F-94 and Ground Radar Sighting at Nemuro, Hokkaido, 1953

Early 1953. The Nemuro AF Detachment was an Air Force radar post on Hokkaido, in northern Japan. It watched the sky with a CPS-5 radar. To the east and northeast lay the Russian-held Kurile Islands.

February 7, 1953. Night. NICAP gives the time as 9:22 p.m. The Blue Book file, as summarised later, gives 2230 local time.

The weather was clear. Low in the east, a light was rising. Observers watched it flash red and green. Later it turned white, with intermittent red and green flashes. Then it settled into a steady white. Two observers said the light "shown from beneath" the object. One believed "that the object did not move with respect to the stars in its vicinity." Its only motion was a slow gain in altitude.

The radar painted a single pip at 85° azimuth. Range, 165 miles. The operator regarded it as interference. The light itself was boresighted with the radar antenna and read at 91°, at an elevation estimated as 15°.

The version that reached the public is more dramatic. Radar picked up a UFO. An F-94 was scrambled. The pilot saw a bright orange object, which changed altitudes and pulled away at high speed. NICAP's account adds that the object changed color to red and green at intervals and disappeared behind a cloud. Richard F. Haines later wrote that the pilot sighted it "both visually and on radar."

The report first appeared in 1953, in an appendix to Donald E. Keyhoe's Flying Saucers from Outer Space. It was entry 36 on a list cleared by Albert M. Chop, and it was placed simply in the "Korean area." Richard Hall repeated it in The UFO Evidence in 1964. NICAP's chronology put it on Okinawa, a label no source explains. Okinawa lies more than 1,000 km from Korea. The Blue Book file names Nemuro. Whether the Chop entry and the Nemuro file describe the very same report remains unconfirmed, though the catalogues treat them as one.

The Blue Book file suggested Deneb or Regulus. In 1969, Gordon D. Thayer reviewed the radar cases for the Condon Committee and filed this one as Case 113-B. He rejected both stars, because "their positions are far away from the sighted object." He found "No stars brighter than magnitude 3" in that part of the sky. His conclusion: "it is very probable that they saw a lighted Pibal balloon, possibly launched from the Russian-held Kurile Islands to the east and northeast of Hokkaido." He added that the investigating officer had noted "the exceptionally good visibility prevalent in the area on clear nights."

Thayer's balloon did not settle the matter for everyone. Brad Sparks lists the sighting as Unknown #927 in his catalogue of Project Blue Book unknowns. It also appears in NICAP's RADCAT radar catalogue, the McDonald list and the FUFOR Index.

No published source names the F-94 crew, their ranks or their unit. What remains are three accounts that never quite meet. A pilot's bright orange object racing away. A slow white light climbing among the stars. And a radar pip written off as interference.