[Dion]

The Gorman Dogfight, 1948

About a half hour later, most of the pilots flying decided to call it a night, but Gorman wanted to get in more flying time. According to a story in The Fargo Forum dated Oct. 3, 1948, Gorman was flying near Hector Field, about two and a half miles from the football field, when an air traffic controller told him about a small Piper Cub in the area.

He acknowledged the smaller plane about 500 feet below, but a few minutes later, he spotted something else.

He said it was a "flying disk," was round with well-defined edges, brilliantly lit and circling slowly over the city. He asked the tower about the object, and they said they only saw Gorman’s plane and the Piper Cub. This object was not showing up on radar.

Gorman decided to investigate, but as he got closer to the object, it suddenly got brighter and shot away from him. He estimated it was flying around 250 miles an hour, but accelerated to 600 miles an hour. Gorman’s plane could only fly about 400 miles an hour, so he lost the object. But it came back and flew right at him.

"When the object was coming head on, I held my plane pointed right at it," Gorman said. "The object came so close that I involuntarily ducked my head because I thought a crash was inevitable. But the object zoomed over my head."

The "dogfight" lasted 27 minutes — a lifetime for a UFO encounter. The declassified documents include a diagram Gorman drew of what went on in the air that night.

Gorman was said to be so shaken after the incident that he had trouble landing the plane. He told The Fargo Forum later, it was "the weirdest experience I've had in my life."

After Gorman told his commanding officer what happened, the incident was referred to Air Force intelligence. Investigators arrived in Fargo on Oct. 4 and interviewed the two air traffic controllers in the tower that night as well as the pilot of the Piper Cub, a local physician. All of them corroborated Gorman’s account.

Gorman wrote in a sworn statement that he was convinced there was "definitive thought" behind the object's maneuvers and that the aircraft could go faster, turn tighter and climb steeper than his aircraft.

Despite what seems to be evidence to the contrary, the Air Force concluded the object was a combination of looking at the planet Jupiter and a weather balloon. According to Eriksmoen, Gorman insisted it wasn’t a weather balloon, but the Air Material Command warned him not to divulge any further information or he would be subject to a court martial.

That might be one reason why Gorman stayed pretty quiet throughout the rest of his military career, which took him to bases in Italy and throughout the U.S. He retired as a lieutenant colonel and died from pancreatic cancer in Texas in the early 1980s at the age of 59.

https://www.wctrib.com/community/far...-football-game