Green fireballs

 ( Ufos By Type ) 

A February 1949 conference at Los Alamos attended by members of Project Sign, scientists including Joseph Kaplan and Edward Teller, and military personnel was unable to identify the origin of the observed green fireballs; secret conferences at Los Alamos and elsewhere, later in 1949 and addressing green fireballs, were also claimed by Edward Ruppelt and ufologists including Jerome Clark to have convened. Clark, Jerome (1956) "The UFO Book: Encyclopedia of the Extraterrestrial", Visible Ink Press In December 1949 Project Twinkle, a network of green fireball observation and photographic units, was established but never fully implemented. It was discontinued two years later, with the official conclusion that the phenomena were likely natural in origin.

The theoretical astrophysicist and UFO skeptic Donald Menzel claimed to have observed in May 1949 a green fireball near Alamogordo, which he later considered to be an ordinary meteor.Menzel letter, May 16, 1949, cited at an Air Force Scientific Advisory Board meeting on the green fireballs in Washington, D.C., Nov. 3, 1949. The quoted section read, "Circumstances force me to conclude that the phenomena described are actually real. With regard to Dr. Kaplan's meteor explanation, which deserves very serious consideration, I merely raise the question as to why the phenomenon seems to be confined to the Alamogordo region."For example, in contrast to his 1949 private statement to the Air Force that he didn't find the meteor explanation totally adequate, Menzel later wrote in his UFO debunking book "The UFO Enigma" (1977) with Ernest Tavres that, "He and several other astronomers present observed the bright green object as it slowly traversed the northern sector of the heavens, moving from east to west: they quickly and unequivocally identified it as a meteor, or bolide..." Green fireballs have more recently been observed in Japan, Australia, West Virginia and Tennessee.