Mid- to Late-1948: Key Developments
. . . Two weeks later, on October 16, came a remarkable UFO sighting in Cache, Japan. This was an encounter of an F-61 Black Widow aircraft with an indeterminate number of UFOs, most likely between two and six. While on night patrol, the pilot and his crew picked up an object on radar at about 200 mph. As he closed to intercept, the object speeded up to 1,200 mph, then slowed down again. Six times the crew tried to close on the UFO; each time the object accelerated out of reach. On one pass the crew saw the object's silhouette, which looked "like a rifle bullet" 20 to 30 feet long. Intelligence reports indicated that at least one of the objects might have carried radar warning equipment, because it "seemed cognizant of the whereabouts of the F-61 at all times." The sighting certainly impressed itself upon the pilot, who stated that "in my opinion, we were shown a new type of aircraft by some agency unknown to us."
The U.S. military continued to track strange objects, both visually and on radar. Another radar sighting occurred at Goose Bay, Labrador on November 1, during which an object was tracked at 600 mph. On November 6 in Japan, two UFOs were tracked on radar, maneuvering like planes in a dogfight. Then during the night of November 18 occurred a strange chase by a U.S. Air Force Reserve pilot of an oval-shaped UFO that appeared as something like a ball of light (reminiscent of the Gorman case). The chase occurred close to Andrews AFB in Maryland, near Washington, D.C., and apparently involved dogfight maneuvers, rapid acceleration, and evasive action. Also like the Gorman case, the unidentified object was visible to personnel on flight line, who noticed it making rapid changes in altitude and speed (from 75 to 600 mph). The pilot was able to flash his landing lights on the object, at which time it glowed white and sped away at over 600 mph.
Soon after this event occurred a USAF sighting in West Germany that constituted the first documented simultaneous visual and radar (in this case both ground and air) sighting of an unidentified flying object. On November 23, 1948, ground radar at the Fursten-Felbruck AFB near Munich detected an object circling rapidly at 27,000 feet. An F-80 pilot sent to intercept found the object and described it as bright red. While moving to intercept, the object abruptly climbed to 50,000 feet – at 900 mph, this was far beyond the capability of any known aircraft. A second F-80 pilot verified the report. According to the Air Force Intelligence officers investigating the encounter, the object was not a balloon, and there were no reported aircraft in the area. The object, in fact, was "nothing we know of." To the investigator, there remained a slim possibility that the object was some kind of experimental aircraft, except for the problem that such craft were "not in Germany, can [not] climb 23,000 feet in a matter of minutes, [nor] travel 900 miles per hour." The sighting was never officially solved. . . .