This article was published in the daily newspaper Chicago Herald American, Illinois, USA, on August 24, 1952.
A jet pilot from O'hare Field made four passes at a "flying saucer" over Elgin Thursday night, but lost it when it blinked out. Ground observers who directed the pursuit, in which another jet pilot took part, described the "saucer" as "five times as bright as a star" until it vanished in the dark. The pursuit lasted from 11:18 to 11:48 p.m.
Capt. Everett A. Turner, operations officer of the Chicago Filter Center, said the blink-out was reported at the same time by both pilots and D.C. Scott, the center's supervisor at Elgin. Saying the "thing" was not a stranger, Scott added: "We have seen this thing five or six times the last two months, but never in the same place. Everybody thought we were seeing things until Lt. Col. Donald Armstrong came out and saw it."
Scott said the Thursday appearance was "typical" with the light first showing in the sky northeast of Elgin at 10:10 p.m. He added: "It appeared first at about 2,000 feet, flying straight. At times it rose with a great burst of speed, then it would appear to hover." Scott said the mysterious object was a "yellowish white light five times brighter than a star and about the size of an orange.
Several times, he said, it appeared to rise 5,000 feet within three minutes. Scott added: "It's like nothing I've ever seen before. It looks like a light but casts no beam. We could not pick out a silhouette on it, even with powerful binoculars."
"Turner had alerted the O'Hare jets and they came at once. So far as I know, only one gave chase. At my direction, relayed by Turner, the pilot made four passes. The first was at 10,000 feet. This seemed much too high, so I asked him to repeat at 5,000 feet. This still seemed too high, so he came over again at 3,000. He repeated again at 2,000, this time turning off his running lights. Just as he got over the mark, the thing blinked out.
The object never showed on the filter center's radar, Turner said, but added: "Radar doesn't always show all that is there. You can know, for instance, that a certain plane is in a certain spot and still the scope won't show it. Furthermore, radar never show anything at the 2,000 foot level. It begins to pick up at about 5,000 feet."
Note: The US Air Force report file shows that Lieutenant-Colonel Donald Armstrong, cited in the article, who tried to intercept this light, indicated that many of these "saucers" seen in Elgin were in fact jet airplanes.
