The RB47 UFO Case(s)

Someone recently claimed to have solved the 1957 RB47 UFO case.

What they're obviously unaware of is that there was more than one RB47 case - although the 1957 one is the spectacular one, there were others. UFOs made a habit of playing tag with one of the most sophisticated electronic surveillance airplanes in the world.

One of the other incidents involved a plane in which Lieutenant Colonel Bruce Bailey was flying as an ECM officer. Bailey, pictured at the left with me in his home outside of Dallas, Texas, back in 2006, has served as the de facto historian for the RB47 since his retirement (his book We See All is a wonderful airman's memoir of what it was like to fly back then). He describes his crew's own incident in my just completed documentary, Best Evidence: Top 10 UFO Cases. Bailey (third from right in the photo at left, back in his USAF days) also describes the aftermath, not only of his incident, but of others involving RB47 crews, including the classic 1957 case. To the best of my knowledge, this was the first time he had talked about his case on camera.

Critics like Phil Klass have had a hard time solving just one RB47 case. It gets even harder to solve several, all of which had the same general characteristics, and all of which were reported by the best crews the United States Air Force had flying back then, with the best equipment - guys who more than once came up wing-to-wing with the Soviets, and never backed down.

In short, the kind of men you could rely on to not get rattled by simple lights in the sky.

Paul Kimball