1950: July UFO|UAP & Entity Sightings Archive

A quieter month numerically, July 1950 nonetheless produced one of the contactee movement’s founding narratives: Daniel Fry’s claimed thirty-minute round trip to New York City aboard a craft piloted by an entity called A-lan, documented in full via the standalone report linked below. The month also brought a detailed occupant sighting at Steep Rock Lake, Ontario, a Navy radar-visual case in Arkansas, and a French sighting later admitted by its own promoters to have been a hoax.

Date: July 1950
Location: Cincinnati, Ohio
Time: Unknown
Summary: A CAA flight engineer observed a “wingless, fuselage-shaped” UFO. Source citation preserved as originally recorded (“V”) — likely an unresolved footnote reference from the original compilation rather than a full source name.
Source: “V” (unresolved citation)

Date: July 2, 1950
Location: Steep Rock Lake, Ontario, Canada
Time: Evening
Summary: After feeling a blast-like vibration, Mr. and Mrs. Gordon Edwards looked toward the lake and saw a large, shiny object on the water less than a quarter mile away, resembling “one saucer upside down on another” with round portholes around its edge. An open hatch on top revealed about ten “queer little figures,” each under four feet tall; a hoop-shaped antenna rotated slowly above them. The topmost figure wore a red skullcap, the others dark blue, all with a shiny metallic covering over the chest and no visible faces. Moving like automatons, they appeared to be drawing water through a bright green hose and discharging it through another. When the witnesses looked again, the figures were gone and the craft — about 48 feet wide and 15 feet thick — had risen to roughly 8 feet above the water; it tilted to 45 degrees and departed northward with a blast of wind.
Source: Gordon Edwards

Date: July 4, 1950
Location: White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico
Time: Evening, approximately 20:30
Summary: Technician Daniel Fry, walking in the desert after missing a bus to that evening’s fireworks, watched an oblate spheroid craft about 30 feet across settle to the ground 70 feet away. A voice warned him not to touch the still-hot hull, identified itself as “A-lan,” and explained he had been chosen for contact due to his scientific background. Fry was invited aboard and reported a roughly 8,000-mile round trip to New York City and back in about 30 minutes. A-lan identified himself as a descendant of the sunken continent of Lemuria. Fry reported further contacts with A-lan over subsequent years; he later revised the date of this first contact to 1949 in retellings. See the Full Report.
Source: Daniel Fry, The White Sands Incident

Date: July 7, 1950
Location: Wiesbaden, Germany
Time: 10:20 p.m. local
Summary: A GCA radar operator noticed an additional target alongside the aircraft under control; a second operator independently confirmed it. After several minutes, the target appeared to separate into two or three individual targets spaced 90 to 100 degrees apart, which then moved at very high speed in a counterclockwise motion on the scope.
Source: Dan Wilson

Date: July 11, 1950
Location: Near Osceola, Arkansas (BBU)
Time: Unknown
Summary: The crews of two Navy planes saw a disc-shaped object, its presence separately confirmed on airborne radar. Lt. (j.g.) J. W. Martin, enlisted pilot R. E. Moore, and electronics technician G. D. Wehner described the object as first appearing as a round ball ahead and to the left of their aircraft; as it crossed their flight path and receded to the right, it resembled “a World War I helmet seen from the side, or a shiny, shallow bowl turned upside down.” Wehner reported catching it on radar, with a closest-approach range estimated at about a mile.
Source: Weinstein, Dominique; Blue Book files

Date: July 13, 1950
Location: Fort Peck, Montana (BBU)
Time: 11:50 a.m.
Summary: A USAF weather reconnaissance flight crew saw four groups of round, metallic silver objects.
Source: Weinstein, Dominique

Date: July 13, 1950
Location: Huntsville, Alabama (BBU 758)
Time: 5:00 p.m.
Summary: Two Redstone Arsenal employees, including a Mr. Washburn, saw a polished aluminum object shaped like a bow tie flying straight and level; one triangular half rotated a quarter turn in the opposite direction before returning to its original position. The object then made a right-angle turn and accelerated away, over roughly 30 seconds.
Source: Berliner; FUFOR Index

Date: July 23, 1950
Location: Guyancourt Airport, France
Time: 23:00
Summary: This case was later admitted by its own promoters to have been a hoax and is preserved here for the record rather than as a genuine sighting. As originally told: walking in the dark near the airport, Claude Blondeau came upon two round craft “resembling two enormous folded napkins, one upside down on the other,” 15 feet in diameter and 6.5 feet high, with square portholes around the rim, hovering just above the ground. A normal-sized man in a flying suit reportedly emerged from each craft; Blondeau approached and asked if they were in trouble, receiving the hesitant French reply “Yes, but not for long.” He described seeing an armchair and a control console with a large oval wheel inside one craft, and was told the controls ran on “energy.” The men re-entered, the portholes became luminescent, and the craft tilted vertical and departed upward; the whole incident reportedly lasted two minutes.
Source: Fernande Palatan & Jimmy Guieu (admitted hoax, per referenced source page 655)

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

A Contactee Milestone Amid a Quieter Month

July 1950’s most historically significant entry is Daniel Fry’s claimed contact at White Sands Proving Ground — one of the earliest and most technically framed contactee narratives on record, now documented in full. The Steep Rock Lake, Ontario sighting stands out for its unusually detailed description of small, automaton-like occupants engaged in what appeared to be a mundane task (drawing water through a hose), a level of behavioral specificity uncommon among this era’s briefer reports. The month closes with a case — the Guyancourt Airport, France sighting — that its own original promoters later admitted was fabricated, preserved here transparently as a documented hoax rather than omitted from the record.

“Tonight I joined the ranks of the F.S.B. — Flying Saucer Believers.”

— Daniel Fry, on the night of July 4, 1950, White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico