Gorman dogfight

Gorman dogfight

Type	Case (pilot encounter)
Also known as	Gorman incident, Fargo dogfight
Date	About 9:00–9:27 p.m., Friday 1 October 1948
Place	Over Fargo, North Dakota, and Hector Airport
Pilot	Second Lt. George F. Gorman, 25, North Dakota Air National Guard, flying an F-51 (P-51) Mustang
Other witnesses	Dr. A. D. Cannon and Einar Neilson (Piper Cub); controller L. D. Jensen; two CAA employees
Investigation	Project Sign
Official explanation	Lighted weather balloon (and possibly the planet Jupiter)

The Gorman dogfight was a widely publicised encounter on the evening of 1 October 1948 in which George F. Gorman, a North Dakota Air National Guard pilot, chased a small blinking light around the sky over Fargo, North Dakota, in an F-51 Mustang fighter for nearly half an hour. Edward J. Ruppelt, later head of Project Blue Book, called it one of three "classic" UFO incidents of 1948 — with the Chiles–Whitted and Mantell incidents — that "proved to [Air Force] intelligence specialists that UFOs were real". By 1949 the Air Force had attributed it to a lighted weather balloon.^[1][2]

Background

Although only 25, George F. Gorman was a veteran fighter pilot of the Second World War. After the war he managed a construction company and served as a second lieutenant in the North Dakota Air National Guard. On 1 October 1948 he was flying a cross-country flight with other Guard pilots, in a P-51 Mustang (by then designated F-51), and the flight reached Fargo at about 8:30 p.m. The other pilots landed at Fargo's Hector Airport, but Gorman decided to use the clear, cloudless night to get in some night-flying time, and stayed aloft.^[1][2]

The chase

At about 9 p.m. Gorman flew over a stadium where a high school football game was under way. He noticed a small Piper Cub about 500 feet below him; otherwise the sky seemed empty. By Ruppelt's account, Gorman had called the tower for landing instructions when what looked like the taillight of another plane passed him on the right. When he looked for the outline of a wing or fuselage, he saw none, although the Cub was clearly outlined against the city lights below. At 9:07 p.m. he asked the Hector Airport tower whether there was any other traffic. The tower said there was none apart from the Cub, and contacted its pilot, the oculist Dr. A. D. Cannon, who with his passenger Einar Neilson said they could also see a light to the west.^[1][2]

Gorman told the tower he would pursue the light to identify it. At full power, 350 to 400 mph, he soon realised it was moving too fast to catch in a straight line, so he tried to cut it off with turns. Closing to within about 1,000 yards, he judged the light to be six to eight inches across, sharply outlined and blinking on and off. When it seemed to increase speed, it stopped blinking and grew brighter; according to Ruppelt, it then banked sharply left, made a pass at the tower and climbed, with Gorman in pursuit. At 7,000 feet it turned, and he could not cut inside its turn. Gorman made a right turn and came at it head-on at about 5,000 feet; it passed over his plane at about 500 feet — only a few feet over his canopy, in Ruppelt's telling — and he dived to avoid a collision.^[1][2]

After losing sight of it, Gorman saw that the light seemed to have turned around and was coming at him again. It then climbed vertically; he followed in a steep climb until his Mustang stalled at 14,000 feet, with the light still 2,000 feet above him. Two more attempts to close on it failed, and it seemed to make another head-on pass but broke off before coming close. By now it was over Hector Airport, where the controller L. D. Jensen watched it through binoculars but could see no shape around the light; Cannon and Neilson, who had landed, joined him in the tower. Gorman followed the light to about 25 miles southwest of Fargo. Seeing it at 11,000 feet while he was at 14,000, he dived on it at full power, but it climbed vertically and passed out of sight, last seen at 9:27 p.m. Gorman broke off the chase and flew back to Hector Airport.^[1]

Gorman's account

In a sworn statement to investigators on 23 October 1948, often reprinted in UFO books and documentaries for decades afterwards, Gorman said he was convinced "there was definite thought behind its maneuvers". He believed the object obeyed the laws of inertia, because its acceleration was rapid but not instantaneous and its tight turns still followed a natural curve. He said that when he tried to turn with it he blacked out briefly from the speed, that he did not think many pilots could withstand such turns and stay conscious, and that the object could out-turn, out-speed and out-climb his aircraft and keep up a steady climb far beyond his own. He told Air Technical Intelligence Center investigators he had "the distinct impression that its maneuvers were controlled by thought or reason".^[1][2]

Ruppelt noted that the other witnesses only partly corroborated the story: Cannon and Neilson saw a light "moving fast" but did not see all the manoeuvres Gorman described, and two Civil Aeronautics Administration employees on the ground saw a light pass over the field once. Two days after the encounter, the Fargo Forum ran an article in which Gorman recalled his dogfight with a "flying disk".^[2][3]

Air Force investigation

Investigators from Project Sign, the Air Force's UFO study, wired ahead to ground Gorman's plane and arrived within hours. They interviewed Gorman, Cannon, Neilson and the tower staff, took sworn statements, and went over the Mustang "from the prop spinner to the rudder trim tab" with a Geiger counter, comparing it with a similar plane that had not flown for several days. Gorman's plane was measurably more radioactive, which was taken as a sign that he had flown close to an "atomic-powered" object. The investigators ruled out another aircraft, Canadian Vampire jet fighters and a weather balloon. A memo from the meeting held on their return to Dayton, which Ruppelt later found in the file, concluded that "some weird things were taking place", and according to the historian Curtis Peebles their initial conclusion was "that something remarkable had occurred".^[1][2]

The balloon explanation

Further work found flaws in the evidence. A memo from a Wright Field laboratory explained that a plane recently flown at high altitude is less shielded from cosmic rays and so will read as more radioactive than one that has sat on the ground for days, so the Geiger readings proved nothing. The Air Weather Service reported that it had released a lighted weather balloon from Fargo at 8:50 p.m. that evening; by 9 p.m. it would have been where Gorman and the Cub's occupants first saw the light. In a letter to the Air Technical Intelligence Center dated 24 January 1949, the Air Weather Service analysed the sighting, which Ruppelt said "proved" Gorman had fought a lighted balloon.^[1][2]

The investigators concluded that the light's apparent manoeuvres were an illusion created by Gorman's own manoeuvres as he chased it, and that after the balloon passed out of sight he may have mistaken the planet Jupiter for the UFO and chased it south of Fargo before giving up. By early 1949 Project Sign, and later Project Grudge and Project Blue Book, listed the case as a lighted weather balloon. Ruppelt explained that pilots flying at night can suffer vertigo and disorientation without reference points, and that night fighters had told many stories of being fooled by lights; he admitted that during the Second World War he had once fired on a "night fighter" that turned out to be Venus.^[1][2]

Similar "dogfights"

Ruppelt described later encounters that closely resembled Gorman's. On 21 June 1952 the pilot of an F-47 near the Atomic Energy Commission's Oak Ridge laboratory "fought" a white, blinking light six to eight inches across from 10,000 to 27,000 feet, and on 10 December 1952 an F-94 crew near the Hanford atomic plant in Washington chased a round white object. In both cases, he wrote, investigators later placed a balloon at the spot. After a similar chase by a Navy pilot over Cuba in September 1952, a lighted balloon was sent up the next night and the pilot, sent up to compare, "duplicated his dogfight — illusions and all".^[2]

Aftermath

The Gorman dogfight received wide national publicity and helped fuel the wave of UFO reports in the late 1940s. While Project Sign's investigators were still puzzling over it, their Top Secret "Estimate of the Situation", which argued that UFOs were interplanetary craft, went up to the Air Force Chief of Staff, General Hoyt S. Vandenberg, who rejected it for lack of proof. At the end of 1949 the writer Donald Keyhoe built his influential True magazine article "The Flying Saucers Are Real" around the three "classics" — the Mantell, Chiles–Whitted and Gorman incidents — attacking the Air Force's conclusions; Ruppelt wrote that Keyhoe mocked the Air Force for hinting at a balloon and then dropping the idea.^[1][2]

Some UFO researchers, such as James E. McDonald and Donald Keyhoe, continued to regard the case as unsolved, but others accepted Project Sign's conclusion. The UFO historian Jerome Clark wrote that "unlike some Air Force would-be solutions this one seems plausible", and that after the Mantell incident "the Gorman sighting may be the most overrated UFO report in the early history of the phenomenon".^[1]

In popular culture

The pilot episode of the 2019 History Channel series Project Blue Book, "The Fuller Dogfight", is loosely based on the Gorman case.^[1][3]

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia article “Gorman dogfight”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.