Page Content (OCR)
Air State Stations; with the Bureau of Safety of the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB), both at their Washington, D.C. Headquarters and their installation at JFK International Airport, N.Y.; with the General Aviation District Office of the Federal Aviation Agency (FAA) at the Teeterboro, N.J., Airport; and with the U. S. Coast Guard. The results of all my inquiries were negative. Nor was the U. S. Army involved in any way with the overflights of the Wanaque Reservoir. There had been a number of Army helicopters based at Stewart Air Force Base, Newburgh, N.Y. But when I checked with a Lieutenant C. King of Base Operations there, he said: "We used to have a group of Army helicopters here - but they were all transferred out by the end of August 1966." Major Lennis G. Harris, the Base UFO investigator at Stewart AFB, checked the flight-mission records and reported: "No USAF aircraft from this base were on a mission in the Wanaque area at 2100 to 2200 hours (9:00 P.M. to 10:00 P.M.) on 11 October 1966." Major Harris also added that neither he personally nor anyone under him had gone to Wanaque for an investigation of the UFO sighting on January 11, 1966. (This was the date of the first sighting of a UFO over the Wanaque Reservoir - the sighting which, according to Sergeant Ben Thompson, caused the Government to send an investigator to the Lakeland Regional High School for interrogation of those who had observed that first UFO.) investigating organization, at Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio, told me: "If you put up that many jet fighters (assuming that the 10 or 12 jets seen by Police Sergeant Thompson were fighters), the Air Defense Command would certainly know about it! The aircraft would have to be vectored in by radar - McGuire AFB near Dover, N.J., is the Divisional Headquarters of the 21st Air Division and has complete control over the vectoring of Air-Defense fighter-interceptors from the various wings and detachments throughout Northern New York and New Jersey. Major Quintanilla checked for me with the Divisional headquarters and reported: "There is no record of any fighters out at the time and date you mentioned. That many planes out all together would mean a training exercise was in progress. No training exercises for that period and area are in the records." He added that Army helicopters are based much too far south of Wanaque to have been able to reach the reservoir area in 15 minutes after Sergeant Thompson saw his weird UFO in October. At the Lakehurst Naval Air Station I spoke with Lieutenant Lee Norris, Public Affairs Officer. He said: "T can't remember ever having seen six helos in the air at one time at night. And I'm fairly well familiar with our operations here. Tell you what, I'll check it out - but I'm willing to bet my next month's paycheck that those helos were not ours!" The only jet aircraft at Lakehurst, according to Lieutenant Norris, are experimental types "and they wouldn't make a short-haul trip, like to Wanaque. They'd be flying down to the Patuxent River Naval Air Station in Maryland for tests. And usually there would be It took Lieutenant Norris about an hour to check out the helicopter flight records for October 11, 1966. Here's what he found: "That day we had 11 helicopter flights-but none after 1900 hours (7:00 P.M.)." Major Hector Quintanilla, Jr., Chief of Project Blue Book, the Government's only official UFO and only the Ground Control Intercept operators of ADC could do this job." no more than two in the air at a time." "Were any of those eleven flights, regardless of the time, over the Wanaque area?" I asked him.