Nakhon Phanom Radar Contacts

In 1968 the US Air Force ran Nakhon Phanom Royal Thai Air Force Base, known as NKP. It sat on the Mekong, across the river from Laos. The 56th Special Operations Wing was stationed there. A detachment of the 621st Tactical Control Squadron ran a ground radar site under the callsign Invert. Radar mattered here. The fear was hostile aircraft or helicopters slipping across from Laos.

November 28, 1968. 9:56 a.m. local time. A Ground Control Approach radar reported two low and slow moving objects, approximately 13 nautical miles south of NKP. The NICAP chronology, credited to researcher Dan Wilson, names the reporting unit as Takhli Royal Thai Air Force Base GCA. Takhli lies far away in central Thailand, and that wording remains an open question. The sightings were confirmed by Invert radar. Two sets. Two targets.

The crews were sure. The NKP Command Post was informed that the sightings "definitely were not ghosts." In radar slang, ghosts are false returns. The operators were saying these were real. Contact was lost when the objects were 9 nautical miles west of the base. A caption in Wilson's index of the Blue Book pages sums it up: "Objects escaped by descending below radar capability."

"A Knife-27 chopper was immediately dispatched to the area, but nothing was seen." That is how Antonio Huneeus summarised the official account. "A second chopper, Knife-28 was sent later without better results." And as the helicopter returned to its base, the ground radar detected new bogies.

On December 26, 1968, Maj. Dale Fulton, the USAF Air Attaché in Vientiane, filed a DOD Intelligence Information Report. Subject: "Unidentified Flying Objects." Area: Laos/Thailand. It was later released under FOIA as a DIA document, and pages of it also sit in the Project Blue Book file. Fulton looked to the season. "Historically, November and early December have produced large number or radar returns," the report noted, from natural or cultural phenomena in Thailand. At fairs and religious celebrations, "many small balloons were released."

His real concern was intelligence. Fulton concluded that "to date, there is no confirmed evidence that hostile aircraft or helicopters have penetrated Thai air space in support of insurgent or communist activities." Infiltration by "other methods," he argued, would be cheaper, safer and less obvious.

Small festival balloons were Fulton's general answer. Anomalous propagation and ground clutter can produce ghosts, but the operators rejected that at the time. Real low flying aircraft or helicopters from Laos were the very possibility the report was written to weigh. Yet the specific contacts were never properly explained. No Blue Book evaluation of the case has been found, and it does not appear among the 1968 Blue Book unknowns listed by Patrick Gross.

No one saw a shape. No one saw a light. Nakhon Phanom is a radar case, pure and simple. It surfaced through Antonio Huneeus's 2009 article "UFOs during the Vietnam War" in Fate, reprinted on Open Minds, and through Dan Wilson's 2010 post to NICAP's RADCAT project, which lists it as "GCA Has Two Uncorrelated Targets." It belongs to a wider pattern of low and slow radar targets across Southeast Asia during the war, from a helicopter scare near the same base in August 1969 to the "enemy helicopter" radar reports Gen. George S. Brown described in 1973.