Gortex wrote: I recently started a thread on the Green Fireballs of the late forties early fifties and was wondering if you had any thoughts on what
they were?
RH responds: I can’t say it any better than I did in my book:
Capt. Edward Ruppelt, first chief of the USAF UFO Project Blue Book, revealed that nuclear weapons scientists had once speculated in his presence that
the green fireballs might be alien probes.
In his 1956 book, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, Ruppelt wrote of a very interesting group discussion in which he had participated at Los
Alamos, early in 1952. He said that some of the scientists and technicians had been informally theorizing about the green fireballs and had proposed a
rather startling explanation for the their origin:
"I was eating lunch with a group of people at the AEC’s Los Alamos Laboratory,” he wrote, “when one of the group mentioned the mysterious
kelly-green balls of fire. The strictly unofficial bull-session-type discussion that followed took up the entire lunch hour and several hours of the
afternoon. It was an interesting discussion because these people, all scientists and technicians from the lab, had a few educated guesses as to what
they might be. All of them had seen a green fireball, some of them had seen several...
The speculation about what the green fireballs were ran through the usual spectrum of answers, a new type of natural phenomenon, a secret U.S.
development, and psychologically-enlarged meteors. When the possibility of the green fireballs being associated with interplanetary vehicles came up,
the whole group got serious. They had been doing a lot of thinking about this, they said, and they had a theory.
The green fireballs, they theorized, could be some type of unmanned test vehicle that was being projected into our atmosphere from a ‘spaceship’
hovering several hundred miles above the earth. Two years ago I would have been amazed to hear a group of reputable scientists make such a startling
statement. Now, however, I took it as a matter of course. I’d heard the same type of statement many times before from equally-qualified
groups..."
The informal discussion at Los Alamos is of course intriguing. That top nuclear weapons specialists would even consider such a radical idea as
extraterrestrial visitors to explain the green fireballs would undoubtedly have shocked most of their scientific peers at the time, probably even
today.
In any event, if Ruppelt’s revelation about the conversation at Los Alamos is intriguing, it is also ironic. In light of researcher Dan Wilson’s
research [which is extensively covered in my book] as well as various declassified documents relating to the UFO-Nukes Connection, it seems arguable,
in my view, that the appearance of the green fireballs—as well as the more frequently-sighted disc-shaped UFOs—was a direct result of the work the
nuclear scientists themselves were doing at the Los Alamos and Sandia Labs, as well as at the Nevada Proving Ground. While the actual origin and
purpose of the fireballs remains unknown, the available data are strongly suggestive of a link with atomic testing.
Wilson, who has extensively investigated UFO sightings associated with atmospheric atomic detonations in Nevada, has developed important information
He writes, “I have examined various sighting reports made during the Buster series of shots, of fireball-like objects that were seen all along the
trajectories of radioactive debris clouds after the tests, especially the Dog and Easy shots. Those were reported in many newspapers in Arizona and
New Mexico and even in The New York Times. I have taken the time to plot out the fireball reports and they matched right up with the trajectories of
fallout debris.”
They did indeed. I spent several weeks reviewing Wilson’s data and was quite intrigued. As we will see, the apparent correlation between the
drifting radioactive clouds and the fireballs is startling, not only during the period of the Buster-Jangle shots, but also following several other
atomic bomb tests occurring during the 1950s. On the face of it, it appears as if Dan Wilson has discovered an important but almost completely
overlooked aspect to the UFO-Nukes Connection.
(As noted in the last chapter, the so-called “green fireball” objects were repeatedly observed in the skies of New Mexico, beginning in 1947, many
of them sighted at or near the Los Alamos and Sandia atomic weapons laboratories. Similar, or perhaps the same phenomena, described as green or blue
“flashes” and “streaks of light”, had been sighted in the sky at Fort Hood/Killeen Base, Texas, where atomic bombs were being stockpiled. At
the time, Dr. Lincoln La Paz, a meteor expert at the University of New Mexico, had extensively studied the fireballs and ruled-out a natural
explanation for them. In fact, declassified Air Force and FBI documents confirm that La Paz had confidentially informed the military and the Atomic
Energy Commission that the fireball objects were probably either a top secret U.S. weapon of some sort, or a secret Soviet device sent into American
airspace to spy on our atomic weapons program. However, despite La Paz’ informed view on the subject, a half-a-century later, no credible evidence
exists to support either hypothesis.)
The documents Wilson sent to me, relating to the atomic tests in Nevada, had been declassified by the Defense Special Weapons Agency (DSWA) and the
Air Force. Each report contained maps of the trajectories of the radioactive debris clouds after each shot, as measured at different altitudes,
plotting their progress as they drifted over various regions of the U.S. in the days following a given test.
Wilson explained, “Before each series of tests, a Fallout-Monitoring Network of collection stations, at more than 50 locations across the United
States, was set up to collect surface debris on trays with a sticky paper on them. The data from this network was used to create maps showing surface
distribution of radioactive debris. Isolines were drawn on these maps showing the areas of contamination.”
Other radiation sampling, within the wind currents themselves, was conducted by research aircraft provided by the U.S. Air Force’s Special Weapons
Command, as well as certain, deceptively-named “Weather Reconnaissance” squadrons, which actually were tasked with sampling drifting radioactive
clouds—both U.S. and Soviet—all over the globe.
Along with the declassified technical reports, Wilson sent numerous newspaper articles about various fireball sightings which had occurred after one
atomic bomb test or another, as well as a handful of declassified Project Blue Book reports summarizing a few of the sightings. I have to admit that I
was startled by the number of apparent correlations, in case after case, where fireball sightings had taken place—almost without exception—at
locations over which the drifting fallout had passed only a few hours or days earlier.
END OF BOOK EXCERPT
So, Gortex, based on Wilson’s excellent and ongoing work, I think it’s clear that the green fireballs were somehow related to the drifting clouds
of radiation or, when seen at the labs in New Mexico, at sites where radioactive-related work was taking place. Beyond that, who knows?
edit on 18-11-2010 by Robert Hastings because: (no reason given)