Truck-Sized UFOs Spook Backup War Room

 

In late July 1976, U.S. Army soldiers stationed in the mountainous heart of Western Maryland -- now-defunct Fort Ritchie, near Cascade in Washington County -- looked overhead and saw some very strange things in the night sky.

Moreover, those objects triggered some urgent, high-level Pentagon communications.

We know all this from a memo signed by a brigadier general in the predawn hours of July 30, on the letterhead of the National Military Command Center in Washington. The text follows.

30 July 1976

0545 EDT

MEMORANDUM FOR RECORD

Subject: Reports of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs)

1.      At approximately 0345 EDT, the ANMCC called to indicate they had received several reports of UFO’s in the vicinity of Fort Ritchie. The following events summarize the reports (times are approximate).

a.       0130 – Civilians reported a UFO sighting near Mt. Airy, Md. This information was obtained via a call from the National Aeronautics Board (?)* to the Fort Ritchie Military Police.

b.      0255 – Two separate patrols from Site R reported sighting 3 oblong objects with a reddish tint, moving east to west. Personnel were located at separate locations on top of the mountain at Site R.

c.       0300 – Desk Sgt at Site R went to the top of the Site R mountain and observed a UFO over the ammo storage area at 100-200 yards altitude.

d.      0345 – An Army Police Sgt on the way to work at Site R reported sighting a UFO in the vicinity of Site R.

2.      ANMCC was requested to have each individual write a statement on the sightings. One individual stated the object was about the size of a 2 ½ ton truck.

3. Based on a JCS memorandum, subject: Temperature Inversion Analysis, dated 13 November 1975, the NMCC contacted the Air Force Global Weather Central. The Duty Officer, LTS OVERBY, reported that the Dulles International Airport observations showed two temperature inversions existed at the time of the alleged sightings. The first extended from the surface to 1,000 feet absolute and the second existed between 27,000 and 30,000 feet, absolute. He also said the atmosphere between 12,000 and 20,000 feet was heavily saturated with moisture. A hard copy message will follow.

L.J. LEBLANC, Jr.

Brigadier General, USMC

Deputy Director for

Operations, NMCC

In other words, nothing to see here, folks: just a routine weather pattern that keeps fog and smoke low to the ground, as reported by the airport 65 miles to the south.

Never mind that this supposed weather phenomenon was moving east to west, the opposite direction from most Maryland weather.

Never mind, too, that a soldier said the object he saw was “the size of a 2 ½ ton truck.” This was no random metaphor. Everyone in uniform was intimately acquainted, by 1976, with the ubiquitous 2½-ton “workhorse of the U.S. Army,” which had hauled everything that needed hauling, domestically and internationally, across all terrain, during World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War.

That soldier, trying to describe what he saw overhead that night, reached for the biggest, heaviest, most commonplace giant hunk of metal he could think of. He was not describing a cloud, or a wisp of fog. 

Never mind, finally, the urgency reflected in the memo. The ANMCC in the first line – the office that alerted the National Military Command Center in the first place – was the Alternate National Military Command Center. This was (and is) the top-secret “underground Pentagon” beneath Raven Rock Mountain in Franklin County, Pennsylvania, that lay (and lies) in wait for the day when Washington, D.C., and environs are taken out by nuclear attack, so that we all can rest easy about that.

Raven Rock and Fort Ritchie were only about 3 miles apart, on opposite sides of the state line,** and were in many ways the same big operation. Certainly, they were bureaucratic intimates.

This suggests that the brass at Raven Rock were not so worried about Fort Ritchie’s ammo dump. They saw a threat to the Pentagon’s backup War Room – a threat sufficient to warrant a call to Washington.

And you don’t need a top-secret clearance to figure that Raven Rock was probably not in the habit of doing that every time a mere temperature inversion passed overhead.

Very interestingly, “Site R,” a phrase that shows up repeatedly in the memo, was (and is) a common synonym for Raven Rock.*** While the MPs from Fort Ritchie may have initiated and led the response, the actual incursions – if any – may have been over Raven Rock territory.

This intriguing memo is labeled, equally intriguingly, “Memorandum for Record” – which could mean, “This is what we’ll hand people as the official record, should we ever be asked about this.” But the memo also promises a forthcoming “hard copy message.”

One wonders what details were included in that. Perhaps it contained those full individual written statements … or perhaps those have remained in Raven Rock’s sole possession, to this day.

*This oddly endearing question mark (?) is in the original, probably because there was (and is) no National Aeronautics Board. Whoever first called Fort Ritchie that night may not have been quite coherent.

**Raven Rock also is only about 16 miles from President Eisenhower’s farmhouse in Gettysburg. This was not a coincidence, at the time the complex was designed and built.

***Plan R is the Pentagon’s last-ditch nuclear-apocalypse scenario in the 1964 Stanley Kubrick movie Dr. Strangelove. That Site R is the Pentagon’s last-ditch nuclear-apocalypse scenario may be a coincidence.

Sources:

“2½ ton 6x6 truck.” Wikipedia. Accessed 31 Oct. 2021.

Eberhart, George M. UFOs and Intelligence: A Timeline. 15 Oct. 2020. 691 pp. Downloaded 28 Oct. 2021 from pdfcoffee.com. See Page 461.

Le Blanc, Brig. Gen. L.J. Jr., USMC. “Memorandum for Record. Subject: Reports of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs).” 30 July 1976. Accessed 31 Oct. 2021 from the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP): https://www.nicap.org/760730ftritchiedocs.htm