UFOs and the Media

Follow the Bouncing Ball
From the TRUE Report On Flying Saucers, 1967
By Major Donald E. Keyhoe

Flight 117 was cruising over Indiana when the strange glowing object
loomed up out of the black sky.
 

         Here's what happened when the airliner gave chase.Flight 117 was ninety miles east of Chicago when Captain Robert F. Manning saw the mysterious light. It was the night of April 27, 1950. The time was 8:25 p.m. Cruising at 2,000 feet, the Trans World Air Lines DC-3 droned westward over Goshen, Indiana. In the left-hand seat, handling the controls, was Captain Robert Adickes, stocky ex-Navy pilot with ten years' service in TWA. Manning, taller, blond, quiet-voiced, was also a four-stripe captain, but on this particular flight he was in the right-hand seat, serving as first officer, or copilot. Manning glanced out from the shadowy cockpit. Twenty-five miles ahead, South Bend was a spreading glow in the darkness. Clouds massed at 4,000 feet made a black sky overhead. He looked back to the right to where Elkhart lay some six miles to the north. It was a familiar routine, picking out Elkhart. He had once lived there and the sight brought pleasant memories. Suddenly a strange red light moving swiftly near the horizon caught Captain Manning's eye. It was coming toward the air liner, climbing up on the right, from a point some miles behind. Puzzled, he watched it close in. This was no wingtip light - the strange red light was too bright. With growing astonishment, he saw that the light was increasing in size. Whatever it was, this was no conventional aircraft.
         The DC-3 was cruising at 175 miles an hour, but the mysterious glowing object was overtaking it rapidly. It was now an orange-red color, like a round blob of hot metal sweeping through the night sky. Craning his neck, Manning looked down on a spherical shape, glowing brightly on top, the lower part in shadow. For a second, he half doubted his senses. He had heard Flying Saucer reports from other air-line pilots, but this was almost fantastic. He swung around to Adickes. "Look over here. What do you make of that?" Captain Adickes turned. Startled, he raised up and gazed through the starboard window. The thing was still climbing, not quite at the air liner's level. Over the top, he could see scattered ground lights, and below it, car lights on a highway. He could only guess at its size, but it looked to be at least twenty feet in diameter, probably closer to fifty. The two pilots stared at each other, then Adickes reached for his mike and called TWA at Chicago. "We've sighted a strange object off the starboard wing," he swiftly told the dispatcher. "Ask ATC if there's any traffic near us." In a moment, the answer came back. Air Traffic Control had no record of anything near their ship.
         Adickes and Manning looked out again at the Saucer. It appeared to be half a mile distant, now keeping pace with the plane. Adickes shook his head incredulously. It looked exactly like a huge round wheel rolling down a road, but how could a thing like that stay in the air? "I'm going to try to sneak up on it," he told Manning. He banked the ship gently, but the glowing disk at once slid away, keeping its distance. He tried again, with the same result. "Call the hostess," he said abruptly. "I want someone else to see this thing." Back in the cabin, hostess Gloria Hinshaw caught the hastily flashing signal. She hurried up the aisle and entered the cockpit. "Take a look out there," said Adickes. He pointed across the right wing. The amazed hostess stared out at the glowing Saucer. It was once more flying parallel with the plane. "What on earth is it?" Gloria Hinshaw exclaimed. "We don't know," said Manning. "Go back and tell the passengers, Adickes said quickly. "Get them all to look at it."
         The hostess returned to the cabin. The first passenger, in a single seat on the right, was sound asleep. She turned to the two across the aisle-Clifford H. Jenkins and Dean C. Bourland, both Boeing Aircraft men. "There's a Flying Saucer out there. Look out the starboard side." Jenkins laughed, then he saw the look on her face. He jumped up and peered out the opposite window, Bourland crouching beside him. From the lighted cabin, the shape of the Saucer was less distinct. To Jenkins, it looked like a blur of windows lit with a queer red light. It was unlike anything he'd ever seen-and he knew every type of plane.
         While Jenkins and Bourland were gazing at the Saucer, Captain Adickes came hurrying out of the cockpit. The sleeping passenger woke up as Adickes leaned down to look out through his window. "What's the matter-what's going on?" he demanded. "Look out there," said Adickes. "See that thing?" He turned to the two Boeing men. "Did you see it? I want plenty of witnesses to this." The starboard-side passengers were watching the Saucer, but on the port side aft, the hostess was having trouble. Some of the passengers, including one who had plainly had a drink or two before embarking, thought the whole thing was a gag. "Sure, let's all see the Flying Saucer," chortled the tipsy gentleman. "Let's see the little men from Mars." He stopped, his mouth hanging open, as he saw the strange red object glowing beyond the wing. Pop-eyed, he sagged back in his seat.
         When Adickes returned to the cockpit, Manning was putting down his mike. "I called the South Bend radio range," said Manning. "I told them to go out and see if they could spot the thing." Adickes took the controls, made one more cautious attempt to sneak up on the Saucer. When the thing again slid away, he swung around quickly, to give direct chase. Instantly, the glowing disk dived. In barely more than a second, it went down to 1,500 feet, racing off to the north past South Bend. Its speed, Adickes estimated, was close to 400 miles per hour. For a few minutes longer, the weird light remained visible-a diminishing bright red spot against the ground. Then it faded and disappeared.
         Adickes' radio flash to Chicago had been picked up by newspapermen. Reporters were waiting at the airport, and the story was soon on the wires. It drew unusual attention. This was not just another Flying Saucer story, to be laughed off. Besides the crew, there were passenger witnesses. Adickes, recalling the ridicule other pilots had met, had carefully seen to that. Because of the unusual nature of this air-line Saucer sighting, TRUE asked me to carry out a full-scale investigation. Each of the three crew members is interviewed. All but five of the sixteen passengers were located. Detailed eyewitness accounts were obtained by long distance telephone calls to Seattle, Minneapolis, Chicago, Dayton and several other cities.
         As we expected, there were some differences in witnesses' stories. All these variations have been noted. The result is this report, which we believe to be an accurate, impartial account of what actually happened on the night of April 27.
         Before meeting the two pilots of Flight 117, I talked with others in TWA who knew them. "Quiet . . . conservative . . . serious careful." These were some of the terms that were applied to both men. Nobody in TWA questions that Adickes and Manning saw just what they said. Manning, who saw the Saucer first, has been an Air Force pilot. He has flown six years with the air line; his flight experience totals about 6,000 hours.
         By the time I met Manning, at Pittsburgh Airport, there had been several published "explanations" of the South Bend Flying Saucer. One theory was the red object was simply a reflection of blast furnaces against the clouds. "Yes, I heard that," Captain Manning told me. "Also, someone said we'd been looking at a burning barn. Even a first-trip passenger would hardly be fooled that easily - certainly not a pilot with any experience. Adickes and I have both seen ground fires and cloud reflections at night. There wasn't any similarity. We were ninety miles from the furnaces at Gary, and no reflection or burning barn could climb and maneuver like that"
         "How large do you think it was?" I asked him. "That's hard to say, because we could only guess at its distance," said Manning. "But it had to be fairly large. When I first saw it, the thing was near the horizon. So it had to be several miles away, perhaps ten or more. Even then, it was big enough to stand out." Manning quietly spiked the idea that the Saucer had been a jet plane's tail pipe. I've seen jets at night. If you're directly behind one, you'll see a round spot for a few moments. But this thing was huge in comparison. It didn't resemble a jet in any way. Besides, I saw it coming up from behind us. A jet's exhaust would be invisible from that angle. You wouldn't see much from the side either."
         When he first saw the object, Manning said, it seemed a brighter color than when it flew alongside. He would venture no opinion, however, when I asked whether this could be interpreted as indicating that it was using less power when it slowed to pace the air liner. "I can't swear to its exact shape Manning told me. "As it came up from below, it was just a bright red spot at first. Once, I had the feeling of looking down on top of a sphere. But most of the time it was just a large orange-red blob, like a mass of glowing hot metal out there in the sky."
         Although Manning had not seen it as a disk rolling on edge, he admitted that a spherical object could appear like a rolling wheel. He agreed with Captain Adickes' opinion that the thing had evaded attempts to get closer to it. "Like flying in formation with another plane," was his description. "It seem to slide away when we turned toward it." Manning did not speculate as to what the object was, or how it was powered and controlled. "All I can say is that it definitely was there. Most of the people in the plane saw it. And it was entirely different from any ordinary aircraft-uncanny enough to startle anyone first seeing it."
         Captain Adickes agreed on the bizarre' appearance of the thing. When I saw him at Washington, he told me he previously had been only half convinced by other pilots' reports of Flying Saucers. "But I know now they definitely do exist. This was not an airplane and it wasn't imagination." Adickes said he had seen jet planes at night. He fully confirmed Manning's rebuttal of this explanation. '"And it wasn't St. Elmo's fire or any reflection on clouds," he added. "A lot of my seventy-eight hundred hours' flight time was put in on night flying. I've seen just about everything you'd expect to encounter, but never anything like that disk."
         Captain Adickes said its proximity had no effect on radio reception. Nor did he notice any deviation on his instruments. The object's color, he said, was not a bright cherry-red, as some newspapers had stated. Instead, it was about the dull-red color of hot metal. "Manning and I could only estimate its size," he said. "It might have been even larger than fifty feet in diameter, depending on its distance from us. This will give you an idea. When I tried to cut in toward it, that last time, it streaked down over South Bend at twice our speed - somewhere between three-fifty and four hundred miles an hour. But even at that speed, it took several minutes to fade out. So it had to be fairly big." As it speeded up to escape, Adickes said, it turned so that he caught a glimpse of the thing edge on. It seemed to be about 10 per cent as thick as its diameter.
         Other air-line pilots had told him of unsuccessful efforts to close in on Flying Saucers, Captain Adickes told me. "I thought maybe they imagined it, but now I know better. I tried to sneak up on it, and also to get above it. Each time, it veered away. And when I went after it, the thing was off in a flash." From the darkened cockpit, hostess Gloria Hinshaw also saw the object veer away. Back in the lighted cabin, she saw it again briefly as it speeded off and dived over South Bend. "How did it look to you?" I asked her. "Like a big red wheel rolling along," she said. "I haven't any idea what it was, but it was certainly a strange-looking thing. If I hadn't actually seen it, I don't think I would believe it."
         None of the passengers was alarmed by the Saucer, but Miss Hinshaw had been worried for a moment when she made the first announcement. "Some of them got excited," she said, "but no one seemed to be nervous. And, course, some didn't even believe it - they were on the other side, farther back. The rest of us took a lot of kidding from them before we landed. But there's one thing sure-those who did see it won't laugh any more at Flying Saucer stories."
         Passenger Samuel N. Miller, manager of the Goodman Jewelry Company in St. Paul, Minnesota, told me the same thing. "I'd been laughing at the stories since 1947, but not any more. I saw the Saucer, all right - even before the hostess told us." Miller was on the left side, near the wing. Glancing up from a magazine, he noticed an odd red glow out on the starboard side. It was the color of a neon sign," he described it to me. "1 thought at first it was an advertising blimp. Then it got closer and I saw it was disk-shaped. It wasn't flashing, like a neon sign-it was solid color, just a big red disk." Soon after this, the air liner swerved as Captain Adickes made the first attempt to close in. "It wasn't abrupt-just an easy turn," said Miller. "Right after that, the hostess's signal began to flash, and she ran up the aisle." The rest of his story tallied with the crew's, except for the time estimate. He thought he had watched the Saucer almost fifteen minutes; the pilots' figure was eight minutes. When I asked him what he thought it was, he admitted he had no answer. "I can't believe it's a secret device of ours," he said. "They'd be pretty stupid to fly it near air liners, where everybody could see it and talk about it."
 

A Guide to This Site
What's here and how to get there.

Text version of this site
An easy to read black and white version.