Somewhere in the Skies - Bite-Sized UFOs | UFOs Over Cannon AFB

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Starting point is 00:00:30 Welcome to bite-sized UFOs, a show where we break down lesser-known UFO cases in 20 minutes or less. And now here's your host, Graham Rendell. In this installment, let's have a quick look at a case from January 1976. Six years after Project Blue Book, the third and longest running of the United States Air Force's public UFO investigation programs, was officially terminated. Blue Book had been recommended for the chop in October 1969 with the first. so-called Bollander memo stating that the Air Force agreed with the conclusions of the University of Colorado scientific study of UFOs published the previous year that nothing in the 21-year study of the phenomenon had added to scientific knowledge. This echoed the conclusions of the January 1953 Robertson

Starting point is 00:01:23 panel, which stated that there was no apparent threat to US national security, but was there. Blue Book seemed to be out of the loop for anything that might have fell into a national security as confirmed by the Bolander memo. According to point four in the October 1969 memo, the following was stated. Reports of unidentified flying objects which could affect national security are made in accordance with JNAP 146 or Air Force Manual 55-11 and are not part of the Blue Book system. This apparently justified the need to disband Blue Book, as were already procedures that allowed for official reporting of UFOs over censored facilities, which presumably included military bases. Although the public announcement of its demise indicated that Blue Book

Starting point is 00:02:12 was terminated on 17 December 1969, in fact, the program finally ceased operations on 30th January 1970. Nine days before Project Blue Book's actual termination date, a strange event occurred at Cannon Air Force Base in New Mexico. Cannon is located about 75 miles northeast of Roswell, close to the city of Clovis. On 21 January 1976, the National Military Command Center received details of a UFO sighting at the base. It read as follows. Two UFOs are reported near the flight line at Cannon Air Force Base, New Mexico. Security Police observing them reported the UFOs to be 25 yards in diameter, gold or silver in color, with blue light on top, hole in the middle and red light on bottom. Air Force is checking with radar, additionally checking weather inversion data. It seemed as though the Air Force wanted to make sure that

Starting point is 00:03:10 radar angels or false signals weren't to blame, but surely the base police personnel wouldn't see a anomalous propagation that affected a radar system. However, the security police at Cannon weren't the only witnesses to see strange objects in the vicinity of the base at around that time. Radio station KMTY FM 99.1 had only just gone on the air at Clovis a fortnight before the Cannon Air Force Base incident. During the evening of the 21st, a young man known only as Bruce was parked up on his truck next to the station's transmitter on the outskirts of Clovis, not far from the base. Bruce occasionally worked for KMTY FM as an engineer. That evening he was at the transmitter at the behest of engineers back in the studio. who were running tests.

Starting point is 00:03:59 In the dark, he could easily make out the lights of Cannon Air Force Base to the southwest. Bruce watched an amazement as three strange lights appeared in the sky, which he described as looking like a string of lights. Two of them suddenly dropped down towards the ground but halted just before what seemed like an inevitable impact. The remaining light remained above. The witness also earned money as a storm spotter, so had a pair of binoculars in his truck, which he quickly grabbed in order to observe the two lights more closely.

Starting point is 00:04:30 They were saucers shaped, with a blue glow around them, although they also projected a radiant red glow downwards from their undersides. After watching the lights at several minutes, Bruce saw them move away in perfect formation. They flew over a part of Clovis, and the witness observed that the street lights and building lights below the strange phenomena seemed to dim momentarily as they passed overhead. The two lights disappeared from view after about three. 15 minutes. Bruce drove to the nearest pay phone and called the station, telling staff there what he had seen.

Starting point is 00:05:02 He was then informed that numerous calls had come in, all reporting the strange lights. Bruce wanted to see if the lights would return the following evening, and he decided to go out again, this time accompanied by several staff from the KMT FM Newsdesk, who were eager for a story. The young man also brought his camera on this occasion. This time, however, he chose the roof of a dormitory block within the Clover's college campus where he lived, securing access to it by obtaining a set of keys from one of his acquaintances there. At 0-100 hours on the morning of the 23rd, four lights appeared over Clovis. Bruce managed to take a photograph of them, and suddenly, from the direction of the airbase,

Starting point is 00:05:45 there was a roar of jet taking off. Bruce noticed several F11D scrambling from the main runaway at Cannon. The Ard-Varx would have belonged to the 27th tactical fighter wing, which was based at the airfield. In a matter of minutes, their emission appeared clear, interception of the strange lights. However, as soon as one of the Varks neared its target, the light shot away to a different part of the sky in incredible speed, often performing right-angle turns in the process, and leaving what seemed to be a trail of glowing plasma in its wake. Bruce and his colleagues had a totally unrestricted view of the futile efforts by their Air Force pilots to intercept the four lights. 45 minutes later, and no further forward in their objective, the pilots watched as the light shot

Starting point is 00:06:30 upwards, in unison, and then disappeared, leaving them with no option but to return to base. One of the news desk staff had brought a spotting scope with him and watched as the lights dived over the air base on occasions. When this happened, he saw the lights across the base itself dim momentarily, just as happened across Clovis when Bruce had watched the three lights the previous night. Bruce himself subsequently managed to speak to some of his many contacts at Cannon and was informed that the base had suffered in power failure at the same time. He was also told that a new brighter light installation was being installed there, possibly as a result of the incident,

Starting point is 00:07:08 and that radar confirmation of the strange activity had been recorded. Apparently, the freedom of information request led to confirmation from the Air Force that F11's had indeed been scrambled from Canon in the early hours of 23rd January, 1976, although the reason was not given. I've not seen a copy of this confirmation, so it cannot verify whether it exists or not. Bruce kept quiet about his sightings for decades afterwards, only coming forward in July 2004, when he was interviewed about them on the Jeff Rentz radio show.

Starting point is 00:07:42 He also decided to release copies of the photographs that he had taken on the second night of the sightings. his radio show appearance, events took a weird turn. Bruce took a call on his private cell phone at 0.1.30 hours four days later. The number was only known to a few people beyond his immediate family, so he thought that one of his grown-up children needed help. However, the voice on the other end of the line was a stranger, one who had a strong interest in the photographs that Bruce had taken. The mystery voice said he wanted to meet him, but when Bruce asked if the call was simply a joke, The man replied, It would be in your best interest to discontinue this line of discussion and do away with those photographs.

Starting point is 00:08:26 Destroy them. Bruce checked the call display, but the number wasn't available. The man continued, This is no joke. We feel that this would be in your best interest and for the sake of your family that this all go away. Unnerved but tried to keep calm. Bruce asked the caller's name. The stranger instead replied with a breakdown of his wife and children's daily routines.

Starting point is 00:08:47 offering to fax him a copy if he wished. To this, Bruce ended the call abruptly. Things that went quiet for a few weeks, until a neighbour told him that he'd seen strange cars pulling up outside Bruce's home, the occupants seemingly content just to sit there. On a few occasions, men had got out of their vehicles and then proceeded to snoop around his property.

Starting point is 00:09:08 According to the neighbour, the cars wore US government licence plates. Was a UFO witness being monitored after being told to keep quiet about what he'd seen in photographs? If so, it wouldn't be the first time. Bruce relayed the details of the odd phone call to researcher Brian Vyke, and eventually agreed to mail him copies of the photographs. According to Vike, the photographs never arrived the first time Bruce Sendy sent them out.

Starting point is 00:09:33 Were the same strange watchers intercepting his mail, or had they simply been lost in the post, or did he never post them in the first place? Vike and a few other selected recipients did eventually receive something in the mail, but it was a black and white photocopy and did not show much beyond a white blurry object, possibly a light source moving quickly as a result of the camera motion or the limitations of the film used. It's not clear what this shows. An article about Bruce's sightings and the strange phone call, but without the photograph itself, was published in the Eastern New Mexico News in June 2006.

Starting point is 00:10:11 Sometime afterwards, Vike apparently retired from the UFO scene due to ill health. Another witness identified only as Pat was interviewed in July 23 about the scrambling of the F11 Ds back in 1976. An avionic system specialist, he was working with colleagues at Cannon on the night in question and saw two F11s taking off in what he described as an emergency combat formation. With no aircraft scheduled to be airborne that night, Pat had little to fix and didn't want a jet coming back with a bent system that he'd have to spend hours of repairing. Wondering what was going on, he recalled a conversation with a non-commissioned officer that led to the latter phoning base operations to see what was happening.

Starting point is 00:10:57 Back came confirmation that it was a scramble and apparently it was a hot one, which meant the aircraft were carrying live weapons. F11Ds could certainly carry AM9 sidewinders on external pylons for self-defense purposes. The NCO next contacted a friend of his who was a radar controller at Cannon and learned that ground air search radar at the base was picking up intermittent traces of strange contacts ones that were apparently traveling at around 4,000 miles per hour at times. The controllers had checked their equipment but could find nothing wrong with it. This suggested that the contacts represented real objects over the vicinity of the base, so the Varks were scrambled. When the F11s finally returned, nothing needed fixing, so Pat was able to go off duty to the

Starting point is 00:11:43 signed time. He spent some time in the airman's club and then decided to contact the radar shack himself, curious to know if anything else had occurred. He used a pay phone on the base. A captain he had never heard of before took the call and apparently did not use the standard Air Force method of answering. When Pat told him the reason for contacting the radar shack, the officer became very angry and demanded to know his identity and the name of his commanding officer. After finding out, the Captain told him that he'd seen nothing and that no jets were scrambled. He was to forget about the whole thing. According to Pat, the officer told them that he'd be watched closely.

Starting point is 00:12:22 If he'd breathed a word of it to anyone, he'd end up in a maximum security prison. But there was also a different threat. It's a big desert, he said. People go missing all the time. For the next day or so, Pat felt like he was continually looking over his shoulder to see if he was indeed being watched or followed. Given the officer's odd manner on the telephone, and his suspicion that the captain wasn't even part of the Air Force due to some of the phrases and terms he used, Pat eventually decided to try and look him up. He checked with base security, but was informed that no officer with that name was stationed at cannon. An attempt to check where the sergeant's buddy at the radar room failed as the friend had already been posted to a different location after the UFO incident had taken place.

Starting point is 00:13:07 A few days later, a directive came down from the base commander, reminding personnel not to inform civilians of any information regarding UFOs. A few nights later, whilst driving to the base from Clovis, Pat was witnessed to two mysterious objects hovering over the airfield. They did not look like helicopters as they had multicolored lights which appear to be rotating. The speed of the rotation wasn't constant, as the objects moved, the rotation speeded up. He eventually caught sight of a dish-shaped silhouette behind one side, set of lights and then saw what appeared to be a transformer on top of a power cable pole blow up as the object passed by.

Starting point is 00:13:45 Once reaching the base, Pat discussed his sighting with a colleague and was told that one of the objects had hovered over the nuclear weapons storage area. Unfortunately, Pat was rather vague about the exact dates involved at Canon and couldn't even confirm it all had occurred in January 1976. Mysterious lights, nuclear weapons, witness intimidation, just another chapter in the rich history of UFO sightings over the decades. Remember, bite-sized UFOs is all about the facts. This has been bite-sized UFOs with your host, Graham Rendell. Be sure to rate and review wherever you get your podcasts. For a full video version of this episode, subscribe to the bite-sized UFO's YouTube channel.

Starting point is 00:14:31 Thank you for listening.

Somewhere in the Skies - Bite-Sized UFOs | UFOs Over Cannon AFB

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