Fort Monmouth, New Jersey: Radar tracks fast target, T-33 crew sees silver object
On 10 September 1951, a student operator at the Army Signal Corps radar center at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, tracked a target too fast for automatic tracking; 25 minutes later the crew of a T-33 saw a silver object at 900 mph over Sandy Hook.
Background
At 11:10 a.m., a student operator demonstrating radar functions to visiting officers at the Army Signal Corps radar center at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, picked up a target moving too fast to be tracked automatically. The object seemed to follow the coastline; he tracked it intermittently for 3 minutes before it disappeared to the northeast at 700 mph. At 11:35 a.m., Lt. Wilbert S. Rogers, piloting a T-33 jet trainer with Maj. Edward Ballard aboard, spotted a “silver-colored object about the size of a fighter plane” flying at 900 mph at 5,000–8,000 feet over Sandy Hook; it made a 90° banking turn and disappeared out to sea. A second radar tracking at 3:15 p.m. involved a slower object that turned out to be a balloon. The account follows the entry in George M. Eberhart's chronology UFOs and Intelligence (CUFOS) and the sources cited there; it is not an independent determination by From Beyond Space.