The Fort Dix / McGuire AFB Alien Shooting (1978)

Fort Dix and McGuire AFB sit side by side in Burlington County, New Jersey. Today they form Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst. In 1980 the crash retrieval researcher Leonard H. Stringfield received a letter from a security police sergeant who had since been posted overseas. He would be known only by the pseudonym "Jeff Morse." His letter described one night two years earlier.

January 18, 1978. Somewhere between three and five in the morning. Bluish-green lights were flying high and in tight formation over the base. Richard H. Hall later wrote that they performed "amazing aerobatics," shifting from two parallel lines to arrow shapes to a crescent before they dispersed.

One object came low. Morse called it "oval shaped, with no details, and glowing with a blueish green color." It hovered over a Fort Dix MP's patrol car, and radio transmission briefly failed. Then something appeared in front of the car. "About 4 ft. tall, greyish, brown, fat head, long arms, and slender body."

The MP fired "five rounds from his .45 Cal into the thing, and one round into the object above." The object "fled straight up and joined with eleven others high in the sky." The being fled over the fence onto McGuire. It died near the runway.

Morse said he saw it from 40 to 70 feet away under truck headlights. "The skin of the unclad, hairless body was wet, shiny, and snake-like." There was a smell, too. "Like ammonia smelling." He rejected any suggestion of a deer or an escaped lab ape. "Unquestionably not human."

His 1980 letter said that "AF OSI came out and took over," while the 1985 account described "Blue Berets" with no insignia. The body was sprayed, covered with a white sheet, framed in wood and sealed in a silver metal container. Around 7 a.m. a C-141 with "special markings" arrived from Wright-Patterson. Two days later Morse and three others were flown there for questioning. "I signed a form and it is supposed to bind me for life," he said.

In 1983 Morse mailed a copy of an AF Form 1569 incident report. Its disposition read: "One body of unknown origin… released to other authorities." In September 1985 CAUS headlined it "The Smoking Gun Has Emerged." Fran Ridge wrote to Senators Dan Quayle and Richard Lugar and Representative Frank McCloskey. The Air Force replied that it could not locate any records.

In January 1987 Stringfield, Hall, Bruce Maccabee and others met Morse, who gave a sworn deposition. Hall wrote: "At this point there is no doubt in my mind whatsoever that the report is authentic."

AFOSI objected that the form's style did not follow proper Air Force usage. Morse said it was probably a back office copy that could have been rewritten. Barry Greenwood of CAUS later said the documents "couldn't be substantiated as real." Skeptics noted that OSI became Blue Berets and Okinawa became Guam, while the shooter never came forward and several officers denied any knowledge. Philip Klass criticised the case, and the Wright-Patterson ending echoes older Hangar 18 lore.

In 2019 the story returned through Strange Craft, the book by George Filer III, a former McGuire intelligence officer. Arriving at about 04:00, he saw "a commotion with red lights" on a disused runway and was told an alien had been shot. "Our security police went out there and found him at the end of the runway dead," he told ABC News. Filer never saw the body himself. The Air Force says simply that no records exist.