The Hamilton Field Escort Discs: Two Milky-White Objects Pace a P-80, 1947

Summer 1947. The United States was in the middle of a flying-disc wave. Researcher Ted Bloecher would later count more than 850 reported cases from June and July alone. Hamilton Army Airfield sat on the shore of San Pablo Bay near Novato, in Marin County, California. The wire services placed it 25 miles north of San Francisco.

Tuesday, July 29, 1947. Capt. William H. Ryherd, the assistant base operations officer, and 1st Lt. Ward Stewart, a reserve officer and former B-29 pilot, had just landed from a routine training flight.

One of the men called the other's attention to something in the sky. An unidentified object was following a P-80 jet on its preliminary approach to landing. Stewart put the P-80 at about 250 miles per hour. The object kept up a speed three to four times that.

A moment later, a second object appeared. The intelligence memo compared its movement to "a fighter aircraft's maneuvers when accompanying heavier ships," a left to right movement over the object first sighted. One flew straight and level. The other weaved from side to side above it. "This maneuvering continued until the objects were out of sight."

It lasted approximately 15 seconds, on a course of approximately 120 degrees. Stewart called the objects "milky white in color, and unlike any conventional type aircraft he had ever seen." He could not estimate their size or altitude. He did not believe them to be beyond six thousand feet.

The report went into the Air Materiel Command's early incident files as Incident 52 and 52A, with papers dated August 5 and September 9, 1947. On September 6, Special Agent Leslie S. Hubbard of the Army Counter Intelligence Corps interviewed Stewart. Hubbard wrote that Stewart "does not convey the impression of being the kind of person who would 'imagine' that he was seeing objects, nor has he any apparent desire for publicity." Asked whether he knew the Navy's experimental "Flapjack" aircraft, Stewart said he did and was certain the objects were not of this nature.

No official explanation was ever adopted. The Flapjack idea was raised and rejected, and the slow V-173 could not match the reported speeds anyway. No published debunking aimed at this case has surfaced.

The record is not tidy. The intelligence memo places the sighting shortly after 12 noon. The later catalogues say 2:50 p.m. PDT. They also give diameters of 15 to 25 feet, an altitude of 6,000 to 10,000 feet, a speed near 750 mph and a southerly heading. Those figures may come from Ryherd's own statement, which has not been checked. A 15-second glimpse, judged by eye, carries its own limits.

Project Blue Book carries the case as "Unknown." Don Berliner placed it among the cases the Air Force "tried to explain and failed." Brad Sparks lists it as case 42 in his catalogue of Blue Book unknowns. Bloecher listed it as case 852.

It is easily confused with another Hamilton report from the day before, when tower operators described a disc shooting blue flames. That was a separate event. This one left no photographs and no radar. Just two airmen, a jet on approach, and two white objects flying like an escort.