The year in between 1970 and 1972 on July 14 on a single night when a series of events led to the crash of an F-106, the back bone the Strategic Air Command interceptor defense in pursuit of a UFO. On that very fateful night, a small flap occurred within a three-state region that left astonished witnesses in its wake! While Project Blue Book officers scrambled to interview onlookers. Meanwhile the Pentagon, startled by the series of events ordered a DEFCON alert, until conclusions could be reached by investigators.

It all began in the evening hours in Eastern Kentucky when a farming couple were alarmed at their livestock going into a panic and went outside to see what had disturbed their animals. Up above in the night shy they saw an illuminated disk type craft and stared at it for a few moments when it suddenly climbed out of sight into the upper atmosphere. At once, their farm animals upset at the intrusion settled back down. The man and wife were left stunned by what they’d seen.

Meanwhile, a pickup truck owner decides to pull to the shoulder of the road and take a break from driving. After lighting up a cigarette, he suddenly notices a lighted object approaching his vehicle head on at high speed. It happens so fast there’s nothing he can do as his truck is struck so hard that he loses consciousness and awakes hours later in a hospital. An hour later into the night a woman in Central Virginia is awakened as powerful lights from out in the night floods the windows of her two-story house. Grabbing her Bible, she walks out to her porch and watches as a brilliantly lit saucer shaped object with a glowing blossom on its underside hovers s few feet off the ground just across the road from his home.

As she watches in stunned silence, something from a science fiction movie unfolds before her as a blue beam of light descends to the ground and a figure unveils from the shaft of light. It is a robotic looking entity that approaches her, but she does not flee in terror, she is a woman of faith and trusts in God. The being seems to drift in mid air and then unfolds its mechanical arms. She tells Blue Book officers later that it asked her if she was afraid and she answered no, and at that, the entity returned to its ship and the UFO silently flew off into the night.

In that same evening of July 14^th, the Silver Hill Radar site in Washington DC is monitoring air traffic when they spot a bogie on their radar screen. There is no scheduled flight for that sector of their fight corridor so they ask an approaching charter jet crew to make visual contact, but to no avail. Next, they contact a passenger jet flight asking the crew for visual confirmation and they do make a visual sighting, describing a lighted saucer shaped craft that seems to hover at such a slow speed that no jet could do this without losing altitude and crashing! Silver Hill Radar Site alerts Andrews Ari Force Base in Maryland that a UFO is within the controlled air space. A pair of F-106 Delta Darts are scrambled to intercept!

In two minutes, the F-106’s are taking off down the runway. At a top speed of 1,525 mph. these super sonic interceptors can reach a target fast as they are vectored to the location of the UAP by Silver Hill Radar center. The height finding instrumentation puts the object at more than 6,000 feet and climbing. As both supersonic fighters climb to meet their rendezvous with fate, the First Lieutenant’s wingman, Red Leader, peels off having hydraulic system failure leaving only a single pilot to pursue!

By now the UAP continues to climb and the pilot, much like Captain Thomas Mantell in 1948 in his P-51 Mustang chasing a higher altitude UFO over Godman Airfield that led to his fatal crash. Only today 22 years later in an F-106 the remaining pilot has the bogie radar locked even though Silver Hill flight center has lost the target. Higher and higher the fighter is pulled up into the atmosphere, witnesses at a construction site below watch as the F-106 driver takes his plane into s series of combat maneuvers! Silver Hill Radar tracks the pilot now exceeding his maximum service ceiling at 60,000 feet! The ground witnesses then watch in stunned awe as the F-106 is seen plunging straight downward at more than 1,100 miles per hour, crashing in a fireball.

What did the pilot see that convinced him to pursue beyond the envelope of his aircraft? Later investigation shows that his canopy separated from the F-106 and fell to the ground leaving the pilot under catastrophic decompression and failing to eject! The glowing white object that he had been trying to intercept seemed to have merged with the jet fighter before the pilot lost control of his interceptor! It then departed the area. The pilot seemed to not be in control of his aircraft as though it were drawn in by the UAP just before impact with it.

Project Blue Book was now under pressure to solve the mystery behind these sightings! Chiefs of staff at the Pentagon wanted answers fast! A major alert had been sent out and a wartime level of readiness had been ordered until some explanation had been arrived at! Doctor J. Allen Hynek had been called in to provide some kind of scientific evaluation for the public. His astrophysics background would rely upon heavily in order to quell the potential for public panic in the midst of the “Cold War” against the Soviet Union. Hynek would explain away the sighting reported by the famer and his wife as march gas causing a visual distortion such as a mirage would appear.

Project Blue Book officers interviewed the truck driver who had suffered injuries and shock, but he refused to accept any other explanation other than that it was an intelligently guided craft that had intentionally struck his truck! Doctor Hynek explained this is the rare phenomenon known as “Ball Lightning” that had collided with his pickup, noting the burn marks on the hood!

However, after interviewing the woman who had sighted a huge glowing saucer that had hovered over the ground in a field across from her front door? There was no way to dismiss what she had seen. The lady was sharp, and confident of her sighting, noting she had held her Bible in her arms in the face of a bizarre experience that would have left many people in terror. The two officers at Blue Book had the unenviable task of contacting the deceased F-106 pilot’s widow in order to establish what state of mind her husband had been in before he had flown on that fateful early morning hour call to intercept an unknown. She was predictably angry with the US Air Force and suspicious of what information had been available over the fatal incident! After reporting directly to the Pentagon Chiefs of Staff, and reporting their findings the DEFCON alert status was downgraded to a peacetime level.

The canopy to the pilot’s F-106 was recovered 4 miles form the crash site and analyzed. It was determined that two types of damage had occurred. Fractures that had taken place inflight and the secondary damage that had been caused by the high altitude fall and impact with the ground. Technicians were unable to determine what had forced the canopy to separate from the F-106 fuselage, but that it had contributed to the pilot’s loss of control. And so ends another mysterious chapter written in the pages of UAP history and what many have called, “The Undeclared Air War” above our skies.