WALESVILLE

Opening

At 11:27 a.m. Eastern Standard Time on 2 July 1954, an empty Air Force F-94C Starfire came down on the crossroads hamlet of Walesville, New York, about eleven miles southwest of Utica. Its crew had ejected four miles back after a fire warning. The jet struck a house, killing a woman preparing lunch, then hit a car at the intersection and killed all three people inside. Both airmen landed unhurt.

The crash happened during an intercept. Ground control had diverted the jet from a training flight to check unidentified aircraft near Griffiss Air Force Base in Rome. That fact, a heat surge in the cockpit and an accident report kept confidential for decades turned Walesville into a staple of UFO books. This report sets the later story beside the record that is now public.

Timeline

2 July 1954, 11:05 a.m. ESTF-94C serial 51-13559 takes off from Griffiss on an operational training mission. The pilot is Lt. William E. Atkins, 24, of Dutton, Virginia; the radar observer is Lt. Henry F. Coudon, 26, of Perryville, Maryland, spelled Condon in some sources.

A few miles outAccording to the official "Summary of Circumstances," the Griffiss tower diverts the crew to an active air defense mission, with a vector of 60 degrees and 10,000 feet, to intercept an unidentified aircraft. The pilot has trouble finding it.

Same flightThe controller points the crew to a second unknown in the area. Atkins identifies it as an Air Force C-47, tail number 6099. The summary notes that neither the F-94 pilot nor the C-47 pilot saw any sign of trouble with the jet at this point.

Same flightThe controller gives a heading of 240 degrees back toward the first unknown. The F-94 is at 8,000 feet, above broken cloud, and Atkins starts down below it. The summary adds that "it was evident that the unidentified aircraft was going to Griffiss Air Force Base." No published version of the record names that aircraft.

During the descentIn the words of the summary, "there was intense heat in the cockpit and the engine plenum chamber fire warning light came on." Atkins throttles to idle, then shuts the engine down. The light stays on. Citing "critical low altitude and the fire warning," both men eject and are recovered without injury.

11:27 a.m. ESTThe jet travels about four miles on a heading of 199 degrees and crashes into the Walesville intersection. It strikes a dwelling, killing Mrs. Doris Monroe, 28, and injuring her daughter, then hits a car, killing Stanley Phillips, 38, his wife Florence, 32, and their son Gary, 11, all of nearby Hecla. Press reports count five other people injured, two seriously.

Evening of 2 JulySeparately, a silvery, balloon-like object drifts over the Utica area and is reported across a twenty-five mile radius. The commandant of the Air Force depot at Rome judges it a partially deflated plastic balloon. The Condon Report later dates the first balloon reports to 1 July.

17 August 1954The Air Force accident board completes its report. It finds no evidence of an in-flight fire and names a malfunction of the fire detector circuit as the primary cause.

1955Donald Keyhoe's The Flying Saucer Conspiracy gives the date as 1 July and describes a radar-tracked "unknown flying object," a scrambled jet and "a sudden, unbearable heat" in the cockpit. Keyhoe floats the idea that the heat could be a side effect of a saucer's propulsion.

1967 to 1975The story grows. Otto Binder argues that the UFO was the only possible source of the heat. In Aliens from Space (1973), Keyhoe has the pilot see a "gleaming disc-shaped machine." In The Edge of Reality (1975), Jacques Vallée describes the pilot seeing the UFO coming at him as he broke into clear sky.

1968 to 1969The Air Force-funded University of Colorado study, the Condon Report, lists Walesville as case 19-B. Drawing on the accident summary, it concludes that "there was no UFO in the aircraft accident case," and notes that Project Blue Book opened no file. The Blue Book index lists the crash as "info only."

1984After researcher Jan Aldrich obtains the accident report, Lawrence Fawcett and Barry Greenwood quote its findings in Clear Intent and still call the cause of the malfunction unknown.

28 March 2009Kevin Randle reviews the accident report and concludes that the unknowns were military aircraft and the crash was an accident, with no UFO involved.

Key figures

Lt. William E. Atkins, the pilot, made the decision to eject. The accident board found that the decision followed the emergency instructions in the F-94C flight handbook. Nothing in the official record has him describing an unusual object; the gleaming disc arrives in later books.

Lt. Henry F. Coudon, the radar observer, ejected on the pilot's warning. Some accounts give his name as Condon, and Binder's version makes him the man who first spotted the UFO, a detail not found in the accident summary.

Doris Monroe and Stanley, Florence and Gary Phillips are the four people killed on the ground. Keyhoe's version got them wrong, describing the dead as a man, his wife and their two infant children.

Donald Keyhoe, the retired Marine major who ran NICAP, built the UFO version of the story without access to the accident report. Kevin Randle argues the confusion "might never have happened if Keyhoe had been given access to the accident report."

Jan Aldrich, a researcher, obtained the accident report. Lawrence Fawcett and Barry Greenwood used it in Clear Intent while keeping the question of cause open.

Physical and documentary trail

The record has the aircraft serial number, the takeoff and crash times, the names of the crew and the dead, contemporary press coverage including the New York Times of 3 July 1954, the Condon Report's case 19-B summary, and the Air Force accident report with its Summary of Circumstances, completed on 17 August 1954 and later released.

The board examined the air conditioning and pressurization system and found "no evidence of smoke, fuel, or oil." It noted that Atkins had flown the same jet earlier that day and had needed to adjust the cockpit temperature by hand several times, with the vents set to direct pressurized air into the cockpit. Because he had changed power settings and attitude during the second intercept, the board judged that he "interpreted a normal, non-automatically controlled temperature rise as an overheat cockpit condition."

The record does not name the aircraft that was letting down toward Griffiss, and the two official summaries tell the intercepts in a different order. The Summary of Circumstances has the C-47 as the second target. The Condon summary has the pilot identify the C-47 first and then go after a low aircraft landing at Griffiss.

Investigation revealed the primary cause of the accident to be a malfunction of the aircraft fire detector circuit. The cause of the malfunction could not be determined.

Things you might not know

• The jet was armed. Press reports said the Starfire carried 48 rockets. The F-94C had no guns; it carried 2.75-inch folding-fin rockets in a ring around the nose and, on later aircraft, in wing pods.
• A balloon jammed the switchboard. That evening the Utica Press logged more than 1,000 calls about the silvery object between 6 and 10 p.m. Col. Milton F. Summerfelt put it at about forty feet long, and a Mohawk Airlines pilot estimated its height at 20,000 feet.
• Blue Book's "witness" lived in Ohio. The Blue Book index names Leonard Stringfield among the witnesses. He was not there; he had written about the crash in his newsletter.
• The board also blamed the checklist. One conclusion of the accident report was that Air Force inspection requirements for F-94C fire and overheat warning circuits were inadequate.
• Hynek and Vallée argued about it in print. In The Edge of Reality, Hynek said the case was not documented. Vallée answered that it was, and had even been in the New York Times the next day.
• The F-94C could choke on its own weapons. Firing the nose rockets could blind the crew with smoke and flame out the engine. On later aircraft the nose rockets were often left off and the wing pods carried the load.

Competing explanations

An accident with no UFO involved. A faulty fire warning circuit lit up at the same moment that normal, manually controlled cockpit heating rose during a descent. Following procedure, the pilot shut down the engine and the crew ejected. This is the accident board's reading, adopted by the Condon Report and by Randle, and it explains the unknowns as a C-47 and an aircraft landing at Griffiss. It leaves the cause of the circuit fault itself undetermined, as the board admitted.

A UFO attack. The jet was chasing something unknown, and the heat came from that object, as Keyhoe suggested and Binder asserted. This reading depends on details absent from the official record: a scramble rather than a diversion, a disc seen by the crew, and a heat source outside the aircraft. It also has to explain why the board found no trace of fire or smoke.

A real failure followed by a slow release. The accident was ordinary, but because military accident reports were kept confidential, writers in the 1950s and 1960s had only the bare facts of an intercept, a heat surge and four dead. On this view the UFO story is less a cover-up than a gap filled by guesswork, which the later release of the report closed.

Later life of the case

Walesville is often filed beside the Mantell crash of 1948 and the Kinross disappearance of 1953 as a military aircraft lost while chasing a UFO. The paper trail sets it apart. In Walesville the crew survived, the unknowns were aircraft, and the accident report is public. Randle, who has written widely in favor of other UFO cases, says it should be removed from the UFO files along with Mantell. The one detail still argued over is the heat: the summary itself speaks of intense heat in the cockpit, while the board's finding calls it a normal temperature rise.

Finding

Walesville was an aircraft accident, not a UFO encounter. The F-94C was diverted to check unknown aircraft, one of which was identified as a C-47 by tail number, while the other was evidently landing at Griffiss. A malfunctioning fire warning circuit, combined with a cockpit temperature rise the board judged normal, led the crew to eject, and the pilotless jet killed four people on the ground. The disc, the scramble and the heat ray came later, from writers who never saw the accident report.

What still will not resolve: why the fire warning circuit failed, which the board could not determine, and the identity of the aircraft heading for Griffiss, which no published record names. Neither gap points to anything unknown in the sky. The lasting lesson of Walesville is how a confidential accident report and a balloon seen over Utica the same evening let a tragedy turn into a legend.