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July 1947, something crashed on a remote ranch near Roswell, New Mexico. On July 8, the Roswell Army Airfield issued an emergency statement. The military found what they called a flying saucer. Within a few hours, the story changed. The object, the army announced, was not a flying saucer at all. It was a weather balloon. But the controversy surrounding Roswell was just the beginning. Reports of strange objects in the sky have increased across the United States. Some of them could be easily explained. Others were more difficult. And given the rapidly rising tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, the military could not
simply ignore the appearance of unidentified objects in American airspace. Then, a little over a year after Roswell, what would later be called one of the most amazing encounters of the early UFO era occurred over North Dakota. On the night of October 1, 1948, year-old Second Lieutenant George Gorman of the North Dakota Air National Guard was flying a P-51 Mustang over Fargo. And that night he saw a bright light moving through the darkness. Gorman pointed his Mustang in his direction. At first it was just a bright speck of light against a backdrop of darkness. But as Gorman closed the distance, his attention was drawn to the nature of the object's movement. The light did n't behave as he expected. Gorman continued toward the object, trying to get close enough to
figure out what it was. What happened next had his P-51 Mustang circling over Fargo for nearly half an hour and convinced the experienced pilot that he had encountered something he had never seen before. So what exactly did George Gorman encounter in the skies over Fargo? Why did an experienced military pilot become convinced that the object he was pursuing was under intelligent control? And did this extraordinary meeting help set the stage for the Air Force's most famous investigation into the UFO phenomenon- Project Blue Book? Let's try to figure it out. Hi, I'm Mike Droberg, a Marine Corps veteran and filmmaker, and we'll try to answer those questions on today's episode of Forgotten History.
The beginning of the most difficult days in the history of the Marine Corps With faith in our armed forces. The 36th President of the United States died this afternoon. There are women and children here. Ви повинні це припинити. In the years immediately following World War II, the skies over the United States became a source of growing concern. The war gave rise to extraordinary achievements in aviation. Jet aviation was becoming a reality. Rockets developed by Nazi Germany proved that weapons could fly farther and faster than ever before. But the war also gave rise to reports of something much more difficult to explain. Beginning in 1944, Allied aircrews over Europe began reporting mysterious lights that seemed to follow their
aircraft. These objects, sometimes described as luminous balls, could keep up with high-speed military aircraft and sometimes maneuvered around them. The pilots gave them the name "fu- fighters." Initially, some Allied crews suspected that this was a secret German weapon, but German and Japanese pilots also reported similar phenomena. And despite the investigation, no enemy aircraft or weapon was ever conclusively identified as the source of these sightings. When the war ended, the mystery did not disappear completely. And now, as relations between the United States and the Soviet Union deteriorated, American military strategists faced a new concern. The next unidentified aircraft over American
territory could be more than just an inexplicable fire in the sky. It could have belonged to the Soviet Union. Over time, Americans began reporting objects that did not look like airplanes at all. In June 1947, pilot Kenneth Arnold was flying near Mount Rainier in Washington state when he noticed nine unusual objects moving through the sky at incredible speed. The newspapers seized on this story. Within weeks, reports of strange objects began to come in from all over the country. The press called them "flying saucers." And what might otherwise have been considered a mere coincidence of unusual observations turned into a national phenomenon. However, for the newly formed US Air Force, the issue was much more serious. If even a small fraction of these objects
were real aircraft, then who was flying them? In late 1947, the Air Force authorized a formal investigation into the growing number of reports. The program was called "Project "Sign"". The investigators were tasked with collecting reports, interviewing witnesses, and determining whether these objects posed a threat to US national security. Most of the messages had the usual explanations. Airplanes, weather phenomena and astronomical objects. But sometimes there were reports from witnesses whose experiences were much harder to ignore. One such witness was George F. Gorman. On
October 1, 1948, Gorman was flying with other members of his unit on a cross-country training flight. These were P-51 Mustang aircraft. Developed during World War II, the Mustang was one of the best piston-engined fighters in history. Fast, maneuverable and well armed. It was created to escort American bombers deep behind enemy lines and confront German fighters on equal terms. But on this particular night, there Shortly before 9:00 PM, the group reached Fargo, North Dakota. The other pilots were preparing to land. Gorman-no.
He decided to stay in the air a little longer and practice night flying. Below, the lights of Fargo spread out in the darkness as Gorman circled the area. There was at least one other plane nearby, a civilian aircraft, approaching the airport, and then Gorman noticed something else-a light. The object was moving through the night sky near the airport. Gorman contacted the control tower. He wanted to find out what else was flying in the area. The controllers could explain the appearance of a civilian plane, but that other light was something else. From the ground, airport staff could also see it. Gorman steered his Mustang toward the object and began to close the distance. At first, it was difficult to distinguish it from any other light in the night sky.
Just a bright light moving in the darkness. Gorman flew the Mustang closer, and then the light changed direction. He turned the P-51 around and attempted a first approach. But as Gorman approached, the light suddenly accelerated and moved away. He followed him. The Mustang could reach speeds of over 400 miles per hour, but it could not catch up with the object. The light began to rise upwards. Gorman pulled the control stick towards him and flew up after him. Then he turned. What began as an attempt to identify a mysterious light turned into an aerial chase.
Gorman maneuvered for another interception attempt. Again the object seemed to avoid him. He made a sharp turn. The light changed direction. Gorman began the climb after him, at one point loading his Mustang so heavily that he later reported a brief loss of consciousness due to overload during the maneuver. When he came to, the light was still there. Every time he tried to intercept it, the light seemed to react. Gorman turned to it -it turned away. He tried to cut off the path-it changed course. Then the situation changed. Instead of running away from the Mustang, the light turned towards him.
Gorman watched it rapidly approach. For a few seconds, it seemed that the pilot and the object were flying directly at each other. Gorman held his course. The light continued to come closer. At what seemed to him a dangerously close distance, Gorman made a sharp maneuver to the side. The object flew nearby and continued on its way. Gorman turned the Mustang around again. Several times they seemed to take action against each other, with Gorman repeatedly trying to bring his Mustang into the tail of the object. But he could n't. The light seemed to be able to climb faster, make steeper turns, and accelerate faster than his P-51.
Eventually, the object began to rise again. Gorman followed him, steering the Mustang higher. At about 1,400 feet, the light was still above him. Then it rose rapidly upwards. Gorman tried to catch up, but the distance between them continued to grow. Finally the light disappeared from sight. The meeting lasted approximately 27 minutes. And while Gorman maneuvered his Mustang in the dark, several other people watched from below. And there was another plane in the sky with him. The question now was not simply what George Gorman thought he had seen. And what other witnesses saw. A Piper Cub, a small two-seat plane, was also flying near Hector Airport in Fargo at the time of the incident. On board were Dr. A. E. Cannon, a
local physician and experienced pilot, and Dr. W. D. Steyer. They also noticed a strange light. They saw Gorman's P-51 maneuvering in the night sky. They also saw an unknown light. At times it seemed like they were moving relative to each other as Gorman tried to make an interception. There were witnesses on earth as well. From the control tower at Hector Airport, traffic personnel observed part of the events. They saw Gorman's plane and they saw the light. Whatever George Gorman faced, the Air Force couldn't simply chalk it up to one pilot's imagination. There was indeed something luminous in the sky over Fargo. After landing, Gorman provided investigators with a detailed account of the encounter. Gorman described it as a dogfight and stated that he was
convinced there was intelligence behind the object's maneuvers. This was an extraordinary finding for a military pilot, and it caught the attention of the Sign project. Investigators also interviewed other witnesses. They inspected the Mustang. The plane was even ordered to be grounded until investigators could examine it. Then they did something unusual. Armed with a Geiger counter, investigators checked the Mustang from nose to tail for radiation. Initial indications were that Gorman's plane was more radioactive than the other fighter jet that remained on the ground. For a moment, the conclusion seemed significant, but additional tests yielded a more mundane explanation. Other aircraft that have flown recently have shown similar results,
likely due to the greater exposure to cosmic radiation at altitude. The results provide no evidence that the P-51 was physically damaged by what Gorman encountered. But investigators soon discovered something different. That same evening, as Gorman lifted his Mustang into the sky over Fargo, the U.S. Weather Bureau released a weather probe. A lighted device was suspended beneath it. But Gorman described something that seemed to accelerate, gain altitude, evade his attacks, and even come close to " head-on" his Mustang. How could this be a weather probe? The answer to this question eventually involved a scientist whose name would become inseparable from UFO history. J. Allen Hynek. Among the scientists who helped the Air Force with
this growing UFO problem was an astronomer from Today, Heinecke is remembered as one of the most famous figures in the history of UFO research. But in 1948 he was not a believer at all. The Air Force brought Heinecke into the Sign project precisely because many reports of unidentified objects could be explained by astronomy. Bright stars, planets, meteors, and other celestial bodies could seem strange to observers unfamiliar with the night sky. Heinecke's job was to help distinguish genuine mysteries from common mistaken identifications. And he approached this work as a skeptic. Investigators had to determine whether the light Gorman was chasing was capable of the extraordinary maneuvers he described. Their attention quickly turned to the weather probe
launched from Fargo that evening. The bullet carried a small device equipped with a flashlight, allowing it to be tracked after dark. From a distance, especially against a black sky with minimal visual landmarks, the ball's light could only appear as a bright point suspended in space. And this posed a serious problem for anyone trying to assess it from the cockpit of a high-speed aircraft. People estimate an object's speed partly by its size and distance, but Gorman had neither He didn't know how big the object was, and therefore had no reliable way of knowing how far away it was. If the light were only a few feet in diameter and relatively close, it might appear to be moving quickly. If it were much smaller and
further away, the same apparent motion could mean something moving very slowly. There was another complication. Gorman himself was moving. He made turns, gained altitude, dived, and constantly turned his Mustang around, trying to intercept it. This meant that the visible movement of light was observed from a platform flying at hundreds of miles per hour and constantly changing direction. Therefore, a relatively slow object could appear to move abruptly against the featureless night sky. But the bullet alone did not explain everything that investigators believed Gorman had seen. That night there was another bright object in the sky.
Jupiter. Under certain conditions, a bright planet seen from a maneuvering aircraft can appear to move in ways that have nothing to do with the planet itself. This raised an interesting possibility. Perhaps Gorman didn't spend 27 minutes chasing a single extraordinary object. Perhaps he observed several ordinary objects, perceiving them as one. Lights on a weather probe, a bright planet, and a P-51 Mustang fighter jet aggressively maneuvering in the nearly empty night sky. Together they could potentially create the illusion of something much more extraordinary. For Hynek and the Air Force, all the pieces were starting to come together. For George Gorman, no. He remained convinced that what he encountered behaved as if it were
guided by intelligence. Ultimately, the Air Force classified the Gorman incident as having a conventional explanation. But the matter did not disappear. As are the reports about her. Project Sign was soon replaced by Project Gradja, and then, in 1952, by the program that became synonymous with the U.S. government's investigation of unidentified flying objects. By the early 1950s, the "flying saucer" phenomenon had become impossible for the Air Force to ignore. Reports continued to come in from civilians, police, military personnel, and pilots. Most of them could be explained, but some did not lend themselves to
easy answers. And in 1952, the Air Force established Project Blue Book. Based at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, Blue Book collected, analyzed, and attempted to explain reports of unidentified flying objects. The goals were simple. Determine whether UFOs pose a threat to national security and whether they demonstrate technologies or capabilities unknown to the United States. J. Allen Hynek remained as a scientific consultant for the project. And at first his approach hardly changed. Hynek believed that many UFO sightings were the result of completely ordinary objects being observed under unusual circumstances.
Stars, planets or airplanes. But over the years, Hynek began to encounter cases that were much harder to dismiss. His problem wasn't that he suddenly became convinced that Earth was being visited by extraterrestrial ships. That was not true. Instead, Hynek began to become increasingly frustrated with the way some UFO reports were investigated. In his opinion, potentially interesting cases were sometimes dismissed too quickly. Witnesses were sometimes mocked, and explanations were sometimes accepted without proper scientific verification. Then one of the most shameful moments in Hynek's career occurred. In March 1966, dozens of people in Michigan reported strange lights in the
night sky. Among the witnesses were police officers. These sightings caused a huge stir, and Hynek was sent to investigate. Under intense pressure to provide an explanation, Hynek suggested that some of the reports could have been caused by glowing gases released by decomposing vegetation. The press reduced his explanation to two words: "swamp gas." The phrase became a national joke, but the controversy surrounding the Michigan sightings had consequences. Congressman Gerald Ford, who later became President of the United States, represented the state of Michigan and called for a congressional investigation into the UFO phenomenon. Eventually, the Air Force commissioned an independent scientific study at the University of Colorado, led by physicist
Edward Condon. His findings helped put an end to Project Blue Book. In December 1969, the Air Force announced the closure of this program. During its existence, the Blue Book has collected over 12,000 UFO reports. The vast majority of them were eventually classified as ordinary objects or those that could be explained. But hundreds of cases remained officially unidentified. For the Air Force, this did not mean extraterrestrial origin. This meant that the researchers lacked evidence to determine what exactly they were observing. Hynek, however, emerged from this experience a completely different person than the skeptic who joined the "Sign" project over 20 years ago. He began to believe that a small proportion of truly inexplicable
cases deserved serious scientific investigation. In 1972, Hynek introduced a system for classifying UFO encounters that became part of popular culture. Close contact of the first kind involves observing an unidentified object at a relatively close distance. Close contact of the second kind involves some form of physical influence or evidence. And close contact of the third kind involves reports of sightings of inhabitants or creatures associated with the object. Five years later, filmmaker Steven Spielberg borrowed Hynek's terminology for the title of his 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Hynek even appeared in the film in a cameo role. A previously hired by the Air Force to explain strange lights in the sky, he became one of the most recognizable scientific figures associated with UFOs. Nearly three decades earlier, George Gorman had posed a question to Hynek and the Air Force that would haunt UFO investigations for decades. Everyone agreed that something had been seen, but no one could agree on what it was. George Gorman continued to serve in the North Dakota Air National Guard and later left the military. Despite his extraordinary experience over Fargo, Gorman largely avoided the publicity that accompanied this UFO incident for decades to come. He died in 1982 at the age of 59. Whatever Gorman encountered that October night,
he took the answer with him. J. Allen Hynek continued to study UFOs after the completion of Project Blue Book. Eventually founding the UFO Study Center. He died in 1986. Over the following decades, the official position seemed relatively straightforward. The Air Force conducted an investigation into the UFO. The Blue Book project was closed. And there was no evidence that the unidentified objects were extraterrestrial technology or a threat to the United States. And then something changed. In 2017, Americans learned that the Pentagon was again investigating reports of unidentified objects encountered by military personnel.
The terminology has changed. UFOs became NIA. Unrecognized anomalous phenomena. Military videos have been released showing objects that Navy pilots and sensors were unable to immediately identify. Pilots began speaking publicly, Congress held hearings, and government officials testified under oath. And the Ministry of Defense created a new organization to study this phenomenon. All Environment Anomalies Research Office, or AARO. Unlike the days of Project Blue Book, the existence of this investigation is not a secret.
Today, the Pentagon openly publishes AE reports, images, and investigation results. Only in 2026 did AARO continue to publish military footage of AEs and incident documentation, including materials provided by US Armed Forces commands. It is important to note that if an object is called an E.U., it does not mean that the government considers it extraterrestrial. This means that at least at some stage of the investigation he was not clearly identified. Congress went even further. In 2024, the National Defense Appropriations Act mandated the creation of a special collection of AE records at the National Archives. Federal agencies have been instructed to identify and turn over records related to AEs for
further release, including documents about what the law calls technologies of unknown origin and non-human intelligence. The recordings are now being released gradually, with materials provided by the Department of Defense, the State Department, and other agencies. This is an extraordinary transformation. In 1948, George Gorman reported encountering an unidentified object over Fargo and became part of a secret military investigation that attempted to find out what Americans were seeing in their skies. Nearly 80 years later, the United States government publicly acknowledges that its military continues to encounter objects and phenomena that it cannot immediately identify. But this recognition raises another question. What
exactly are they telling us? Are some of them advanced technologies of foreign adversaries? Could a small number represent something truly unknown? During the Cold War, the mystery surrounding experimental aircraft and reconnaissance programs inevitably intertwined with reports of UFOs. Today, allowing the public to speculate about mysterious objects could just as easily conceal secret American technology, mask surveillance capabilities, confuse adversaries, or divert attention from programs the government would rather keep hidden. In
other words, even the government's newfound openness deserves close scrutiny. The terminology has changed. Even the government's willingness to acknowledge that such meetings are taking place has changed. But the question remains. What's really up there? Share your thoughts on Gorman's dogfight with the UFO in the comments below. Thank you for watching "Forgotten History." Please like, share, and subscribe. If you have any comments or ideas for the show, we 'd love to hear them. Ще раз дякуємо.
