Five cases from March 1951, headlined by the Chorwon, Korea battlefield encounter and the Drakensteen Mountain contact in South Africa.
1951: March UFO|UAP & Entity Sightings Archive
March 1951 opens with a Korean War battlefield encounter near Chorwon and closes with a Venus sighting that Presque Isle’s weather observer and two control towers all watched change color. In between, this March 1951 UFO sightings archive follows a B-29 crew’s brilliant flash over the Yellow Sea, an Air Force lieutenant’s twin-tailed cylinder over Sacramento, a flock of swirling white bodies over Holloman, and a cigar-shaped object that about 25 Delhi Flying Club members watched loop over their airfield. The month also holds a Pine Bluff, Arkansas driver’s close encounter, set down decades later, and a Drakensteen mountain contact told for the first time 26 years afterward.
Date: Spring 1951 (May, per later accounts)
Location: The Iron Triangle, near Chorwon, Korea
Time: Night
Summary: PFC Francis P. Wall’s infantry unit, sheltering on a mountainside above a village under artillery bombardment, watched an orange, glowing object repeatedly fly through exploding airbursts unharmed. When it approached and pulsed a brilliant blue-green light, Wall fired on it with an M-1 rifle and reported hearing the round strike metal; the object then flickered erratically and swept the position with a pulsing beam that caused a burning, tingling sensation among the men before departing abruptly. Three days later, the entire company was evacuated by ambulance with dysentery and an unexplained elevated white blood cell count. Researcher Richard F. Haines later interviewed Wall and commented on the symptoms. See the Full Report.
Source: Francis P. Wall, interviewed by John Timmerman, CUFOS, 1987; Richard F. Haines; NICAP
Source Status: Rests on Wall’s own account. He said he discussed it with about 25 other men, but none has come forward, and the company reportedly agreed not to file a report. The illness among the regiment is the corroborated part; the cause is not established.
Date: Spring 1951
Location: East Port Macquarie, New South Wales, Australia
Time: 22:00
Summary: The main witness and two friends were walking up a steep hillside when his two companions suddenly turned and ran back down. The witness then saw a six-foot-tall, human-shaped figure floating just above the ground ahead of him, smoky gray in color and wearing a robe, with no visible facial features. He eventually fled the scene as well.
Source: Mark Moravec, Psiufo Phenomena
Source Status: Catalogue entry from a single researcher; the season is as given in the source and no month or day survives.
Date: Spring 1951
Location: Near Paarl, Cape Town, South Africa
Time: 23:15
Summary: A British instrumentation engineer identified only as “H.M.” was flagged down on the Drakensteen mountain road by a young man asking for water. Following him instead to a shadowed hollow, H.M. found a landed, lens-shaped craft roughly 35-50 feet across, was invited aboard, and shown a circular bench, a bank of hand levers, and an instrument console. Four other short, calmly dressed occupants were present, one recovering from a burn injury; his host explained the craft used no engines, instead “nullifying gravity” via a fluid circulated through a tube at near-light speed. After 15-20 minutes of conversation, H.M. was asked to leave. He did not tell the story publicly for 26 years. See the Full Report.
Source: Juan José Benítez, Flying Saucer Review Vol. 24 #2
Source Status: Single anonymized witness, first told 26 years after the event; no corroboration.
Date: Spring 1951
Location: Brugine, Italy
Time: Night
Summary: A woman reported seeing a low-flying, cigar-shaped object that suddenly emitted a bright flash of light. She lost consciousness and experienced a period of missing time, briefly recalling seeing a human-like figure in a silvery coverall aboard the object. No other information survives.
Source: CUN
Source Status: Brief catalogue entry with no named witness or contemporary record.
Date: March 1951
Location: Santiago de Compostela, La Coruña, Spain
Time: 22:00
Summary: Alerted by their barking dog, sisters B. Bahamonde and E. Bahamonde looked out the window to see a two-meter-tall, bronze-colored, fluorescent figure standing motionless in the garden. At one point their dog approached the figure and appeared to be calmed by some unknown influence. The figure soon vanished; poltergeist-like phenomena were reported in the household afterward.
Source: Denys Breysse, Project Bécassine
Date: March 1951 (day not recorded)
Location: Union Bridge, Pine Bluff, Arkansas
Time: About 10:30 p.m.
Summary: Clifford W. Bowman, 48, driving north at about 45 mph with a passenger, saw an object with different-colored lights that cut his car lights and then his engine as it closed to about 40 feet and landed east of the road. He stopped at the end of the bridge and got out; he reported seeing “something” run around the craft, get in, and leave very fast. He described it as about 30 feet long and 7.5 feet high, round, and sounding like an electric motor. The encounter lasted ten minutes or less. See the Detailed Report.
Source: Bowman’s handwritten Air Force UFO questionnaire; Project Blue Book files
Source Status: Written decades after the event on a later edition of the Air Force form; Bowman says he did not report it in 1951 because he feared ridicule. The passenger’s name is redacted in the released file.
Date: March 1951 (exact date unknown)
Location: Off Cape May, New Jersey
Time: 23:30
Summary: An unattributed account describes a Navy destroyer on Korean War-era coastal watch radar-tracking an object approaching at 85-90 knots and 3,000-4,000 feet, which stopped and hovered roughly 30 miles out. As the ship closed to within 15 miles, the object accelerated away at an estimated 5,000 km/h, then turned into a vertical climb south of Nantucket Island that altitude-determining radar tracked to 100 miles above the earth, still ascending. A report was said to have reached the Pentagon. See the Full Report.
Source: Unattributed
Source Status: No witness name, ship name or document has been identified; the account rests on unattributed secondary material and carries the least evidential weight of the month’s three largest cases.
Date: March 6, 1951
Location: Near Tafoya, northeastern New Mexico (seen by Los Alamos and Kirtland AFB personnel)
Time: 2:34 p.m. MST (2134Z)
Summary: Four Los Alamos personnel saw a very bright object cross the sky, and two Kirtland AFB pilots reported it as a meteor. Dr. Lincoln LaPaz of the University of New Mexico’s Institute of Meteoritics judged it a detonating fireball of exceptional magnitude, seen in bright sunlight from 10 miles away. Sighting data placed the probable fall area, about 3 by 6 miles, near Tafoya, but searches found no fragments. LaPaz told the Air Force that he was “chiefly influenced by the possibility that the fireballs in question may not be meteoritic in nature.”
Source: Project Blue Book record card; 17th District OSI spot intelligence report of March 21, 1951; Project Twinkle Final Report
Source Status: Blue Book evaluation: Was Astronomical (meteor). Included as a documented, explained case; no meteorite was ever recovered.
Date: March 9, 1951
Location: About 20 miles southeast of Tsushima Island, Japan
Time: 2:25 p.m.
Summary: Per Air Intelligence Information Report IR-29-52, a high-speed air target was tracked by a Mariner SA4 aircraft, initially bearing 320 degrees true; over roughly 60 seconds the target covered 55 miles, for a calculated speed of approximately 3,350 mph.
Source: Dan Wilson; Jan Aldrich
Source Status: No Blue Book card for this case was in the files reviewed, and it is not among the March cases on Berliner’s list of Blue Book unknowns.
Date: March 10, 1951
Location: About 42 miles southwest of Chinnampo, Korea
Time: 9:51 a.m. local (0051Z)
Summary: The crew of a USAF B-29 at about 16,800 feet saw a brilliant flash that began as a reddish-yellow glow and ended in a bluish-white burst, like a heavy flak burst but unlike any flak they had seen. A scanner judged it about the size of a basketball. It moved in a straight line toward the aircraft, whereas projectiles fired at the aircraft appeared to curve. Neither sound nor concussion was felt, and all agreed the sighting lasted about one second.
Source: BBU; Berliner; Project Blue Book record card; Air Force intelligence cable
Source Status: Blue Book evaluation: Other (Unidentified); the card comment lists flak, flare or meteor as possibilities but says the data are insufficient to evaluate the object as any of them.
Date: March 11, 1951
Location: Biggs AFB, El Paso, Texas
Time: 12:00 noon MST
Summary: A Military Air Transport Service crew at high altitude reported a white, half-moon-shaped object about the size of a quarter, moving from south to west. The report came in by Air Force wire.
Source: Project Blue Book record card
Source Status: Blue Book evaluation: Was Astronomical (Venus). The card notes no case file survives. Included as a documented, explained case; the altitude figure on the card is illegible.
Date: March 12, 1951
Location: Albuquerque, New Mexico
Time: Unknown
Summary: Two individuals reported a ball-shaped object of shining white appearance that descended rapidly to the horizon.
Source: Project Twinkle Final Report (Elterman, November 27, 1951)
Source Status: Listed in the Twinkle log as Insufficient Data; no further information survives.
Date: March 13, 1951
Location: McClellan AFB, Sacramento, California
Time: 3:20 p.m. PST
Summary: USAF 1st Lt. B. J. Hastie, stopping his car beside the base to look, and a woman passenger saw a white, cylindrical object with twin tails, about 200 feet in diameter and 90 feet deep, hovering about 2,000 feet up and seven miles away. After about two minutes it turned north and shrank to a speck in under a minute at incredible speed, without sound or trail. The day was clear and cloudless, and no other aircraft or witnesses were found. See the Detailed Report.
Source: BBU; Berliner; Project Blue Book record card; Sacramento Air Materiel Area report of March 19, 1951
Source Status: Blue Book evaluation: Other (Unidentified). The witnesses’ names are redacted in the released file and are given here as Berliner lists them.
Date: March 14, 1951
Location: East of Holloman AFB, Alamogordo, New Mexico
Time: About 3:00 p.m. MST
Summary: Several Bell Aircraft personnel awaiting the return of B-50 No. 6002 from a captive-flight mission saw 14 to 20 small white bodies swirling like a flock of geese or a handful of leaflets in an updraft, which twice grouped into a V-formation and moved north for about 15 minutes. The Bell field test director wrote that the phenomenon “was different from anything he has ever seen up to and including flights of birds” and that it could not have been Skyhook balloons. See the Detailed Report.
Source: Bell Aircraft memorandum to Holloman Operations of March 15, 1951; Project Twinkle Final Report
Source Status: No Blue Book evaluation is shown; the observers’ names are redacted.
Date: March 15, 1951
Location: New Delhi, India
Time: 10:20 a.m. local (0450Z)
Summary: About 25 members of the Delhi Flying Club on a taxi strip, including the chief engineer, watched a cigar-shaped object about 100 feet long, first appearing as a whitish cloud, pass over the field at 4,000 to 5,000 feet, loop and leave to the south in about 7.5 minutes. Its white exhaust turned black when its speed increased, and its top speed was estimated at about 2,000 mph. There was no sound. See the Detailed Report.
Source: BBU; Berliner; FUFOR Index; Project Blue Book record card; Air Intelligence Information Report from the U.S. Air Attache, New Delhi
Source Status: Blue Book evaluation: Other (Unidentified), with a card comment that the principal witness was prone to exaggerate. Berliner gives a top speed of about 1,000 mph; the card says 2,000 mph.
Date: March 24, 1951
Location: Holloman AFB, Alamogordo, New Mexico
Time: 5:55-6:00 a.m. MST
Summary: Project TWINKLE personnel photographed, with a Leica 3c 50mm camera, an unidentified elliptical object measuring 8.31 by 6.343 arcminutes (0.1385° by 0.1057°) across its major and minor axes.
Source: Sparks; Project Blue Book record card
Source Status: Blue Book evaluation: Other (Insufficient Data). The card says the photograph was taken by a tracking camera during meteor studies and triangulation attempts, and that duration, direction and other data are missing.
Date: March 25, 1951
Location: Presque Isle, Maine
Time: 8:17 p.m. EST (0117Z on March 26)
Summary: A weather observer at Presque Isle AFB saw a spherical light about 15 degrees above the horizon at azimuth 290 degrees that changed from yellowish white to brilliant red about every six seconds as it settled for more than ten minutes. The control tower operator saw it too, and the Limestone AFB tower confirmed it.
Source: Project Blue Book record card; 23rd Fighter-Interceptor Wing report
Source Status: Blue Book evaluation: Was Astronomical (Venus, at or just below the horizon, with refraction). Included as a documented, explained case.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Three Unknowns, Three Explained Cases, and Three Stories Told Later
March 1951 divides cleanly by documentation. Three cases carry a Blue Book Unidentified evaluation: the Chinnampo flash, the McClellan cylinder and the New Delhi cigar, and Berliner’s list of Blue Book unknowns for the month names exactly those three. Three more are explained (the Tafoya fireball and the Biggs and Presque Isle Venus reports), and two carry Insufficient Data (the Holloman Twinkle photograph and an Albuquerque ball of light on March 12).
The month’s three largest narrative cases rest on far thinner ground. The Chorwon account rests on one soldier’s recollection, with illness among his regiment as the corroborated element; the Drakensteen contact comes from one anonymized engineer; and the Cape May destroyer report has no named source at all. Pine Bluff is a first-person account written decades later. Among the military and civilian cases, the Bell Aircraft memorandum on the March 14 Holloman objects stands out for its detail, and the McClellan and New Delhi files each hold multiple witnesses and a signed intelligence report.
“…the aerial phenomenon was different from anything he has ever seen up to and including flights of birds.”
— Bell Aircraft field test director, in a memorandum to Holloman AFB Operations on the March 14, 1951 sighting
