Illustration by Brian Smith

Illustration by Brian Smith

On a mild, slightly breezy March evening in 1959, two men spotted something unusual in the sky over White Rock Lake — cylindrical, dime-sized from their perspective and aluminum in color. It moved in a straight but rolling path northward for about 10 seconds, then vanished. That’s how they described it to the U.S. Air Force, which in 1954 launched project 10073, a.k.a. Blue Book, a study of UFO sightings, the reports of which were declassified in 2004. When the operation ceased in 1970, agents had investigated more than 12,000 UFO sightings; the majority of which could be explained — usually as misidentified clouds or stars (“natural phenomena”), conventional aircraft or clandestine military aircraft unfamiliar to civilians. But a small percentage of cases went unexplained, including this one. The witnesses’ names are censored, but the documents show that one was a 37-year old supervisor of technical illustration at Temco Aircraft in Garland. The other was a 35-year-old service manager at Royal McBee Typewriter Corp. According to the March 1 record card: “It is impossible for this station to determine if there were any aircraft in that area at this certain time.” In other words: unidentified, unexplained.(Source: Project Blue Book case files on Sightings of Unidentified Flying Objects, 1947-69).

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