Redmond, Oregon UFO Incident (1959)

The sighting and the response

On the morning of 24 September 1959, Redmond police officer Robert Dickerson reported a bright, multicoloured light over the town. Redmond Airport's Federal Aviation Administration staff also watched it. Most accounts agree the object hovered, moved, and climbed away, but they disagree on the details. A declassified Air Force record card for Project 10073 lists the light as red, green, yellow and white, hovering at about 800 feet before rising to about 3,000 feet, and lasting more than an hour. NICAP, the civilian UFO group, describes a round object that descended, hovered, moved quickly, and shot upward into clouds with a flame trail, and it puts the visual portion at about ten minutes. Altitude readings from FAA height-finder equipment reportedly ranged from roughly 6,000 to 54,000 feet.

The radar picture was more dramatic. FAA logs record an Air Force radar station tracking a target, and a Seattle control-centre log notes a UFO also seen on radar at the Klamath Falls ground-control intercept site. The Air Force scrambled F-102 interceptors from Portland, with an F-89 and a civilian Tri-Pacer also reported in the record. No aircraft made visual or radar contact with the object.

Official explanations

The Air Force offered several explanations over time. In January 1960, Maj. Lawrence J. Tacker of the Air Technical Intelligence Center suggested a balloon. NICAP argued that winds were southeasterly and no local balloon had been released, and the Air Force later dropped this explanation. In April 1960, Col. Gordon B. Knight attributed the radar returns to a gap-filler antenna on a mountain at about 8,010 feet, which did not move during the search. A 1963 information sheet attributed the visual sighting to refraction of light from Venus. NICAP countered that the witnesses did not see Venus during the event, although they saw it afterward.

The case was filed as insufficient information. NICAP accepted that the ground echo was probably not the object witnesses saw.

Assessment

The Redmond case is often cited because it combines a civilian visual report, FAA personnel, radar returns from two sites, and a real military response. The inconsistencies in the record are significant, though. Witness accounts differ on altitude, direction of travel, and timing. The main radar explanation is a fixed ground antenna, which fits the radar data but not the moving visual report. The record also shows the Air Force's stated reasons changed between 1960 and 1963. Most of the detailed material comes from fan-run archives and secondary summaries, so dates, distances and altitudes should be checked against the National Archives Project Blue Book files before being relied on.

Legacy

Redmond has kept the case in local memory. The town's Project Blue Book Festival, begun in 2008, takes its name from the Air Force programme that investigated the event. The case remains unexplained in official terms, but the most plausible mundane explanations, a ground radar artifact and atmospheric refraction of Venus, cover different parts of the record and neither covers all of it.