Green Fireball Discussed at Pentagon
In late 1949, as the Cold War got increasingly tense, the Pentagon became interested in accounts of "green fireballs" over the Los Alamos lab in New Mexico and other military installations in the West. While meteors in the night sky can flash green*, they aren't terribly common, and these green fireballs were becoming so common and spooking so many personnel that the Air Force asked Dr. Joseph Kaplan of UCLA to look into them. On 3 Nov. 1949, Kaplan reported his findings at a Pentagon meeting. Kaplan believed the green fireballs seen at Los Alamos represented a previously undetected type of "auroral display" -- though he conceded this explained neither "the rapid horizontal motion reported" nor "the occurrence of these phenomena at low magnetic altitudes" (qtd. in Gross 13). Needless to say, Kaplan's explanation "did not escape criticism," in the words of UFO historian Loren E. Gross (60). In the ensuing animated discussion, one...