The July 1952 Nash-Fortenberry UFO Sighting

 My take Copyright 2017, InterAmerica, Inc.

While foraging the David Wallechinsky/Irving Wallace volumes of The People’s Almanac and The Book of Lists series, all popular best-sellers in the 1975-1980 time-frame, I found many interesting accounts of weird happenings and a listing of some iconic flying saucer/UFO tales, one being the July 14, 1952 Nash-Fortenberry sighting, which involved commercial pilots and happened almost exactly four years after the Chiles-Whitted July 24, 1948 sighting of a cigar-shaped craft (that account covered thoroughly by Kevin Randle, recently, at his blog).

This is a newspaper headline about the 1952 sighting, provided online by Isaac Koi:

Looking for an internet account, via Google, I came across a superb Project 1947 offering (provided, with permission, to Project 1947) by Tom Tulien:

http://www.project1947.com/shg/articles/tulien_nashfort.htm

Mr. Tulien’s piece is how UFO accounts, old and new, should be rendered, but rarely are nowadays.

If I have a caveat, it’s this: Mr. Tulien closes his erudite account of the facts and story with pilot Nash’s thinking on what he and his co-pilot partner saw:

“Looking at the thing shook us up. We stared at each other, and all of a sudden there was this realization that our world is not alone in the universe. Because, nothing could have advanced to that degree of scientific progress without some of the intermediate steps having become public knowledge, or, at least known to the people who were flying. Bill had just come out of the Navy and was fully acquainted with their latest developments.  We just knew that they were not from this planet. I know to this day, that it was nothing from this planet.”

A jump of faith and logic, yes?

How could anyone conclude that the objects seen were not “from this planet”?

Even in 1952, the predilection was that odd things seen in the sky were interplanetary craft, ETs.

And as our friend Dominick writes, they may be, but that is a leap of reason that is flawed (unscientific), however not to some.

RR