William E. Smith Interview, 25 August 2001(b)
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| WS: | No, they didn't come close to us, and again, when we saw the aircraft in normal patterns, we could generally tell that they were aircraft. Typically, you saw a light pattern that was very far away. What we were seeing is a glob of light [gestures round shape] and what we saw with aircraft was typically, you could generally tell what it was. | |
| TT: | I would think they'd have a landing light coming in. | |
| WS: | Oh sure. You could see a landing light probably and those kind of things, but what we saw was a glob. What we saw, a larger sphere in one spot, and aircraft patterns are totally different. Number one, they're not that bright anyway from that distance. On a clear night, you could barely see them, see the lights, but what we saw was much larger, so we would not have been able to—and there were so many things going on it's very possible that whether they passed over us or not, I just couldn't tell. Plus being inside we wouldn't have heard them anyway. | |
| [Switches tape] | ||
| JK: | The suggestion from Wright-Patterson was that people were, at least part of the time, seeing stars and the B-52 itself, and what I think I'm hearing from you is this object you were seeing was clearly neither of those things. | |
| WS: | Clearly, from the perspective from Oscar, where we were at Oscar. Now it's possible some of the other people in the region may have seen some of those things, but where we were, we definitely could tell the difference between that object. What I'm saying is its' possible others people may have seen the '52, but from our perspective I'm sure we didn't. | |
| JK: | Well, in fact, other people do report seeing the B-52 come over... | |
| WS: | Right. But another thing that sort of struck me as strange because I know we have charts to show where Sirius was because we're talking about a star pattern that moves from east to west, and if that's true, that should be way above the horizon looking south. | |
| TT: | Also we're talking about a three-hour period. | |
| WS: | A three hour period of time. And Sirius doesn't bounce around [laughs] and move, go over this way to that, we just know that.
Were there some observations that gave dimensions of the object? | |
| TT: | The pilot. | |
| WS: | From the pilot. As a matter of fact, I remember them talking about how large it was and they were giving on the radio and the telephone as I was listening to it, some size dimensions, and I just can't remember precisely what they were, but they gave some general dimensions of what size they thought it was. | |
| TT: | They did compare to a KC-135. |
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