| By Steve Allison, Grantsville 2012
Here is a non-Calhoun UFO account.
In fall of '59, I was stationed outside of Baltimore at the fire
control center of a Nike Ajax missile base, part of a ring of such
bases that served to protect our 'worthy' DC critters.
After my pay was depleted for the month, I would go up to our mobile
units and 'train' on the two types of radar we had, one a tracking
radar for guiding the missile and the other, longer range radar that
reached out 60 miles to initially find aircraft.
Once located, a
cursor system using an azimuth strobe and range circle, which would be
centered on the aircraft target and these coordinates were passed to
the tracking radar that then locked onto the target up to 100,000
yards (~57 miles total) distant.
When fired, the missile followed input from that tracking radar to
destroy the target.
One evening, I was at my assigned station, alone in the trailers so
for entertainment, I would run our acquisition, lock-on and 'fire'
exercises by leading a target on my scope and then running over to the
other trailer to lock on and 'destroy' the target.
A one-man "terrorist" firing blanks.
You could also manually set the tracking radar on a stationary point
from the horizon to 12 o'clock and any compass direction so I would
also pick up ground targets and 'shoot' them too.
A radio alert suddenly came in from NORAD, the system that was located
in Alaska to detect incoming bad guys from the USSR.
The radioed NORAD alert stated an incoming target at high speed and
altitude coming roughly from the direction of Russia and headed SSW, I
spotted the target that made a blurry, elongated trace on the screen
and in two sweeps of the antenna at 30 RPM crossed nearly through the
center of the screen producing only two smeared blips before it was out
of range.
A normal aircraft produced a spot, not a smear on the
display screen.
This means it had traversed ~100 miles of screen in ~5 seconds (2 ½
sweeps of the antenna).
This calculated to be 70,000 miles per hour.
Whatever it was, was also seen visually by several ground observers
along its route as well as a report from the Canadian military radar
folks.
This wasn't long after Sputnik, but no one on the planet had any device
that could go faster than roughly 20,000 mph or a bit above the escape
velocity of 18-19,000 mph necessary to achieve orbit.
It wasn't a meteor but some high speed, high altitude object that both
radar and the eye could briefly see.
And it wasn't 'one of ours.'
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