Weird Western Maryland

  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 N...

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...