That may be true, however, in many respects there is a remarkable consistency in the object descriptions over a three-hour period. For example, all of the ground witnesses described a very large object, which would alternate bright white, to reddish orange, to green. In his official report Col. Werlich described: “VISUAL SIGHTING COMPARED OBJECT SIZE TO BE EQUAL TO THE SUN, VERY LARGE, TOO BIG FOR AN AIRCRAFT. RADAR SIGHTING DESCRIBES THE SIZE ON THE SCOPE TO BE LARGER THAN THAT OF A KC-135 DURING AERIAL REFUELING. (3) COLOR WAS A VERY BRIGHT RED ORANGE MOST OF THE TIME. (4) THE INITIAL SIGHTING WAS ONE OBJECT. THE ONE OBJECT WAS JOINED BY ONE OTHER LIKE OBJECT FOR A SHORT TIME. The B-52 navigator, McCaslin, described the object as being as large or larger than a KC-135 tanker. McCaslin routinely observed incoming/approaching KC-135’s on his radarscope during refueling. Partin described the object as being larger than a house in our interview, and as “a miniature sun placed on the ground below the aircraft” in his AF-117, drawing an “orange ball of light with a very dim ring of soft white light” extending to the side. He initially observed the object from an estimated distance of 15 miles. Imagine seeing an object at that distance in the dark.

PARTIN: Yeah, he watched it go. So we forgot it and went on down and were shooting low approaches in the traffic pattern. . . — but I remember looking off to my right probably about the 2 o’clock position, as they used to say, and low and I saw a — it was sort of oblong, there were, looked like windows around it that were lit and it
was just hovering there… . We must have been around 1500-1700
feet above the ground — you could see houses on the ground from that altitude, and they looked like, you know, the size of dice — a die.
INTERVIEWER: Maybe like a Monopoly house?
PARTIN: Yeah, right, and this was much larger than that… . When I described to the crew over the interphone what I was seeing the navigator, the radar navigator, and everybody tried to get up in our lap in the cockpit and — [laughs].

In addition:
NARRATIVE Endnotes:

[117] The body of the object is described as: egg-shaped (Runyon), football-shaped (Goduto), cough drop-shaped, and elliptically-shaped (McCaslin), and oblong (Partin), possibly watermelon-shaped, which could be defined as a prolate ellipsoid, generated by revolving an ellipse about its major axis with the polar diameter greater than the equatorial diameter.

[120] McCaslin 2000, 12-13. Also: “At that briefing it was described as an orangish, elliptically-shaped object—not perfectly circular, but elliptically-shaped, with kind of a halo—a boomerang-shaped exhaust, if you will, of the same color, slightly separated from the elliptical shape. I didn’t see it, so I just go with what the pilot said, but that’s what I was told. And that’s my memory of what General Holland was told” (McCaslin 2001, 30).

Goduto recalls, “Brad’s description that came over intercom was it was kind of a reddish, orangish football shape” (2001, 19-22).

In any case, Runyan's air-visual description is not completely unsupported. Unfortunately, only the pilots could have viewed the object in a B-52, and Partin would have been quite busy simply piloting a very heavy aircraft at reduced speed and low altitude.

Kind regards, Tom