Dow Chemical
and the Scientific Analysis of UFO Debris
by Joel Carpenter
Most students of the history of UFOs are familiar
with the famous Ubatuba, Brazil case of 1957, in which metallic debris
said to have been retrieved after the explosion of a UFO was determined
to be magnesium metal of unusual composition. Few researchers are
probably aware of another, surprisingly similar incident that occurred
in the US at the dawn of the modern UFO phenomenon. This incident
directly or indirectly involved a host of people and organizations that
were later to have a major impact on the study of UFOs in the United
States, and points out that there is still much to be learned
concerning the early investigation of the phenomenon by the military,
the intelligence community and even, perhaps, by the corporate world.
Project Blue Book's detailed case file on the second
incident tells a weird and fascinating tale. According to Dow documents
preserved in the file, the event began just after 5:00 on the afternoon
of July 9, 1947, when a forty-five year old electrician named Raymond
Lane and his wife were picking huckleberries near Midland, Michigan. A
strange sizzling noise abruptly drew their attention to a bizarre mass
of bright white, fiery sparks hovering about a foot above the ground
and about a hundred feet away. It reminded them of a Fourth of July
sparkler, but it was much bigger -- the size, as they later put it, of
a bushel basket. The fireball burned brilliantly for about fifteen
seconds before dying out. When the smoke drifted away, there was
nothing left except some hot, light-and-dark-colored metallic-looking
debris on the sandy soil. Lane collected fragments of the material in a
tin can and considered whom to tell.
The mysterious fireball had appeared in a uniquely
appropriate place. Midland happened to be the home of one of America's
most well-equipped materials analysis facilities: the laboratories of Dow Chemical
company, well known for its metallurgical expertise and a world leader
in magnesium technology.
Shortly after World War I, Dow metallurgists had developed
an alloy that the company called "Dowmetal" -- refined magnesium to
which was added about six percent aluminum and one-half percent
manganese. Dowmetal was widely promoted for automotive and aviation
uses and was highly profitable for the company, eventually giving it a
virtual monopoly on magnesium production in the US. In 1933 the company
was approached by Belgian scientist Jean Piccard with a request to
design and build a Dowmetal cabin for a record-setting high-altitude
balloon flight. The design was highly successful and eventually enabled
flights to over 70,000 feet. During World War II Dow's extremely
lightweight, strong magnesium alloys became an indispensable ingredient
of aircraft and missile structures. The company also became a
contractor for an unusual flight test program that had a direct link to
Project SIGN, the Air Force's 1948 UFO research establishment.
See: Dow and Boundary Layer Control
One of the most significant figures behind Dow's success was
a chemist named John Josef Grebe [pronounced "gree-bee"]. Born Hans
Josef Grebe in Uerzig, Germany in 1900, he emigrated to Ohio in 1914
and became a US citizen in 1921. Grebe graduated from the Case School
of Applied Science in 1924 and was immediately hired by Dow. Considered
a genius by his colleagues and known as the "Idea Man," Grebe was given
free rein to work on projects of his own devising. He established the
company's Physical Research Laboratory, an organization that produced a
steady stream of valuable inventions, particularly in the field of
plastics. Chemists under his direction were responsible for the
discovery of several now-universally used plastics, such as styrene,
Styrofoam, and polyvinyl chloride, and also developed a synthetic
rubber that was vital to the US military in World War II.
Grebe even perfected a method of extracting magnesium from
sea water, a process that became Dow's main source of the metal. After
Japan's surrender Grebe was assigned to work with the Oak Ridge nuclear
laboratory, and in 1946 he was an observer at the Operation Crossroads
nuclear tests. He also worked closely with the US Army's Chemical Corps
on the highly classified toxicological and radiological warfare
programs (in fact, by 1948, Grebe would be named the Chemical Corps'
chief technical advisor).
The morning after the fireball incident, Lane took his can
of sandy debris to Robert S. Spencer, a senior researcher in Grebe's
laboratory, whom Lane had met when he was a Dow employee some years
before. Spencer contacted Edward Fales, the company's internal security
chief, and together the men went to the site to investigate. Lane told
the Dow officials that he thought the object had been a flying saucer,
or possibly a meteorite, and that some small lumps of silvery metal in
the debris he had scooped up might be platinum. (Ironically, there is
no evidence that he or anyone else ever reported seeing an object in
flight prior to the appearance of the fireball). Spencer immediately
arranged to have the material analyzed. The Spectroscopy Laboratory
quickly reported that the shiny pellets in the material were largely
silver mixed with a few percent silicon, which probably came from the
sand on which the molten material had solidified. The sample was
checked for radioactivity, but did not blacken photographic plates.
According to a report by Fales,
Preliminary tests of the material show the
contents to be as follows: ordinary sand, not radio active [sic],
but giving off an ammonia gas. A silver nugget, almost pure except for
sand mixed in it, not radio active. Melted or fused sand which gives
off ammonia, has little droplets of silver melted in the sand and some
other material which is not radio active. The fused sand has some
characteristics of the Los Alamos sand [i.e., the glassy material
created by the Trinity nuclear explosion] but is not believed to be
the same.
By the end of September the Lab had run more spectrographic tests on a
small quantity of a fine, light, ash-like powder laboriously sifted
from the debris. The powder turned out to be a material called thorite,
which was discovered to be somewhat radioactive. The remaining portion
of the debris yielded traces of iron, aluminum, magnesium, and other
metals. There was also evidence of a significant amount of magnesium
hydroxide, which some analysts took to be the remains of the combustion
of a sizable amount of magnesium.
Interestingly, Dow handled the case as a purely internal
matter at first. Fales' inquiries concerning Lane led him to conclude
that he was a somewhat peculiar individual who was known to have basic
technical expertise. On balance, the incident seemed likely to be the
result of some kind of home-made fireworks experiment. The FBI was
eventually contacted and an agent conducted a basic inquiry. As will be
seen, there was no Air Force involvement with the case in 1947.
Activity surrounding the Midland fireball incident became
dormant by the autumn of 1947 but was revived dramatically a year
later, when on September 17, 1948, Grebe, then working with the
Chemical Corps at Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland, requested an update on
the investigation from Dow. An examination of Fales' dossier set him to
speculating. In an October 11 memo to one of his Army superiors, he
wrote that
The only technical point that would tend to
discredit the report in a very slight way is that the particular
spectrum analysis that was made of the sand that was supposed to have
been picked up with the sample of the fused mineral matter, which
contained nuggets of silver, had a different analysis from the sand
picked up in the general area. It had rained, however, in the meantime,
which would remove any magnesium hydroxide that might have been around.
As a whole, it would appear to me that, every bit of
evidence found should be considered seriously as an indication that a
self-consuming missile capable of producing a considerable amount of
smoke and fire and leaving behind only the minimum residue required to
produce a battery and radio transmitter is feasible and was probably
observed.
This concept - that the small Midland fireball had represented the
self-destruction of some kind of instrumented projectile - marked a
drastic change in the official approach to the incident, bringing it in
line with the fears in 1946 and 1947 that some anomalous meteor-like
events were actually a type of "self-consuming missile" experiments.
See: Ghost
Rockets
See: Green Fireballs
It is not apparent from the available source material
exactly why Grebe chose this juncture to reopen the case, but there are
indications that similar studies were being performed at the time on
other samples of apparent UFO debris that were considered to be
possibly the remains of missiles. For example, on November 26, FBI
Director J. Edgar Hoover sent a memo to the Air Force's Director of
Special Investigations (IG), concerning a case similar to the
Midland incident.
Just two days before Lane's 1947 experience, a group of
people near the village of West Rindge, New Hampshire had been
surprised by the sudden appearance of wisps of smoke and flame rising
from nearby lawns and fields. Many small burned areas were discovered
to be scattered in a 200-foot diameter circle and seemed to have been
caused by hot fragments of metal that apparently had fallen from the
sky. A witness turned several of the fragments over to a Professor
"Rentges" of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for analysis.
(This was typical phonetic FBI spelling -- "Rentges" was apparently J.
Francis Reintjes of the MIT
Servomechanisms Laboratory where Project Whirlwind, a powerful
digital computer that would become the prototype for the SAGE national
air defense network, was under development at the time). Reintjes
expressed the opinion that the material, which had obviously been
subjected to "terrific heat," resembled the lining of the rocket
engines of German V-2 ballistic missiles he had seen in New Mexico.
Four of the collected fragments, when pieced together, appeared to have
been part of a hollow cylinder eight inches in diameter and having a
wall thickness of three-sixteenths of an inch. The West Rindge material
had been subjected to spectrographic analysis recently, Hoover
reported, and was determined to be ordinary cast iron that "had been
subjected to a very high degree of heat."
Additionally, in a letter titled "Flying Object Incidents in
the United States", dated November 3, 1948, Col. Howard McCoy of Air
Materiel Command's Technical Intelligence Division informed Chief of
Staff General Hoyt Vandenberg that his Project "Sign" flying saucer
analysts had interviewed Dr
Irving Langmuir of General Electric concerning the possible origin
of the objects, and that "it is planned to have another interview with
Dr. Langmuir in the near future to review all the data now available,
and it is hoped that he will be able to present some opinion as to the
nature of the unidentified objects, particularly those described as
'balls of light.'"
Study of this particular type of flying object - apparently
a tiny, remote-controlled or internally-guided probe - had gained
urgency after the October 1, 1948 incident in which an Air National
Guard pilot had engaged in a long nighttime dogfight over Fargo, North
Dakota with a small, fast-moving blinking light that was apparently
under intelligent control. It seems probable that this effort to
carefully analyze fragments of suspected flying saucers was part of the
escalating attempt to establish whether there was any credible evidence
of a foreign terrestrial origin of the objects - an approach that
achieved its highest expression with the publication, on December 10,
1948, of the Top Secret Air Intelligence Division Study 203, "Analysis
of Flying Object Incidents in the US". This study examined the
possibility that flying objects reported over the continental US
represented Soviet reconnaissance, training or provocation missions.
Meanwhile, John Grebe had taken his theory about the Midland
case to the highest levels of Army missile research. In the middle of
October he met with Col. Holger Toftoy, Army Ordnance, the commander of
Project Hermes, the Army's multifaceted guided missile program based at
White Sands, New Mexico. Shortly after the Nazi surrender Toftoy had
supervised the removal of some one hundred V-2 missiles from
underground factories and had them transported to White Sands. Under
Project Paperclip, the German rocket engineers who had created the V-2,
including Wernher von Braun, were moved to Fort Bliss to work with
Toftoy's Ordnance team and General Electric, the contractor for Project
Hermes, in reconstructing and launching the missiles.
Toftoy's log
for October 18, 1948 records Grebe's surprising presentation:
Conference attended by Cols Toftoy, Roberts
& Bainbridge (CC), Maj J.F. Gay & Dr. J. J. Grebe, (Chemical
Corps), and Dr. Mugson. Chemical Corps reported analysis of fragments
picked up from '"flying saucer" which vanished with a brilliant flash
and bang near Midlin [sic], Michigan. Sand and clinker recovered from
the locality contained nuggets of fairly pure silver and some thorium.
The thorium was sufficient to give radio activity [sic] approximately
10 times natural background which could possibly be ascribed to thorium
coated filaments in electronic equipment, although the quantity seems
excessive. There was evidence also of mechanism [magnesium] which had
been completely oxidized. Dr. Grebe advanced his hypothesis that small
missiles of the order of 1 to 3 feet in diameter might be responsible,
coming from distant sources. He considered that a rapidly rotating disc
of mechanism [magnesium] and/or aluminum might have enough energy if
properly utilized to propel the disc several thousand miles, and might
be completely destroyed by burning in air. Remaining traces of silver
and thorium might be ascribed to electronic control system. After
discussion, it was agreed that Col Roberts should request the Bur of
Standards group to investigate some of the mechanisms which might
conceivably propel discs of this general type and TU will keep in close
touch with these calculations (CMH). A meeting next Monday, 25 Oct, can
be arranged with Dr. Grebe if indications are favorable. Dr. Grebe also
briefly described a theory of his that a fish-shaped object with a
modified tear-drop cross section would take off along the long axis and
change position in flight to fly at an angle more like a flying wing.
No wings or other aerodynamic surfaces that produce drag would be
required.
Grebe clearly envisioned the Midland object as a
small, unmanned vehicle containing 1940s state-of-the-art vacuum tube
based electronic equipment, and given that he specified its range as
"thousands of miles," he apparently believed that its source was the
Soviet Union. The intriguing vision of a fast-spinning, flywheel-like
object that would destroy itself at the end of its trajectory was
novel, to say the least, but Grebe had a good reason for this idea. One
of Dow's most secret and most vital wartime projects had been the
development of a structural housing for the miniature radio transmitter
that formed the heart of the "VT" - the proximity fuse.
The radar like VT fuse was designed to detonate an artillery
shell at the exact moment that it passed within lethal range of its
target, such as an aircraft or missile - or in anti-personnel
applications, just as it descended to within a few yards of the ground.
To do so, it incorporated a tiny radio transmitter and receiver built
from highly miniaturized and ruggedized vacuum tubes. These tubes had
to survive shock and acceleration amounting to thousands of g's when
fired from a heavy gun, as well as the enormous centrifugal force of
the shell's stabilizing spin. Dow's contribution was the design and
production of a special plastic housing for the tiny tubes, and the
project was carried out in such secrecy that most of the technicians on
the project only learned of its exact function at the end of the war.
(The proximity fuse design effort was headquartered at the
Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland and
was directed by Merle Tuve, whose administrative assistant was an
astronomer named Josef Allen Hynek.) Grebe's saucer concept amounted to
something much like an artillery shell, possibly combined with an
aerodynamic shape that would allow a degree of flight after the device
arrived in the vicinity of its target. The VT shell had incorporated a
novel battery that was energized when its chemicals mixed due to the
shock of launching, and Grebe believed that the disc-missiles used
something similar. Presumably the self-destructing feature would
prevent US analysts from recovering intact specimens of the vehicle.
The "Bur of Standards group" referred to in the memo was the
National Bureau of Standards' Ordnance Development department, a secret
guided missile research establishment operating within the
weights-and-measures agency, which had worked closely with the Army and
Navy during WWII under the direction of Harry Diamond and Dr. A. V.
Astin.
The Ordnance department's first products were highly
classified miniature radio components for the proximity fuse. Diamond's
group, along with Hugh Dryden, from the Bureau's Mechanics and Sound
department, also developed some of America's first "smart weapons"
during the war, including the "Robin," a television-guided bomb, the
"Pelican," a passive-radar-homing glide bomb, and the "Bat," a
1,000-pound radar-guided anti-ship glide weapon.
To help pack more and more electronic components into
missiles, the Bureau had perfected increasingly miniaturized vacuum
tubes, and by the end of the war, its technicians helped invent a
process for literally painting circuitry onto insulating substrates,
the forerunner of modern printed circuits.
The Director of the Bureau of Standards since November 1945
was Edward U. Condon. The New Mexico-born physicist had been J. Robert
Oppenheimer's roommate at the University of Göttingen, Germany, in
the 1920s. He co-founded the MIT Radiation Laboratories and did
fundamental work on radar theory and application at Westinghouse. When
General Leslie Groves set up the Los Alamos laboratory of the Manhattan
Project in 1943, he had asked Condon to be associate director under
Oppenheimer. Later Condon had been a member of the executive committee
of the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics (NACA), the
forerunner of NASA.
When Condon left the Bureau of Standards in 1951, it was to
become head of research and development at Corning Glass Works, a
corporate relative of Dow (via the Dow Corning partnership). In light
of the Air Force - sponsored University of Colorado UFO study in the
1960s which Condon directed (and during which his personal antipathy to
the subject became legendary), it is tempting to speculate that
Condon's involvement with UFOs actually might have begun a decade and a
half earlier.
Unfortunately, there is as yet no evidence that the Bureau
of Standards "disc propulsion study" that Toftoy advocated actually was
undertaken. Interviews with several surviving members of the Bureau's
Ordnance and Electronics departments have uncovered no recollection of
any such project. Grebe's theory did, however, make enough of an
impression at senior military levels that a report quickly reached
General Vandenberg's office. Vandenberg cabled Project Sign on December
2 inquiring about Sign's investigation of the case. Project Sign
admitted in a December 21 teletype that it had no details on the
Midland incident and sheepishly requested copies of Grebe's report from
the Chief of Staff.
Interestingly, there is some evidence that the Bureau of
Standards was involved with yet another case concerning magnesium from
a UFO. In 1952, five NBS scientists allegedly analyzed a fragment of
metal supplied by Cdr. Alvin Moore, USN, who said that it had fallen on
his property during the July 1952 "Washington, DC Invasion". The
scientists subjected the material to a battery of tests, including
spectrographic analysis, and concluded that it was an artificially
produced artifact. It was composed mostly of magnesium, had a specific
gravity of 3.48 and was filled with millions of microscopic iron
particles. Like the West Rindge fragments, it appeared to be a section
of a cylinder, which when complete would have been 10.4 inches in
diameter. Cdr. Moore decided that Project Blue Book should know about
the discovery. He mailed it to Captain Edward Ruppelt, who sent it on
to the Battelle Memorial Institute, where Howard Cross gave it a
cursory examination.
There are hints that Harry Diamond Laboratories, which
eventually spun off from the Bureau of Standards to become part of the
Army Research Laboratories, conducted a study of radar UFOs at some
point in the early 1960s, but hard evidence is unavailable to date.
Dow's 1947 analysis of magnesium debris from a suspected UFO
crash near its own headquarters foreshadows the company's involvement
with the far more famous Ubatuba material. These fragments first
surfaced in September 1957 (although other accounts exist - see Sources), when
they were mailed anonymously to a reporter for a Rio de Janeiro
newspaper, who in turn passed them to Dr Olavo Fontes, the Brazilian
representative of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO). Coral and
Jim Lorenzen, APRO's directors, were impressed by an analysis
performed at a laboratory in Brazil, and upon obtaining the samples,
Coral Lorenzen arranged to have Dow's magnesium experts study them.
The fragments probably reached the US immediately after the
launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik on October 4, and it seems
likely that there was suspicion in some US circles that the Ubatuba
episode could be related in some way to Soviet intercontinental
ballistic missile experiments. Soviet Premier Khrushchev had boasted in
August that his new ICBM could strike any point on earth, and now it
had been used to launch a globe-circling satellite. In the feverish
atmosphere of the post-Sputnik US defense community, no one could
afford to overlook intelligence leads -- even tenuous ones. On December
1, 1957, US Army ground search parties were called out in Alaska after
sightings of unusual meteors raised suspicions that part of the Sputnik
launcher rocket had entered the atmosphere there.
See: The
Last Ghost Rocket: Did the Sputnik 1 Launcher Fall in Alaska?
The unusually high purity of the UFO-related magnesium
detected by the Brazilian laboratory may have set off alarms in the US,
and part of the debris was conveyed to Dow for analysis. Similar
searches for fragments of downed Soviet spacecraft became quite
frequent in the 1960s and 70s and would become known as "Moon Dust"
events.
See: Moon Dust events
In 1967, under the auspices of the Air Force-sponsored UFO
study based at the University of Colorado and headed by Edward Condon,
investigator Dr. Roy Craig obtained a portion of one of the Ubatuba
fragments in order to subject it to neutron activation analysis. Since
the Brazilian analysis in 1957 had indicated that the material was
extremely pure magnesium - purer than terrestrial technology could
produce, according to APRO - Craig contacted Dr. R. S. Busk, head of
Dow's Metal Products Department.
During or shortly after World War II, Dow had
developed a sublimation refining process under which magnesium was
heated to vapor and condensed in a vacuum chamber. After three such
cycles, the material, for all practical purposes, was pure magnesium
with only the most minute residue of other elements. Busk supplied
Craig with triply-sublimed material as a reference sample, and while
doing so, mentioned Dow's earlier test of the Ubatuba material. In a
letter to the author, Craig recalled that
[P]ersonnel at the Dow laboratories were
interested in UFO-related materials. They were most cooperative in
furnishing pure magnesium samples and doing whatever analytical work I
requested relating to the Ubatuba magnesium samples. I was surprised to
learn that, years previously [possibly as early as 1958 - JC], they had
done metallographic studies of the very samples of Ubatuba magnesium I
was then asking them to analyze. They showed me the results of their
earlier work, which they still had on file, and repeated the work for
me.
Interestingly, Craig himself had worked for Dow for eight years at the
Atomic Energy Commission's Rocky Flats Weapons Plant in Colorado, which
was a Dow-managed facility that John Grebe had helped establish. Craig
did not know Grebe, but they had mutual friends. He had never heard of
the Midland case, and, perhaps not surprisingly, has no recollection of
Condon describing any earlier involvement with UFO research.
The neutron activation analysis Craig oversaw showed that,
in contradiction to the Brazilian claims, the Ubatuba sample contained
more impurities than the triply-sublimed sample, and could in fact have
been made by terrestrial technology. Controversy over the significance
of the particular constituents of the Ubatuba sample continues, as does
analysis of the material using the latest techniques.
1958 advertisement for Dow magnesium cruise missile
components
Grebe continued to work on nuclear projects at Dow until he
retired. He died in Sun City, Arizona in 1984. His younger brother
Carl, a scientist himself, recalls discussing flying saucers with John
in the 1940s, and though they never discussed the Midland incident in
detail, he agrees with John's former Dow colleagues that the spinning,
self-destructing missile described in the Toftoy memo is exactly the
kind of idea that Grebe's fertile mind would produce. The parallels
between the Midland and Ubatuba incidents, separated by a decade and by
thousands of miles, are striking. Were both incidents simply hoaxes, or
is there still more to be learned about Ubatuba? Even Dr. Olavo Fontes
observed, in his report on the Brazilian analysis of the Ubatuba
fragments, that
The mystery of that sudden explosion probably
will never be solved. It may have been produced by the release of some
self-destructing mechanism to prevent the machine from falling into our
hands and thus giving us the chance to learn its secrets.
Sources
Cochrane, Rexmond C., Measures for Progress. A History
of the National Bureau of Standards, NBS Special Publication 275.
Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1966
Ray Boundy and J. Lawrence Amos, eds, A History of the
Dow Chemical Physics Lab: The Freedom to Be Creative. New York:
Marcel Dekker. 1990
Brandt, E. N., Growth Company: Dow Chemical's First
Century. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1997
US Air Force Project Blue Book "July 9, 1947
Midland, Michigan" case file
Col Holger Toftoy daily log, October 1948
Note: While the Ubatuba material is typically said to
have first surfaced in September 1957, some sources link its origin to
much earlier Brazilian "mystery crashed airplane" stories from the
pre-WWII period. Until better information is available, I assume that
the 1957 version is correct.
Ubatuba Case
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