Welcome back! This month we're looking at strange green fireballs seen near Las Vegas, New Mexico. Let's dive in.
In November 1951, TIME Magazine published an article about the "Great Balls of Fire" phenomenon. There had been multiple sightings of "flying green lights" or "fireballs" in the skies of New Mexico a few years earlier in 1948. These sightings fascinated so many people that it has become a significant chapter in the history of UFO sightings, due to both the sheer number of sightings and the credibility of the witnesses.
The sightings were mainly focused near the Los Alamos and Sandia atomic-weapons laboratories as well as highly-sensitive military locations such as radar stations and fighter-interceptor bases. This concentration of sightings greatly unsettled the U.S. military. It also meant that these sightings were mostly reported by trustworthy witnesses: military and civilian pilots, scientists, weather observers, intelligence officers, and other defense personnel.
In 1952, Edward J. Ruppelt, the director of Project Blue Book's UFO investigations, visited the Los Alamos National Laboratory to interview scientists and technicians. He found they became excited when he suggested the possibility of interplanetary vehicles. In his Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, Ruppelt wrote that interviewees "had been doing a lot of thinking about this... and they had a theory." They believed the fireballs were extraterrestrial probes that were "projected into our atmosphere from a 'spaceship' hovering several hundred miles above the Earth."
Government investigators were only able to conclude the fireballs were some sort of never-before-seen natural phenomenon. The widest-believed, non-UFO theory is the lights came from Soviet spy devices. Another popular explanation was nuclear fallout.
UFO researcher Jan Aldrich believes the green fireballs were related to aerial phenomena seen in 1949, near Fort Hood, Texas. He says, "Writing these off as natural phenomena did not solve the problem. It just pushed it under the table."
