Sighting record / 1966
June 19, 1966. Nha Trang, South Vietnam. Hundreds of American and South Vietnamese soldiers sat in the dark for an outdoor movie. At about 9:45 p.m. the sky to the north lit up. A brilliant light came in, speeding up and slowing down. It dropped to an estimated 300 to 500 feet and stopped dead. The valley glowed like midday. And everything with an engine went quiet. The projector's generator. The base generators. Two Skyraiders on the runway. Eight bulldozers in the hills. For about four minutes, nothing ran. Then the light went straight up and was gone in seconds. The story survives in one soldier's letter home.
Nha Trang, 1966. A heavily defended military complex in South Vietnam. NICAP described more than 40,000 troops there, about 2,000 of them American. The base sat in a valley ringed by mountains. The airstrip lay to the east, fuel storage and hills to the west, the docks on the China Sea to the south.