White Sands Proving Ground Army patrol sightings near Trinity Site (1957)

It was a restless weekend in the American Southwest. Around Levelland, Texas, drivers had reported stalled cars on November 2 and 3, 1957. On November 3, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 2. In the New Mexico desert, Army military police patrolled the northern range of White Sands Proving Ground, around Stallion Site. Out there stood the abandoned bunkers used to observe the Trinity test of July 1945, the first atomic explosion.

Sunday, November 3. Somewhere between 0238 and 0300, Cpl. Glenn H. Toy, 21, and PFC James E. Wilbanks were on patrol in the Range Area. In Toy's sworn statement, they "noticed a very bright object high in the sky." It came down toward the ground and stopped about 50 yards up. Then its light went out.

Minutes later it returned, "real bright (like the sun)." It fell at an angle to the ground and went out. Toy put it at "approximately seventy-five (75) to 100 yards in diameter and shaped like an egg." It had landed, he said, by the bunker area, about three miles away. Brad Sparks later described it as an orange, "apparently controlled," luminous object.

8:00 p.m. Seventeen hours later, Sp3c Henry R. Barlow and Sp3c Forest R. Oakes of Army Garrison Detachment 5 were driving west in a jeep near Trinity Site. Four or five miles off, they saw a pulsating red light. It turned white. It brightened, dimmed, and at times went out.

They judged it might be 200 to 300 feet across. It rose from near the bunker until it stood about 45 degrees up, shrinking to a point of light, like a star. They watched for 25 minutes. Then it disappeared. According to NICAP, the two patrols had not spoken to each other before they reported.

White Sands Proving Ground announced the sightings itself. On November 5 the Washington Post described "a huge, oval object 'nearly as bright as the sun'" near bunkers used in the first atomic bomb explosion. A commander named Penney took some of his MPs to the site. They found no physical evidence.

Project Blue Book took the case. According to Kevin Randle, the Air Force sent a single officer. The verdict on the morning sighting was the moon. The record card called the witnesses "very young (18 20), impressionable & on duty in a lonely, isolated desert post," and said "their sightings were magnified out of proportion." The evening light was filed as possibly Venus, low in the southwest and setting around 8:30 p.m.

Randle argues the investigation was superficial, built to produce answers "as quickly as possible," and that the moon does not fit what Toy described. Venus suits the evening light better. But the soldiers saw their light climb, and Venus was going down. Sparks also noted "1 p.m. MST ?" beside the logged time, hinting at a possible error that would change any astronomical answer. Sceptic Tim Printy found Venus behind roughly 90 of the 482 Blue Book reports from that November and December.

Randle also cites an unnamed source who said Wilbanks was in hospital after the sighting, a detail kept out of the Air Force file. Nothing from 1957 confirms it.

Sparks lists the morning sighting as Case 1262 in his Blue Book Unknowns catalogue. The case appears in books by Aimé Michel, Donald Keyhoe, Jacques Vallée and Loren E. Gross, and in Randle's Levelland. NICAP places it among its New Mexico nuclear site reports. Two patrols. Two lights. The same old bunkers where the atomic age began.