Alfred Loedding & The Great Flying ...

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Special Preface
We must be cautious of the hubris of the present. When UFOs first appeared in numbers during
the great flying saucer wave of 1947, few people made the jump to an extraterrestrial hypothesis.
The subject of this book, Alfred Loedding, is significant because he did eventually lean toward that
assumption. Because he played such an instrumental role in the first official Air Force investigation
into the phenomena, it is important to analyze the progression of his theories.
For the best part of the summer of 1947 most serious minds studying the flying disc mystery, like
Alfred Loedding, considered that a domestic secret project might account for the sightings. After
eliminating that possibility, the "foreign origin" option was exhaustively explored. By 1948 foreign
origin became a catch word for visitors from outer space, but in 1947 it meant only one thing—
Russians. In fact, worries that the Soviet Union may have gleaned a Nazi super weapon at the end of
the Second World War remained in the minds of Air Force officials up through 1952. But by late
1947 some aeronautical engineers, like Alfred Loedding, began to consider that "flying saucers" may
represent intelligently controlled machines from another world. Why? What was the mind set in
1947 that could rationalize such a conclusion? What was his perspective? Where was the proof?
It is very difficult with our 1998 view of popular culture to consider a time when there was no
extensive set of preconceptions on extraterrestrial life. Without a Steven Spielberg to help us dream,
or a Star Wars trilogy and a thousand other such productions dating back to 1949, we would not
have the present-day mind set that we do. Yet, that is not to say there was not already some basis for
the consideration of alien visitation.
The best way for us to understand one early perspective is to look at Halloween night 1938.
During that famous evening the dramatic actor Orson Welles produced and narrated a radio drama
based on H.G. Wells' book, The War of the Worlds. Like the famous account of a Martian invasion,
the radio play was a frightening success. Unfortunately for many East Coast listeners, it seemed so
real that thousands flew into a panicked frenzy—actually believing aliens were landing in Grovers
Mill, New Jersey. The nation was certainly in a vulnerable state of paranoia due to the brewing
storm clouds in Europe. The Second World War would begin just one year later on September 1st
and Americans knew that they would soon be impacted by Hitler's madness.
2 Alfred Loedding and The Great Flying Saucer Wave of 1947
Many authors have used the panic caused by Orson Welles' radio drama as a foretelling
explanation for later UFO sightings. In other words, a belief has arisen that the radio drama planted a
seed in the public's mind—a self-fulfilling prophecy for extraterrestrial visitation. The historian,
however, will realize the concept of extraterrestrial life had already been firmly ingrained in the
public's mind since 1894 when Percival Lowell founded the Lowell Observatory near Flagstaff,
Arizona.
Lowell believed he saw signs through his huge telescope of canals on the Martian landscape --
proving to him the existence of intelligent life there. Some scientists agreed while others were
skeptical, but until the first Mars probes of the 1960s and 1970s showed just how lifeless the planet's
surface actually was, many people kept an open mind about the possibility. UFOs, never the less,
continued to be seen after we realized the near planets were uninhabited. Why?
UFOs are just that, unidentified objects in the atmosphere. Most of these turn out to be identified
or IFOs—always representing something of physical reality regardless of what they turn out to be.
For years debunkers have tried to use science fiction stories as an impetus behind UFO reports. But
the stimulus for the sightings is real, not imagined. Orson Welles had no more responsibility than
Percival Lowell for UFOs because as Alfred Loedding finally realized, whatever they represent, they
are a real phenomena. True, no proof has surfaced to tell us what the UFO phenomenon represents.
The continuing record of sightings detailed in this book will demonstrate clues to its anomalous
nature just as it did to Loedding. In the case of UFOs it seems the truth may be very extraordinary.
That, at any rate, is what Loedding came to suggest. And for that reason it is perhaps best to
remember the words of the late Dr. Carl Sagan who stressed that finding such extraordinary truths
always requires extraordinary evidence. Unfortunately, if Loedding ever did come across conclusive
evidence, it has not yet been discovered. As a result, this book studies the events of 1947 that we do
know and presents them just as Alfred Loedding lived them.
We can not disavow that Loedding might have had some cultural preconceptions in the back of
his mind. He did draft a formal conclusion to Air Force officials in mid 1948, stating that flying
discs may represent extraterrestrial visitation. But, he based his famous Estimate Of The Situation
draft on fact, not fiction. It was, however, rejected in part due to fears of generating another War of
the Worlds fiction-like panic.
Beyond that no one can say if popular culture tainted the history of man's modern interpretation
of UFO sightings. The point for the sake of objectivity had to be presented. Following is presented
the story of Alfred Loedding and the great flying saucer wave of 1947.
Introduction
The morning of July 4th, 1947, at 3733 Shroyer Road Dayton, Ohio, began very peacefully. An
initially hazy dawn yielded to a blue sky and a sunny but muggy day of eighty-one degrees. With the
after effects of the Second World War still being felt, the nation welcomed the long and bright three-
day holiday despite the heat. It felt strange, however, for Alfred Christian Loedding not to be at work
on a Friday morning. Loedding was a civilian aeronautical engineer at the well known Army Air
Force labs just down the road at Wright Field. He was also a workaholic who lived and breathed
aviation. Yet for all his talents, relaxing at home was not one of them.
His son, Donald, remembers his father always doing something when at the house. So maybe
that morning he was hard at work cleaning and tuning his prized 1946 Buick. Maybe he was down in
the basement working on a host of experiments that over the years made him one of America's first
Army-employed engineers to study rocketry and jet propulsion. Alfred preferred to be designing
away in his cellar as to be anywhere else.
His home-spun research did pay off over the years, giving him the experience needed to start the
first jet propulsion division at Wright Labs and file a whole host of patents. One of these even
included a design of a low aspect ratio (flying wing) aircraft — another one of Alfred's specialties.
It is, in fact, because of his cutting-edge innovative brilliance that we would like to know
Alfred's exact thoughts. Undoubtedly sometime during that Independence holiday he stopped to pay
close attention to the news. Since June 24th there had been a small number of unique stories in the
press concerning sightings of unidentifiable flying objects.
At the time these were coined "flying discs" or "saucers" after private pilot Kenneth Arnold
likened the nine objects he saw over the Cascade Mountains to "saucers skipping across the water."
No one then used the phrase UFO so "saucers and discs" became the catch words. But it was not
until that Independence day weekend that the sightings dramatically increased in intensity and
started to dominate news headlines. West Coast newspapers were the first to detail the stories,
although, by Sunday of that weekend even the New York Times had a page-one feature on the discs
and would do so for the next three days.
Alfred Loedding may have heard accounts of the latest sightings on the
4 Alfred Loedding and The Great Flying Saucer Wave of 1947
WNBC Bob Smith morning radio news show that Friday at 9:00 A.M. By Saturday he could have
caught some Midwest stories in print. Although when he began hearing or reading the accounts, it is
unlikely that he was surprised. Well, perhaps surprised, but certainly not unprepared.
Loedding, like a number of people in the years prior to the famous Arnold account, had observed
similar phenomena themselves. It was back in 1932 that Loedding, together with his wife Marion,
saw something that they never could explain. A Dayton, Ohio, news article detailed their incident as
follows:
In October, 1932, the couple saw such an object one evening while driving near Plainsboro, N.J., he
reported.
At first they thought an aircraft was crashing nearby, Loedding said. Then the craft leveled off and
flashed away at high speed, emitting a changing bluish-green light. On reaching his home, he immediately
sketched the object from memory. Later, Loedding said former New York congressman L.G. Clemente
reported he had seen such an object at about the same time. Loedding estimated the object he and his wife
had seen was 100 feet in diameter and 500 to 600 feet high. He said the object gave off a weird light "like
looking at a fire-fly" and appeared to change shape.
He said he had seen nothing of a similar nature since.
1
Alfred Loedding pictured second from the right
with Dr. Goddard on far left at his testing sight
in Roswell, New Mexico, during 1941.
Because he did not reveal that story until 1957, it is impossible to know his thoughts during that
first rash of disc sightings. Yet it would be fun to have read the mind of this brilliant engineer who
had graduated the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aeronautics back in 1930. This is especially
important because Alfred had been privately designing flying wing-shaped aircraft (then termed low
aspect ratio) and lecturing about the concept with a slide show since his 1932 sighting. Some of
these concepts by 1947 were translated into small working models, looking more like flying saucers
than flying wings.
Introduction 5
He certainly knew aviation, having held a key position with the Bellanca family in their famous
aircraft company before coming to work for Wright Labs in 1938. At Wright Labs he established the
first jet propulsion division and became the resident expert on rocketry. Loedding became the base's
key contact with rocket pioneer Robert H. Goddard.
2
However, having been periodically utilized
from his T-3 engineering section by the base's T-2 intelligence branch, it is fair to speculate that
Loedding might have had some hint of the more spectacular saucer stories before he returned to
work on Monday, July 7th.
Loedding at Bellanca aircraft company circa 1937.
He may have even been intrigued by the July 6th Sunday New York Times exclusive on the
recent deployment of two reactivated B-29 bomber groups to the West Coast—and how their
appearance coincided in place and time with many of the disc sightings. Being a dedicated German
Catholic he would have digested these stories after church on Sunday. And certainly that last day of
the long weekend he would have been mulling over all he had learned to date.
Up to this time the military had only issued a few and very contradictory statements on the
incidents. Loedding would have surely been aware of these because he knew and worked for many
key figures in the Army Air Force. On July 3rd, for example, Army Major Paul Gaynor stated that a
preliminary investigation had been dropped for lack of evidence. Then that same day Boise Evening
Statesman reporter Dave Johnson got a different slant from the commander of the Air Materiel
Command, Lieutenant General Nathan F. Twining. Twining, who had the T-2 Army Air Force
Intelligence group under his command, commented that officials were indeed looking into the matter
of flying discs. He stated that even the top secret research conducted at the aviation labs at Wright
Field had not produced technology comparable to that being observed. Continuing, he added that a
"reputable scientist" had seen one of the discs and that his report is being studied.
6 Alfred Loedding and The Great Flying Saucer Wave of 1947
Loedding would have learned shortly following that weekend that other units of the Army Air
Force were becoming interested in the sightings and in particular the Kenneth Arnold account.
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