UFO Over The North Pacific
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I was flying a Rivet Ball mission out of Shemya, Alaska in the summer of 1969. I was the Lucy, as the AMS was called. Many of the operators on missions staging out of Eielson AFB were named after Charles Schultz's Peanuts characters. That practice was carried over to missions flown from Shemya.
We had a normal mission with a re-entry event. Rivet Ball was configured on the right side of the aircraft with ten portholes and ten cameras filming through those portholes. When we flew out to cover the re-entry event, called "Gaslight" when it was seen, we would go to the top of the track and make a left turn down the track, thus turning our cameras towards the event.
We did get a gaslight that day and I and the rest of the Spooks, as we were called by the SAC crew, were fairly busy when the AC called me and asked me to look out one of the portholes. I told him I was pretty busy and had seen re-entry events in the past, but he insisted that look out the porthole.
It was getting close to dusk at the time. I got up and looked out a porthole and just over the horizon I saw what appeared to be a huge wheel that may have been slowly rotating. The sun was a little behind it and it appeared to be glowing. We were near the end of our track so I asked the AC to go back to the top of the track as quickly as possible and turn around and come back down the track.
We went balls to the wall up the track and turned back, but when we went back down the track the wheel, or whatever it was, had disappeared. I didn't think that much about it but I did put an SI (sighting) tag describing it in the Post Mission Flight Report (PMFR). We had just gone to water soluble PMFR's at the time. When we returned to Shemya, it was mentioned in the debriefing and the SAC commander, Colonel Stanley Ratto, was very interested.
He asked me what I thought it was and I replied that I didn't know. I tried to gaf him off a bit by suggesting that maybe the Soviets were testing an ABM and that was some type of aurora of dirt or something. Stanley was smarter than that and I should have known it. He said to me, "Gene, tell me where the ABM systems are located." I told him one around Moscow and told him where the other, permitted, one was as well. He then says, "Do you really think the Russians are going to violate the ABM treaty when they know we're always out here?", or words to that effect. I said no, he was right.
I sent the PMFR and left for Eielson on a turn-around the next day, along with the rest of the crew. Gene Gifford was the replacement AMS for Rivet Ball. The next day, I went into OPS at Eielson and went to Mission Management to look at the PMFR's I'd sent out on that deployment. I noticed that there was no SI tag on the last one, so I called Shemya on Autovon and asked to speak with Gifford. I wanted him to re-send the report.
He hesitated a bit and said that he no longer had the report. I asked why and was told that someone had spilled coffee on it. I asked how could that be as I had personally filed it in AAFJOG ops, in our little office area we had there. Gene then said that maybe I'd better speak with Colonel Ratto, but our OPS Officer, Captain Stanley got on the line and told me to forget it. I said, "forget it?' and Stanley replied "yes". I said, "Okay," and hung up and that's the last I ever heard about it.
To this day, I don't know if there was some sort of cover-up or if there was some kind of snafu. I do know it would be easy to cover something up, as we were the only ones out there, in contrast to Stellar Stu Skeen's later encounter, where a lot of other players were involved, including international players.
Oh, much later on, The USAF Foreign Technology Division at Wright Patterson AFB, Ohio told us that the film we sent them was blank.