Green fireballs

Green fireballs

Type	Case (sighting wave)
Date	Late November 1948 onward; most reports December 1948 – 1949
Place	Mainly northern New Mexico, near Los Alamos, Sandia Base and Kirtland AFB
Key investigator	Dr. Lincoln La Paz, Institute of Meteoritics, University of New Mexico
Official studies	Los Alamos conferences (February and October 1949); Project Twinkle (1949/50–1951)
Official conclusion	Probably natural phenomena

Green fireballs are a type of unidentified flying object reported since the late 1940s: bright green balls of light that streaked across the night sky, first and most famously over northern New Mexico from late 1948, close to the atomic weapons laboratories at Los Alamos and Sandia Base. Their vivid colour, flat paths and silence convinced the meteor expert Lincoln La Paz that they were not ordinary meteors, and their location alarmed military and security officials, leading to secret scientific conferences at Los Alamos and the Air Force's Project Twinkle.^[1][2]

Project Twinkle recorded nothing useful and concluded in 1951 that there was no sign the fireballs were anything but natural. Most scientists consider them bright meteors (bolides), although some ufologists regard them as artificial and possibly extraterrestrial. Green fireballs are still reported around the world, and most are identified as meteors.^[1][5]

First sightings

According to Edward J. Ruppelt, later head of Project Blue Book, the green fireballs "streaked into UFO history" in late November 1948, when people around Albuquerque began reporting mysterious "green flares" at night, at first only a "green streak in the sky" low on the horizon. Air Force intelligence at Kirtland Air Force Base and Project Sign at the Air Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC) wrote them off as flares — thousands of discharged soldiers had probably brought home "liberated" flare pistols. But the reports improved, the objects seemed to grow larger and more people saw them, though there had been no publicity, and the Air Force was reconsidering the flare explanation when the night of 5 December 1948 arrived.^[2][3]

The night of 5 December 1948

At 9:27 p.m. an Air Force C-47 transport flown by a Captain Goede was at 18,000 feet, 10 miles east of Albuquerque, when its crew saw a green ball of fire flash across the sky ahead of them. It looked like a huge meteor, but it was bright green and did not arc downward: it started low, near the eastern slopes of the Sandia Mountains, rose a little, then levelled out, and it was bigger than any meteor the crew had seen. They had seen an identical object 22 minutes earlier near Las Vegas, New Mexico, and reported both to the Kirtland tower.^[2]

Minutes later the captain of Pioneer Airlines Flight 63, a DC-3 bound for Albuquerque, called in to report that at 9:35 p.m., approaching Las Vegas from the east, he and his co-pilot had seen what they first took for a shooting star, but which was too low and too flat in trajectory for a meteor. It seemed to come at them head-on, changing from orange-red to green and growing as big as or bigger than a full moon, until he threw the airliner into a tight turn to avoid a collision; as it drew level it fell toward the ground, dimming until it vanished. The crews described the objects as a "green ball of fire" and "like a huge green meteor". Further reports arrived from all over northern New Mexico, and by morning a full investigation was under way.^[1][2]

On 8 December two Kirtland intelligence officers took off just before dark with a plan for what each would observe. At 6:33 p.m., flying at 11,500 feet 20 miles east of the Las Vegas radio range station, they saw an object 2,000 feet above them approaching fast. It looked like a burning green Air Force flare, but much more intense and larger; its path was almost flat and parallel to the ground for about two seconds, then it seemed to burn out and dropped off rapidly.^[1][2]

La Paz's investigation

Because the fireballs resembled meteors, the Kirtland officers called in Dr. Lincoln La Paz, director of the University of New Mexico's Institute of Meteoritics and a world authority on meteorites. He proposed plotting their paths from witnesses' sightlines, as he had done successfully with meteorites, to find where any fragments would have landed. Interviewing dozens of witnesses on 6 December and the following days, La Paz and the intelligence officers determined that eight separate fireballs had been seen on the night of 5 December. They traced the most spectacular one eastward across New Mexico to the Texas border and plotted where it should have struck, but repeated searches found nothing. La Paz later told Ruppelt this was the first time he seriously doubted the fireballs were meteorites.^[2]

La Paz saw a green fireball himself on 12 December. According to the ufologist Kevin Randle, he told officials that it "was not a conventional meteorite fall", though he noted that its path "drooped" near the end and that it "broke into fragments, still bright green". Within days the fireballs were appearing almost nightly. ATIC, reviewing reports from across the country, found that nothing elsewhere matched them: they were unique to the Albuquerque area. Through December 1948 and January 1949 nearly everyone involved — Kirtland's intelligence officers, Air Defense Command personnel, La Paz and some of the most distinguished scientists at Los Alamos — saw at least one.^[1][2]

La Paz's case

La Paz later set out his reasons for believing they were neither meteors nor meteorites. Using a colour chart, he had every witness pick the shade they had seen; all chose the same vivid green, quite unlike the pale, almost yellowish green of documented green meteors. Their paths were flatter than even a level-looking meteor's, and witnesses called them "terrifying", "blinding" or "as big as the moon" — bigger and brighter than meteors. Meteorites arrive with sound and shock waves that break windows and stampede cattle, yet no one ever heard a green fireball. Above all, no fragment was ever found: he showed Ruppelt maps on which converging sightlines had led him to a meteorite he then dug up, and identical-looking plots for green fireballs where repeated searches found nothing. Asked what he thought they were, he said only that he did not think they were natural, and hoped one day one would hit the ground and solve the mystery.^[2][3]

Official concern

Whatever the fireballs were, they were appearing in one of the most sensitive security areas in the United States: within 100 miles of Albuquerque lay Los Alamos and Sandia Base, the backbone of the atomic bomb program, along with radar stations, fighter-interceptor bases and other restricted sites. On 13 January 1949 the Director of Army Intelligence at Fourth Army headquarters in Texas wrote that the fireballs might be "the result of radiological warfare experiments by a foreign power", and that because they were occurring near sensitive installations a scientific board should study them.^[1][2]

The Los Alamos conference

In mid-February 1949 a conference at Los Alamos brought together Project Sign, Kirtland's intelligence officers, military officers and scientists including the upper-atmosphere physicist Joseph Kaplan, Edward Teller and La Paz. As Ruppelt put it, there was no need to debate whether the fireballs existed, since almost everyone present had seen one; the question was whether they were natural or man-made. Supporters of the meteor theory pointed out that greenish meteors, though uncommon, had often been recorded, that a meteor can look flat from certain angles, and that the unusually clear weather across the Southwest that winter explained the number of sightings. La Paz argued that the paths were too flat, the colour too green, and that no fragments had been found where they should have fallen. After two days the conference decided the fireballs were a natural phenomenon of some kind, and recommended that the Air Force's Cambridge Research Laboratory take over and try to photograph them and measure their speed, height and size. Ruppelt and the historian Jerome Clark wrote that further conferences on the subject were held in secret at Los Alamos and elsewhere later in 1949.^[1][2][4]

The 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 had been an ordinary meteor.^[1]

Project Twinkle

According to the project's final report, a classified letter from the Air Force Chief of Staff on 14 September 1949 led Lieutenant Colonel Frederic C. E. Oder of the Cambridge Research Division to attend a conference at Los Alamos on 14 October 1949 on the green fireballs, which, it said, had been seen only in that area and only since 1947 and were causing considerable concern among local security agencies. The scientists agreed the information was not quantitative enough and that photographic, triangulation and spectroscopic measurements were essential. La Paz was invited to propose a study but on 2 February 1950 declined, citing academic commitments. Wikipedia dates the establishment of Project Twinkle to December 1949, and Ruppelt to late summer 1949; the report says its directive came early in 1950.^[1][2][5]

In February 1950 frequent reports near Holloman Air Force Base and Vaughn, New Mexico, led Holloman's commander to set up a two-man observation post on 21 February with a theodolite, telescope and camera. After a conference at Wright-Patterson on 5 March, a three-part program was approved on 16 March: triangulation with Askania cine-theodolite cameras by the contractor Land-Air Inc., spectrum-grating photography by Holloman personnel, and electromagnetic frequency measurements by the Signal Corps. Land-Air kept watch at two camera stations at Vaughn from 1 April to 15 September 1950. Some photos were taken on 27 April and 24 May, but never by both cameras at once, so nothing could be measured. Phenomena seen over Holloman after a Bell missile launch on 30 August and a V-2 launch on 31 August were also missed — the first time no one told the camera crews, the second time the triangulation failed. The grating cameras were little used after their operators were withdrawn for the Korean War, and the Signal Corps monitoring was dropped as not worth $50,000 a year. The contract was extended to 31 March 1951, with the cameras moved to Holloman, but they recorded nothing, and pilots asked to report sightings reported none.^[5]

Ruppelt summed up the project as "a bust": only one of the three planned cameras was available, and it was constantly moved to wherever reports came from, always arriving too late; the staff lacked money, equipment, people and moral support, and when the Korean War began the project "silently died".^[2]

Conclusions

The final report, by the project scientist Louis Elterman and dated 27 November 1951, found that most reports could be attributed to aircraft, balloons, smoke rockets, birds, planets, meteors and possibly clouds; the possibility of small glowing clouds from atomic installations was also raised. The astronomer Fred Whipple found that, of 72 observations, 45 were made with the Moon up, suggesting moonlit clouds might play a part, and none of his meteor photographs from 35 nights with reports showed anything unusual. The report noted that the high rate of sightings since 1948 did not necessarily mean the objects were man-made: the Earth might be passing through a region rich in meteors, and the 1948 sunspot maximum might be a factor. It concluded that there was no indication the green fireballs were "anything but natural phenomena", and recommended spending no more money, while keeping watch through Whipple's planned meteor cameras near Las Cruces.^[5]

Speaking to the project in August 1951, La Paz said he disbelieved all the other aerial phenomena but not the green fireballs, which he thought too recent in origin and too odd in trajectory to be natural. He cited one seen over Detroit on 7 July 1951, and said they might be of U.S. military origin, but if not, they were "a matter of serious concern".^[5]

Later reports

When Ruppelt organised Project Blue Book in the summer of 1951 he had never heard of the green fireballs; the files held no reports for a year and a half. He learned of them from Joseph Kaplan, who asked him "What ever happened to the green fireballs?" and, though he respected La Paz, was not convinced they were man-made. At a later lunch at Los Alamos, scientists who had all seen fireballs told Ruppelt that the evidence against a natural explanation outweighed the evidence for it; one, a private pilot, compared an encounter to having a fluorescent green softball hurled at his face from 100 feet away. Some speculated they might be unmanned probes sent down from a spacecraft high above the Earth to test re-entry. When Ruppelt finally met La Paz, he confirmed that the genuine green fireballs were no longer being seen, and that the hundreds of reports he had received since writing about them were all ordinary greenish meteors.^[2][3]

On 18 September 1954 a "blinding green" fireball as big as a full moon streaked silently across Colorado and northern New Mexico, seen by thousands, including a football crowd at Santa Fe and the crew of a TWA airliner; people in Denver said it "turned night into day". La Paz told a reporter he would plot its course and look for it, but added, "I don't expect to find anything." Green fireballs have more recently been reported in Japan, Australia, West Virginia and Tennessee.^[1][2]

Explanations

Some ufologists consider the green fireballs artificial and possibly extraterrestrial. The mainstream explanation is that they were natural bolides — exceptionally bright meteors — whose green colour comes from elements such as magnesium or nickel. Other suggestions have included effects of atomic weapons tests, such as clouds of nuclear fallout, material thrown off the Moon by meteor impacts, and aircraft from secret military projects.^[1]

References

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