Five cases from July 1951, spanning wildly different levels of documentation, from a verified military pilot's pursuit to an unsourced Cold War legend.
1951: July UFO|UAP & Entity Sightings Archive
July 1951 stands out for three cases now documented in full via standalone reports: the bizarre and unsettling Fred Reagan collision over Georgia, in which a downed pilot claimed to be pulled aboard a craft crewed by beings resembling metallic asparagus stalks; Lt. George Kinmon’s persistent aerial confrontation near Dearing, Georgia, in which his F-51 was repeatedly dive-bombed by a fast white disc; and the dramatic, though very thinly sourced, account of a Soviet fighter pilot near Murmansk, Russia allegedly firing on an armed UFO before a swift NKVD cover-up. The month also brought a striking entity contact in rural California and a night-vigil sighting at an Idaho Air Force base on the eve of Korean War deployment.
Date: July 1951 (exact date not recorded)
Location: Over Georgia
Time: Unknown
Summary: A lozenge-shaped object collided with a Piper Cub piloted by Fred Reagan; as the damaged plane began to fall, an unseen force pulled him upward and into the object instead. Inside were beings resembling metallic stalks of asparagus, about three feet tall, who communicated in apparently fluent English, apologized for the collision, then gave him a medical examination and claimed to have healed him of cancer. He was set down unconscious beside the wreckage of his plane without a scratch on him. In May 1952 the witness reportedly died of brain deterioration attributed to radiation exposure. See the Full Report.
Source: Gordon Creighton, Flying Saucer Review Vol. 15 #5
Date: July 1951 (exact date not recorded)
Location: Mountain Home AFB, near Boise, Idaho
Time: Shortly after dawn
Summary: Several military men in their barracks, including informant Walter De Young, were part of a detachment reactivating the base ahead of deployment to Korea. When a soldier ran in shouting that a UFO was hovering over the road, De Young initially assumed it was a joke and stayed in bed — until colleagues started a C-45 aircraft and he ran outside to see a disc-shaped craft, roughly 20-25 feet wide, hovering 400-500 feet up with lighted windows and figures visible inside. The aircraft took off and approached the object, which departed silently at very high speed. Witnesses reported watching as if in a hypnotic trance; a colonel reportedly suffered a nervous breakdown afterward. Following the incident, all the soldiers involved were dispersed to different bases worldwide and never saw one another again.
Source: Dispatch, Saint Paul, Minnesota, November 1, 1979; MUFON UFO Journal #279, July 1991
Date: July 1951 (exact date not recorded)
Location: Near Orange, France
Time: Late evening
Summary: Nineteen-year-old Pierre Monnet, traveling by moped, reached a crossroads and saw an extremely bright object hovering a few meters off the ground, with several figures visible moving within the light around it. Four very tall men with long blond hair emerged, wearing metallic light-combination suits with epaulets; one spoke in a loud, reassuring, apparently telepathic voice. Monnet stood roughly three meters from the group during the exchange but could not recall its duration or how the beings departed, though he felt he had been given a message to reveal gradually over time. They claimed to originate from a planet called “Vega,” part of a 14-planet star system with nine inhabited worlds, and said they maintained a base on one of Saturn’s rings.
Source: Guy Tarade, Ovni, Terre Planète Sous Contrôle
Date: July 1, 1951 (BBU)
Location: Seoul, South Korea
Time: 10:50 p.m. (or possibly 10:20 p.m.)
Summary: USMC pilots flying four F4U-5N fighters with the 1st Marine Air Wing saw several bright green spheres, possibly fireballs; ground radar confirmation of the sighting is uncertain in the surviving source.
Source: Project 1947; FUFOR Index
Date: July 3, 1951
Location: Near Ukiah, Calaveras County, California
Time: 03:00
Summary: A young witness at a Catholic school camp, who had cut his foot hiking earlier that day, woke startled to find himself lying on a cement serving area roughly six blocks from his cabin. A weird blue-green light he could perceive even with his eyes closed hovered about two telephone poles above him, slowly rising with a low buzzing sound. He saw a huge, city-block-wide black disk edged with silver, the bluish-green light at its center, which rose over him and departed rapidly. Despite his injured foot he walked back to camp and tried to report what he’d seen but was rebuked by counselors. His memory of the intervening period later returned: he recalled being confronted by a small, large-headed female entity with shiny black cat-like eyes and dull white skin, who communicated by telepathy and identified herself as “Nane,” the leader of a security force protecting her planet. He recalled being instantly transported to a gray, ash-colored world she identified as the moon, and being told of an ancient lunar civilization destroyed by a war that had left the moon’s visible craters, along with various claims about the nature of the universe, other UFOs and aliens, and a skeptical framing of religious belief. The being told him she had visited him three times before.
Source: NUFORC
Date: July 9, 1951 (BBU)
Location: Near Dearing, Georgia (25 miles west of Augusta)
Time: 1:40-1:50 p.m. EST
Summary: 1st Lt. George H. Kinmon, Jr., flying an F-51 fighter, saw a fast white oval disc approach head-on from the direction of the sun, then dive beneath his aircraft, narrowly missing it. The object made repeated head-on diving passes over several minutes before finally climbing away out of sight. Kinmon’s own accounts differ meaningfully on the object’s exact size and the encounter’s precise structure, a discrepancy preserved honestly in the full report rather than resolved. See the Full Report.
Source: Weinstein; NICAP; Loren Gross, UFOs: A History — 1951
Date: July 9, 1951 (BBU)
Location: Corona Experimental Radar Site, New Mexico
Time: 10:30 p.m.
Summary: USAF Sgt. Meadows, a security guard at the site, saw a red, glowing ball about the size of a full moon to the west, descending into the tree line over roughly 30 seconds with an afterglow lasting another 10 seconds. A crescent moon was setting in roughly the same direction and time frame, offering a plausible — though not certain — mundane explanation depending on local terrain height.
Source: McDonald files; Jan Aldrich; FUFOR Index
Date: July 14, 1951 (BBU)
Location: Holloman AFB, New Mexico
Time: Unknown
Summary: An unidentified object that sped near a B-29 bomber was tracked on radar, observed visually, and photographed.
Source: McDonald list; FUFOR Index
Date: July 16, 1951
Location: Near Murmansk, Russia
Time: Morning
Summary: According to an account with no verifiable primary sourcing, Soviet fighter pilot Capt. Peter Vusov, on coastal patrol near Murmansk, spotted a dark, unmarked, cannon-armed disc roughly 20 meters across, fired on it across two strafing runs with no visible effect, then was ordered mid-engagement to cease fire, hold radio silence, and return to base — where NKVD officers and a plainclothes official awaited him and his wingman. Both pilots were reportedly transferred to opposite ends of the Soviet Union that same day and promoted, apparently to buy their silence. This story circulates widely online but traces to no primary Soviet record or established ufological catalogue this archive has been able to locate. See the Full Report.
Source: Unattributed (vik.clan.su and subsequent informal online circulation)
Date: July 23, 1951 (date correction — see September 23, 1951)
Location: March Field, California
Time: Unknown
Summary: A radar-visual sighting of a silvery object circling high above an aircraft was recorded under this date in some compilations, but the original UFO Evidence (UFOE) source lists the date in error — the correct date is September 23, 1951, where this case’s full detail is documented instead.
Source: Cross-reference correction, per original compiler’s note
Date: July 24, 1951 (BBU 943)
Location: Portsmouth, New Hampshire
Time: Approximately 7:10 p.m.
Summary: Hanscom AFB Operations Officer Capt. Cobb and Cpl. Fein saw a grayish, tubular object roughly 100-200 feet long with many black spots and a 5:1 length-to-width ratio, fins at one end, flying at 800-1,000 mph at 1,000-2,000 feet altitude and leaving a faint trail.
Source: Berliner; Dan Wilson
Date: July 30, 1951 (BBU)
Location: Selfridge AFB, Michigan
Time: 7:14 a.m. EDT
Summary: An unidentified object was observed on the scopes of an AN/CPS-6B radar at the 752nd Aircraft Control and Warning Squadron at Empire, Michigan. The blip’s speed varied from 3,000 mph to 28,000 mph across an 18-minute observation.
Source: McDonald list; FUFOR Index; Dan Wilson
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Three Kinds of Strange, Three Different Standards of Evidence
July 1951 is a good month for illustrating how differently this archive treats cases of wildly varying evidentiary strength that nonetheless share equal narrative drama. Lt. George Kinmon’s F-51 pursuit rests on a named military pilot’s own two accounts — genuinely inconsistent with each other, but independently preserved in serious Blue Book-adjacent literature. The Vusov engagement near Murmansk describes an actual weapons engagement with a UFO, which would be extraordinary if true, but traces to no verifiable primary source at all. And the Fred Reagan collision sits somewhere stranger still — a single magazine account of an accidental abduction, an unlikely medical cure, and an unconfirmed death, that this archive can neither dismiss nor vouch for. All three are presented in full, with their evidentiary standing made explicit rather than left for the reader to guess at.
“No vapor trails or exhaust or visible system of propulsion… traveling tremendous speed.”
— 1st Lt. George H. Kinmon, Jr., on the July 9, 1951 encounter near Dearing, Georgia
