Fargo and the Gorman Dogfight
On the evening of 1 October 1948 Lieutenant George Gorman of the National Guard was on approach to Fargo when he saw a fast point of light beside him — no body, no navigation lights. For the next twenty-seven minutes he tried to catch it: it turned away, came head-on, and climbed more steeply than his fighter could. The chase was watched from the ground by a controller and by two men in a light aircraft. The Air Force explanation is a lit weather balloon, and it is plausible: the balloon is stationary and all the manoeuvring is produced by the pilot circling it. Gorman disagreed for the rest of his life; the transcript of his debriefing that same evening is still read as a model of a detailed report.
Coyame and the Crash That May Not Have Happened
On 25 August 1974 US radar over the Chihuahua desert picked up an unidentified return heading north and, almost at the same time, a light aircraft. The returns merged and vanished. In the version set out in a document that reached an American researcher in 1978, a Mexican military party found the wreckage of a disc in the desert, and then contact with the party was lost. The document is a typed report with no signature and no classification, of unknown provenance. No agency in either country has ever confirmed it. The case survives in the literature as an example of a story grown entirely out of one piece of paper, and is useful for exactly that: there is nothing in it to check.
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