I do not like the idea of a case summary at all here: every little detail of the case is important. Actually, it is by forgetting and minimizing case details that this case has been turned into an "explained" case by the Colorado Project which lead to the Condon Report. I deeply encourage the seriously interested person into reading all the documents listed above. For those who are just curious or in a hurry, here is a short summary anyway.
On August 5, 1952, just before midnight, two Air Force control tower operators at the Haneda US Air Force Base near Tokyo, Japan, noticed a brilliant light in the sky, joined others and watched it through 7x50 binoculars.
The UFO approached the base slowly and hovered, plainly visible from the control tower. Behind the brilliant light, the observers could see a dark circular shape four times the light's diameter. A similar body light was visible on the underside at one point. The UFO hovered, flew curves and performed a variety of maneuvers.
The object was tracked by ground radar, and an F-94 interceptor was scrambled. Pilot 1st Lieutenant W.R. Holder was directed to the UFO by that ground radar operators at Shiroi CGI and his 1st Lieutenant A.M. Jones, radar operator in the jet, obtained a radar lock-on while chasing it, although the UFO could not be seen visually anymore.
The UFO was given chase by the F-94, tracked on ground radar also, and went into a series of circular maneuvers, repeated several times. At one point, the UFO suddenly raced away at a clocked speed of 300 knots (about 345 mph), dividing into three separate radar targets at spaced intervals. Contact with the UFO either by radar or visually from Haneda AFB, was maintained for over 30 minutes. During this period, scattered witnesses saw the UFO exactly where radar showed it to be.
Project Blue Book, the official public UFO study by the US Air Force concluded that the UFO belongs to the category "unknown," the euphemism that meant that it could not be anything common.
The UFO maneuvers were so clearly under intelligent control that Major Dewey Fournet, the representative of Project Blue Book at the Pentagon, elected it one of the example that would prove that UFOs are spaceships from some other planet. Subsequently the study of UFO maneuvers to prove they are spaceships was simply dropped.
Later, the Colorado Project, a skeptical UFO study effort conducted for the USAF that did not want to deal with the UFO problem anymore, minimized the details of the sighting. The visual UFO was reduced to "a light that looked like a star" and the radar track which was obviously the track of an intelligent controlled craft was reduced to "false radar echoes caused by a temperature inversion layer."
Professor James E. McDonald, a world famous specialist of meteorology and atmospheric physics, who disagreed with the handling of UFO cases by the Condon Report, re-evaluated and re-investigated the case and demonstrated how erroneous the Condon Report conclusion on this case - and on many other cases - was.
A list of sources and references is not necessary here: the original sources and the references, including Blue Book documents, The Condon Report, the McDonald analysis, the Ruppelt account, are reproduced in this section. Read them.
