Illustration by Brian Smith
On a mild, slightly breezy March evening in 1959, two men in the Old Lake Highlands area spotted something odd in the sky over White Rock Lake — cylindrical, dime-sized from their perspective and aluminum in color. It moved in a straight but rolling path northward for about 10 seconds, then vanished. That’s how they described it to the United States Air Force, which in 1954 launched project 10073, or project Blue Book, whereby they conducted studies of UFO sightings. Reports were declassified in 2004. When the operation ceased in ’70, agents had recorded more than 12,000 UFO sightings; the majority, investigators ruled definitively explained — usually as misidentified clouds or stars (“natural phenomena”), conventional aircraft or clandestine military aircraft unfamiliar to civilians. But, a small percentage of cases went unexplained. Including this one. Our witnesses’ names are censored, but the documents show that one was a 37-year-old supervisor at Temco Aircraft in Garland. The other was a 35-year-old service manager at Royal McBee Typewriter Corp. According to the March 1 record card: “It is impossible for this station to determine if there were any aircraft in that area at this certain time.” In other words: unidentified, unexplained.
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The U.S. Air Force’s Project Blue Book reports were declassified in 2004. Among the relatively few unexplained UFO sightings was one over White Rock Lake. (Department of Defense Technical Intelligence Division, 1947-1951 via national archives catalogue)
