The Redlands Mass Sighting, 1968

Redlands is a city of about 30,000 people in San Bernardino County, California. Norton AFB sat next door in San Bernardino. March AFB lay further off, near Riverside.

Sunday, 4 February 1968. At 19:15 a light plane landed at Tri-City airport. Minutes later, north Redlands woke up to something else.

At about 7:20 p.m., residents heard their dogs barking in an unusual way. Some heard a disturbing and unusual sound. They went outside.

The object was low. Most witnesses put it at about 300 feet. It was round and huge, perhaps 50 to 60 feet across. Glowing windows or ports circled its upper edge. Eight to ten lights in a row on top alternated red and green, giving the impression that it was rotating. Seven lights on the base appeared to expel jets of bright orange flame.

It came down just west of Columbia Street and north of Colton Avenue. It moved slowly for about a mile. It stopped. It hovered. It jerked forward and hovered again. Then it shot straight up with a burst of speed and left fast to the northwest.

Witnesses heard a high-pitched, modulated whine. Many compared it to the saucer sound in the television series The Invaders. Dogs howled. Children hid indoors. Some adults said they were sickened by the sighting and the humming sound. It was over in under five minutes. About 200 people saw or heard it.

A team from the University of Redlands took up the case. Dr. Philip Seff, a geologist, led it. Mathematician Dr. Judson Sanderson worked out size and altitude. Chemist Dr. Reinhold Krantz joined them. Art professor John Brownfield interviewed witnesses and painted a composite, which witnesses checked. Seff thought it probably very accurate.

The only plane nearby, a single-engine Bonanza from Los Angeles, never came closer than six miles. Radar offered nothing. Norton's set was not the type to catch it, and ridges screened March AFB at that altitude. Seff's verdict: "The object sighted can be attributed to no known type of aircraft." No known natural phenomenon fit either. Who sponsored the work is still unclear. Accounts credit APRO, Project Blue Book or the Condon Committee.

There was a tape. Rev. Julian Vigh was recording at Bethel Christian Church and caught an intense, distinctive sound. A rescue vehicle was running its siren in town at the time. Seff concluded the siren made the sound. Physicist William F. Krupke analysed the tape in 1969 and published in 2016. He agreed about the siren, but found anomalies in intensity and Doppler shift.

Project Blue Book never truly investigated. Someone from Norton AFB looked at the case superficially, and it was filed as "probable aircraft." J. Allen Hynek called the gap between the reports and that evaluation "so great as to be laughable."

On 29 July 1968, James E. McDonald presented Redlands as Case 15 to the House Committee on Science and Astronautics. He called it a multiple-witness case that is hard to dismiss, and argued that plasma or ball lightning did not fit. Local papers, he said, had run only extremely brief items.

Hynek wrote of a book in production, Inquiry at Redlands, by David Branch and Robert Klinn. It was never completed. The sighting remains unexplained. The sound on the tape does not. A rare split verdict.