The Redlands Mass Sighting

Redlands is a city in San Bernardino County, California, home to the University of Redlands. On the evening of Sunday, February 4, 1968, its northern streets became the scene of one of the most closely studied mass sightings of the decade.

It was between 7:20 and 7:25 p.m. A huge, low-flying, disk-shaped object came down just west of Columbia Street and north of Colton Avenue. It was about 50 feet across and hung some 300 feet up. Seven lights on its underside appeared to expel jets of bright orange flame. Along the top, eight to ten lights in a row alternated red and green, so the object seemed to rotate.

It drifted slowly for about a mile. It stopped and hovered. It jerked forward. It hovered again. Then it shot straight up, wavered to the northwest, climbed slightly and streaked off to the northwest at high speed. Accounts differ on that first leg, northwest in one NICAP report, northeast in Hynek's version. The whole event took less than five minutes.

The sound stayed with them. NICAP described a high-pitched, modulated whining sound, like the saucer effect in the TV series The Invaders. Mike Patapoff Jr. heard a "chee chee" sound that grew louder, then faded as the object left. Rudy Elisarraras compared it to the "laser guns on TV program 'Voyage to Bottom of the Sea'".

"Dogs howled. Children hid in their homes. Adults were shocked and some even said they were sickened," columnist Phill Courtney wrote in 2021. About 200 residents saw or heard the object. At Bethel Christian Church, the Rev. Julian Vigh was recording his sermon. The tape caught the sound in the background.

Three University of Redlands scientists took the case: Dr. Philip Seff of geology, Dr. Judson Sanderson of mathematics and Dr. Reinhold Krantz of chemistry. From art, John Brownfield interviewed witnesses and drew a composite that they checked. Most accounts say APRO commissioned the work. After three months the team concluded: "The object sighted can be attributed to no known type of aircraft." Natural phenomena were ruled out too. Only the tape got a mundane answer. They put it down to a rescue vehicle that happened to be in the same part of town with its siren on.

Project Blue Book filed the case as "probable aircraft" without any real investigation, leaning on a light aircraft landing at 7:15 p.m. J. Allen Hynek, Blue Book's own consultant, objected. The sighting came at 7:20 or later. The radar data did not fit. The plane's route never came within six miles of Redlands. Radar at Norton Air Force Base could not have caught a plane or a UFO at that altitude and distance anyway. Hynek wrote that "no one at Blue Book has seen fit to contact these professors".

The tape got a second look. In 1969 William F. Krupke analysed both the recording and the siren in detail, reporting "anomalies in the time dependence of sound intensity and Doppler shift". His report waited until 2016 to appear in the Journal of Scientific Exploration.

Hynek made the case Appendix 4 of The UFO Experience, "Inquiry at Redlands", a lesson in how unscientific Blue Book's methods were. James E. McDonald raised it before the House Committee on Science and Astronautics on 29 July 1968. In 2013 the Press-Enterprise ran the headline "REDLANDS: 1968 UFO sighting remains unexplained". Blue Book called it an aircraft. The professors said it was no known type of aircraft. That gap has never closed.