could be explained by a "rapidly-moving temp inversion" at 52,000 feet travelling east to west. According to his reading of CIA scientist Herbert Scoville Jr.'s Watch Committee notes, Air Force General John M. Dougherty of Air Research and Development Command intelligence supplied this explanation. It reached Eisenhower through Goodpaster on the orders of Army chief of staff General Maxwell D. Taylor. Sparks calls the idea physically impossible, because an inversion is a stationary layering of air and cannot move at 2,300 mph.^[1]

The CIA memo

Scoville directed the CIA's Office of Scientific Intelligence. Sparks says he raised the possibility of a manoeuvrable Soviet cruise missile. Sparks adds that no such weapon existed: the first Soviet cruise missile, the Burya, failed on its launch pad on 1 August 1957, and its second test, on 1 September, crashed at the launch site.^[1][2]

The UFO Scans archive holds a memorandum for the Acting Director of Central Intelligence dated 21 September 1957 and attributed to Scoville. According to the site's summary, it takes a different line:^[3]

• the object was tracked moving west from the eastern tip of Long Island toward Buffalo, at 50,000 feet and 2,000 knots, with an 11-minute break in the track;
• radar jamming was seen in the area and as far west as Chicago;
• Air Defense Command found weather conditions of a type known to produce false radar returns and electronic interference;
• SAC B-47s were flying an electronic countermeasures training mission near Chicago;
• there was no intelligence supporting Soviet involvement, which it judged "highly improbable";
• weather phenomena were "increasingly likely" explanations, and no further committee meetings on the subject were needed.^[3]

The CIA reading-room link for the memo returned only the reading room's home page when checked, so the CIA's own copy could not be read.^[5]

NORAD's evaluation

NORAD sent five officers and operations analysts to the radar sites. Their 31-page "Evaluation of Air Defense Incident of 20 September 1957" is dated 25 September.^[1] Its main points, as Sparks reports them:

• no "unequivocal" explanation was found, and equipment malfunction and interference were the "most probable causes";
• there had been no temperature inversion, and refractivity profiles were attached to show it;
• interception was impossible at the speeds and altitudes involved;
• the radar returns looked "realistic" in shape and size and behaved "coherently".^[1]

The report was at first withheld from Project Blue Book and its parent, the Air Technical Intelligence Center. It reached them several months later, after pressure from Major General James Walsh, deputy director of Air Force intelligence. In May 1958 Major General Howell M. Estes Jr., the Air Force's assistant chief of staff for air defence systems, wrote that no specific malfunction or other explanation had yet been found. He said the investigation must continue.^[1] A year after the event, the UAP Discovery summary says, NORAD still could not identify a malfunction that would make the radar targets agree with the IFF signals.^[2]

The SAC question

Sparks argues that the alert may have caused one of SAC's first "fail-safe" launches. In such a launch, nuclear-armed bombers headed toward the Soviet Union and were recalled before the point of no return. He admits the record is tangled.^[1]

• The UP report. On 7 April 1958 a United Press story, cleared by the Pentagon and based on an investigation by UP president Frank Bartholomew, said SAC had launched its bombers "many times". The causes it listed included meteors, radar interference and unexplained "foreign objects".^[1]
• Power's two versions. SAC commander General Thomas Power described an incident to a congressional committee, and Senator Ralph Flanders relayed it. In one transcript the targets were "headed west"; in another, released on 3 February, they were "headed into the interior of this country". NICAP read the story in July 1958 as a Pacific incident.^[1]
• The "Sputnik Surprise" hearing. In a classified 15 January 1958 hearing of the Senate Armed Services Preparedness Subcommittee, Flanders recounted Power's story of a flight reported from a "Texas tower", heading west at 2,000 miles an hour. Sparks believes this refers to the Montauk alert, told with errors.^[1]

Whether bombers were actually launched on 20 September 1957 is not established in the sources; Sparks says only that SAC "apparently" did so.^[1][2]

Later analysis

Sparks's analysis was republished by former Pentagon official Christopher Mellon and revised in May 2023. In it he says he found top-secret CIA documents on the case in December 2016.^[1] His case for a real object rests on several points:

• IFF frequencies. IFF interrogations go out at 1030 MHz and replies come back at 1090 MHz. A reflection or mirage would return on the same frequency, so the replies rule out radar ghosts.
• Different radars and beams. The target crossed between Benton's radar beams on different frequencies and was seen by more than one radar, which rules out interference from a single set.
• Prediction. Montauk's projection of the target's arrival at Benton came true.
• Direction of travel. The Benton track ran almost across the radar's line of sight, whereas interference moves straight in or out.^[1]

He calls NORAD's report "disingenuous" and says it reads like a committee document whose authors did not agree. As examples he gives these:

• It cited the Lockport radar's failure to track the targets, although elsewhere it admitted Lockport was shut down for maintenance.
• It dismissed the 50,000-foot estimate as "so unreliable".
• It cut the number of Montauk radar sweeps from 12 to 10. The Watch Committee was told there were only nine.
• It called equipment malfunction and outside interference the most probable causes, which Sparks says are mutually exclusive.^[1]

He puts the altitudes at 100,000 feet or more and peak speeds far beyond any 1957 aircraft.^[1] The UAP Discovery summary lists further published sources: Michael Swords and Robert Powell's UFOs and Government, Jerome Clark's UFO Encyclopedia, and NICAP's case page, "Multiple Radars Track 4,500 MPH Target".^[2]

Sparks's catalogue treats the case as unexplained. It names it as one of a series of national air-defence UFO alerts, with earlier ones on 6 December 1950 and 17 April 1952 and a later one on 18 April 1962.^[6]

People and topics

• U.S. Air Force — The U.S. military service that ran the official UFO projects from 1947 to 1969.
• Montauk Project — Montauk Project
• Federal Bureau of Investigation — The U.S. federal police agency, which helped check flying disc reports from 1947 to 1950.
• Central Intelligence Agency — The U.S. foreign intelligence agency, which has followed UFO reports since the 1940s.
• Herbert Scoville — CIA scientific intelligence director who commented on the 1957 Mach 3 radar target.
• Brad Sparks — UFO analyst known for his catalogue of Blue Book unknowns and work on the CIA lawsuit.
• Christopher Mellon — Former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence who helped release the Navy UAP videos.
• NORAD — The U.S.–Canadian air defence command.

On the Timeline

• NICAP fed a fake crash story (1957) (May 1957) — Civilian group NICAP is fed a fake UAP crash story by a source with NSA ties.
• Pantex nuclear plant sightings (1957) (7 November 1957) — Guards at the Pantex nuclear plant in Texas report three flashing objects landing nearby.

See every 1957 event on the UAP Timeline →

References