The Camp Hood "Balls of Fire": Lights Over the Killeen Base Atomic Bomb Site

In 1949 the Army kept a secret in a hillside in Bell County, Texas. Killeen Base, also called Site Baker, lay six miles west of Killeen, across U.S. 190 from Camp Hood. Its tunnels held atomic bombs. It was one of three such storage and assembly sites in the United States, alongside Kirtland AFB and Fort Campbell. Later renamed West Fort Hood, the site was protected by military patrols day and night.

March 6, 1949. At 8:20 p.m., a sergeant and a private saw an "oblong, blue-white object moving south." The next night a military policeman watched an "orange-colored, teardrop-shaped object" drop from the sky right in front of him. On March 8, infantrymen half a mile apart saw lights over the bomb storage site. One was a "whitish light"; another was "lemon-shaped, yellowish-red."

Edward J. Ruppelt later wrote that the lights soon became "a nightly occurrence." Most observers reported a V formation of three lights, changing "from a bluish white to orange and back to bluish white." They usually travelled west to east without sound. They were "going faster than a jet." One night at dusk, during retreat, the entire garrison watched a formation pass directly over the post parade ground.

The Army's first answer was flares from night manoeuvres. Capt. Horace McCulloch, assistant G-2 of the 2nd Armored Division, doubted the reports. On March 17 he set up a test firing of flares to prove it. At 7:52 p.m., before any flare was fired, observers reported white, red and green lights flying in straight lines. McCulloch put the base on alert.

On March 31, Lt. Frederick Davis saw a "reddish-white ball of fire" pass horizontally above the airstrip and disappear after 10 to 15 seconds. When he phoned in his report, he noticed interference on the line. On April 27, patrols met tiny lights at close range. One, a blinking violet light, passed through tree branches. Another zig-zagged six or seven feet above the ground, then accelerated down the road and vanished.

The Army wrote a formal field order for four-man teams to radio azimuth and elevation to a command post so each light could be triangulated. The Air Force received the plan, but Ruppelt later wrote: "I don't know where the plan was killed, or who killed it, but it was killed." According to Mike Cox's reading of the released documents, however, the post went ahead anyway, and the net went live around May 4. On May 7 observers logged a diamond-shaped object with a white light at 1,000 feet, at an estimated 1,300 mph. On June 6, two posts watched an orange light hover, move in level flight, then burst into small particles. Their readings put it at 5,280 feet and 30 to 70 feet across.

The Fourth Army G-2 handled the reports, and the FBI's San Antonio office kept watch. Ruppelt linked the Air Force's refusal to a new official view after the Los Alamos conference judged the green fireballs natural. The flare theory never recovered from McCulloch's test, and searches found no flare debris. Brad Sparks lists the April 27 and June 6 events among Project Blue Book unknowns.

Mike Cox put it plainly: "What caused the rash of mysterious sightings above the then top secret facility has never been explained." Ruppelt told the story in the same chapter as the green fireballs and Project Twinkle. Some now call June 6 "the first real-time triangulation of a UFO sighting."