Four cases from December 1950, closing out the year with the final Oak Ridge/Knoxville incidents and a nationwide military alert.
1950: December UFO|UAP & Entity Sightings Archive
December 1950 closes the year with the final three incidents in the long-running Oak Ridge/Knoxville Flap, now documented in full via the standalone report linked below, alongside a nationwide military alert triggered by radar activity and a genuinely dramatic near-miss aboard a Navy ship off Korea. The month also carries the Del Rio, Texas/Mexico border case — a real December 6 radar-tracked impact whose surrounding crash-retrieval narrative, as told on this site’s own standalone page, rests entirely on unverified MJ-12-era mythology rather than any primary documentation.
Date: December ?, 1950
Location: Aboard USS Gardiners Bay, Latitude 37-28 N, Longitude 126-37 E (channel from Inchon, Korea)
Time: Unknown
Summary: While steaming up the channel from Inchon, Korea, the crew saw two mysterious missiles trailing long white smoke trails strike the water at great speed off the ship’s port bow. Two huge columns of water rose to about 100 feet in height at the point of contact. No aircraft could be sighted by radar or visually overhead, although the ceiling was unlimited.
Source: Donald E. Keyhoe, True magazine, May 1957, p. 16
Date: December 1950
Location: Near Cheyenne, Wyoming
Time: Unknown
Summary: A USAF officer saw an aluminum-like oval UFO. Source citation preserved as originally recorded (“III”) — likely an unresolved footnote reference from the original compilation rather than a full source name.
Source: “III” (unresolved citation)
Date: December 2, 1950 (BBU 845)
Location: Nanyuki, Kenya
Time: 10:50 a.m.
Summary: Mr. and Mrs. L. Scott saw a pearly, iridescent object with a flattened top spin while hovering, making a sound like buzzing bees. The only data preserved in Blue Book’s files on this case came from a report in the East African Standard newspaper.
Source: Berliner
Date: December 6, 1950 (BB)
Location: Westover AFB, Massachusetts
Time: 8:16 a.m. EST
Summary: A civilian observer at Westover AFB — an Air National Guard member and aircraft mechanic — saw a half-moon-shaped object with a silvery outline traveling south at a speed greater than known aircraft, at an estimated altitude of 10,000-20,000 feet, first sighted at roughly 60 degrees above the horizon. The object disappeared suddenly with no apparent reason. The Westover Approach Control Radar was inoperative at the time of the sighting.
Source: Dan Wilson; Bruce Maccabee
Date: December 6, 1950
Location: Laredo AFB, Texas
Time: Unknown
Summary: A possible UFO crash/retrieval is referenced in a single secondary source, with no further detail, named witness, or corroborating documentation available.
Source: Dolan, Richard M. UFO’s and the National Security State: An Unclassified History, Volume One: 1941-1973 Keyhole Publishing Company, Rochester, 2000
Date: December 6, 1950
Location: Nationwide (radar-inspired national alert)
Time: 10:30 a.m.
Summary: For roughly one hour, the United States military was placed under a condition of national emergency on the morning of December 6, 1950. Two days later, the FBI was informed that the Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps had been placed on immediate high alert for any information related to flying saucers.
Source: Fran Ridge; Bruce Maccabee
Date: December 6, 1950 (BBU 848)
Location: Fort Myers, Florida
Time: 5:00 p.m.
Summary: Former aircraft purchasing agent Harry Lamp and four boys, using 10x binoculars, saw a 75-foot object, 3-4 feet thick, with a bubble on top, silver with a red rim, having two white and two orange jets along its edge and a center section that revolved while the object hovered. The object flew away at very high speed.
Source: Berliner
Date: December 6, 1950 (claimed radar/impact) / Recovery narrative unverified
Location: El Indio-Guerrero area, Texas-Mexico border, near Del Rio, Texas
Time: Unknown
Summary: This case combines two distinct layers that should not be treated with equal confidence. The documented layer: Air Defense Command records, referenced in the disputed “Eisenhower Briefing Document” of MJ-12 lore, describe an object impacting the earth at high speed in the El Indio-Guerrero area of the Texas-Mexico border on December 6, 1950, following a long atmospheric trajectory; by the time a search team arrived, the object was said to be almost totally incinerated. Separately, some regional accounts describe a formation of roughly 40 objects detected approaching from the north that day amid Cold War fears of a Soviet attack, with one object reportedly falling out of formation and coming down in the desert. The unverified layer, found only on this site’s own standalone page for the case and in similar online crash-retrieval material: that two dead, gray-type reptilian humanoid occupants were recovered from a 20-foot disk-shaped craft, that the crash was attributed internally to electromagnetic radar interference, and that the wreckage was subsequently moved to Muroc/Edwards AFB and later to Area 51 and the S-4 facility. None of this second layer is sourced to any primary record; it follows the same narrative template as the Roswell and Aztec crash-retrieval legends and should be read as unverified extrapolation from MJ-12-era mythology, not as documented fact. See the Full Report for the complete claim as it currently exists on this site.
Source: “Eisenhower Briefing Document” (MJ-12; disputed authenticity); regional secondary accounts
Date: December 11 or 18, 1950 (BBU 849)
Location: 10 miles NW of Gulkana, Alaska
Time: 10:13 p.m.
Summary: The crew of Northwest Airlines Flight 802, and possibly military personnel as well, saw two white flashes followed by a dark cloud that rose and split in two. Original sourcing gives both December 11 and December 18 as the date and is ambiguous about whether military witnesses were also present; preserved here as recorded rather than resolved.
Source: Berliner
Date: December 14, 1950
Location: Knoxville, Tennessee
Time: 4:05 p.m.
Summary: A group of targets blanketed the radar scopes in the area directly over the government Atomic Energy Commission projects at Oak Ridge; the targets could not be identified, and a fighter interception attempt met with negative results. The first of three December incidents continuing the ongoing Oak Ridge/Knoxville pattern. See the Full Report.
Source: Fran Ridge
Date: December 16, 1950
Location: Grand Haven, Michigan, Latitude 43-04 N, Longitude 86-14 W
Time: Midnight
Summary: Otto Herny, watching from shore about five miles from the object, saw a light in the black sky that looked like a large, curved harvest moon plunging toward the dark waters of Lake Michigan, throwing off light as it sped downward. It appeared briefly as a distant campfire on the water’s surface before the glow vanished.
Source: Loren Gross, UFOs: A History, 1950, Book #3, p. 67
Date: December 18, 1950 (BBU)
Location: Oak Ridge, Tennessee
Time: Visual sighting 8:20-8:30 a.m.; radar detection 8:39-8:45 a.m.
Summary: Seven officials of the NEPA Division, traveling in two cars, observed an unidentified flying object; fourteen minutes later a small radar “paint” appeared on the scopes of the 663rd AC&W Squadron at Knoxville Airport, near the southeast corner of the Oak Ridge Controlled Area, on a bearing of 190 degrees at roughly 60 mph and 2,500 feet altitude. A fighter interception attempt was made with negative results. See the Full Report.
Source: Blue Book files; McDonald list; FUFOR Index
Date: December 20, 1950 (BBU)
Location: Oak Ridge, Tennessee
Time: Unknown
Summary: The log of the 663rd Aircraft Control and Warning Squadron records a further unidentified radar track, followed by an F-82 intercept attempt. The final documented incident in the Oak Ridge/Knoxville pattern. See the Full Report.
Source: McDonald list; FUFOR Index
Date: December 27, 1950 (BBU)
Location: Lakehurst, New Jersey
Time: Unknown
Summary: No further detail on this sighting survives in the available source beyond its listing as a Blue Book Unknown case. Lakehurst was also the site of the well-documented Robert Haven aerial pursuit earlier the same year, on November 7 — see that standalone report for comparison, though no connection between the two cases is established.
Source: McDonald list; FUFOR Index
Date: December 27, 1950
Location: Bradford, Illinois
Time: Unknown
Summary: A Trans-World Airways pilot watched a light source perform violent and erratic maneuvers.
Source: McDonald list; FUFOR Index
Date: 1950-1953 (Korean War period; not specifically dated to December)
Location: Northeast China Sea
Time: Unknown
Summary: A UFO was photographed by a US Marine Air Group pilot over the Northeast China Sea during the Korean War. The object approached close to the aircraft before shooting off at over 1,000 mph. It had a very bright top, which reportedly “burned” into the film emulsion, and a bronze-colored base. This entry’s original placement on the December 1950 page reflects only that it was filed here in the source compilation — the case itself is dated only to the broad 1950-1953 Korean War period, not to December specifically.
Source: W. Gordon Allen
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
A Year Closes With Its Longest-Running Pattern Still Unresolved
December 1950’s defining thread is the close of the Oak Ridge/Knoxville pattern, now documented across a full three months from October through December, with the December 18 incident standing out as the flap’s cleanest example of an independent visual sighting followed by a geographically consistent radar detection. The month also preserves two very different kinds of “unresolved” case side by side: the USS Gardiners Bay near-miss off Korea, a vivid but thinly sourced single account, and the Del Rio, Texas/Mexico border case, where a real documented radar-and-impact claim has, over the decades, accreted an entirely unverified crash-retrieval narrative that this archive is careful to separate out rather than present as established fact. The nationwide December 6 military alert — a full hour of national emergency status followed by a documented Counter Intelligence Corps high-alert directive — closes out a year that began with the Kodiak, Alaska radar case in January and produced, across its twelve months, some of the best-documented military UFO encounters of the entire era.
“No aircraft could be sighted by radar or visually overhead although the ceiling was unlimited.”
— USS Gardiners Bay account, on the December 1950 Inchon channel near-miss
