McKinney, Texas: the six-hour stationary object

McKinney sits in Collin County, Texas, about 30 miles north of Dallas. That spring, the U.S. Air Force was flying high-altitude balloons out of Texas. One of them would later become the centre of this story. But on the afternoon itself, the people of McKinney saw only what was in front of them.

Wednesday, 4 April 1956. 3:15 p.m.

Capt. Roy Hall, retired from the U.S. Army and known as the local weather observer, spotted it first. One fat, oblong object with two lines around its middle. Bright silver against the afternoon sky.

Hall turned a six-inch reflecting telescope on it and studied it at 200 power. He made a sketch. Others came to look, some through the 6-inch telescope, others through a second telescope of 55 to 200 power. Charles Anderson, described as an amateur astronomer, drew it too. His drawing showed an oblong with a raised band. Through the eyepiece, Hall said, the surface resembled translucent rubber.

The object never moved. It sat seven degrees north of Venus for the entire 6 hours. Hall noted that the upper level winds were moving towards the east. The object stayed where it was.

It was observed from two separate locations. Hall used them to triangulate. The object measured about one minute of arc across. He computed that this made it roughly 200 feet across at about 100,000 feet, and perhaps higher. One later compilation adds that Hall said observers 100 miles away also saw it, directly overhead.

Then the light went. Around 9PM, when it got dark, the object was gone.

Hall did not call a local base. He wrote a three-page letter, with his sketch, directly to USAF intelligence. It became Project Blue Book case #4050. Blue Book suggested "it was possibly some form of Parahelia due to cirrus clouds in the area." It did not close the case on that idea. The file was marked unidentified.

A Denton newspaper told a different story. It reported that the officer of the day at Carswell AFB in Fort Worth looked into the sighting, and that a C-47 and a jet from Perrin AFB identified the object as a "weather balloon." That identification never seems to have reached the Blue Book file.

In January 1974, Don Berliner read the Blue Book unexplained files at Maxwell AFB. McKinney went onto his list of Blue Book Unknowns for the Fund for UFO Research.

In 2014 the SUNlite newsletter took up the case, and CENAP republished the analysis. It pointed to Project Grab Bag. On 4 April 1956 the USAF 1110th Balloon Activities Squadron launched a Grab Bag balloon from Goodfellow AFB in San Angelo. These balloons climbed to an 80,000 ft ceiling to sample stratospheric air for signs of Soviet nuclear tests.

The fit is not perfect. No launch time was recorded. SUNlite doubted that a C-47, with a service ceiling under 30,000 ft, could have reached 45,000 ft. And Hall's 9 p.m. ending is odd, since the sky was nearly dark by about 8 p.m. The analysis still concluded: "This case should be classified as a probable research balloon." No flight track confirms it.

Two days later, on 6 April 1956, about 5 miles east of McKinney, a man named Mitchell and a companion saw a silvery object slant down into a field 300 ft away. When they stopped, it took off at high speed. That case was listed as unidentified too. For Blue Book, the silver oblong over McKinney remains what it was in 1956. Unidentified.