The File
The Black Vault hosts a 55-page document from the Project Blue Book collection, the Air Force’s program for investigating UFO reports, held at the U.S. National Archives. The file is titled “The Alleged 1964 UFO Landing in Harrisonburg, Virginia,” runs to 12.1 megabytes of scanned material, and was posted online on May 23, 2024. Inside are field reports, a final Air Force conclusion, and correspondence between investigators, the witnesses, and Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. The file does not identify the originating office or a declassification date; that omission concerns the paperwork, not the reported event.
What Burns Reported
On December 21, 1964, a gunsmith named Horace Burns was driving near Route 250 outside Staunton, close to Fishersville in Augusta County. He told investigators he saw a beehive-shaped object, 80 to 90 feet high (24 to 27 meters) and 125 feet (38 meters) across, come down in a meadow about 100 yards (91 meters) off the highway. As it crossed the road ahead of him, his car’s engine stalled and the vehicle came to what he described as an unnatural stop. By his account, the object glowed with a fluorescent light and rested on the ground for 60 to 90 seconds before lifting off toward the northeast with a sound of rushing air. This is Burns’s account exactly as the file preserves it, before it is weighed against anything else.
Gehman’s Reading
Burns reported the sighting to Ernest Gehman, a professor at Eastern Mennonite College and a member of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, a civilian group that collected UFO reports for review. Gehman went to the site with a Geiger counter and recorded what the file describes as significant radioactivity. Two DuPont research engineers, Harry Cook and a colleague the file names only as “Mr. Funk,” were present and are listed as witnesses to the reading. The document does not say which instrument Gehman used, how it was calibrated, or what figure it produced. This is the first of two radiation readings in the case, and it is the one the record leaves least detailed.
The Official Visit
Three weeks later, on January 12, 1965, Technical Sergeant David Moody and Staff Sergeant Harold Jones of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base arrived to investigate. Burns, Gehman, and a student named Clair Weaver, president of the college’s UFO Investigators group, went with them to the site. Moody tested the ground with a Model 2586 Beta-Gamma Survey Meter, built to register beta and gamma radiation, and reported no significant level. The report notes no depressions in the grass and no other sign that anything had landed. By January the field was under snow, and the file also notes the meadow had already been mowed for hay before the Air Force ever arrived. Moody’s reading and Gehman’s were taken three weeks apart, with different instruments, under different weather. The file records both and reconciles neither.
The Finding
Project Blue Book’s final report concluded there was no evidence to substantiate a UFO landing. It cited the absence of physical traces and the fact that no witnesses beyond those already named had been consulted, judging it unlikely that a landing of that size near Fishersville would have gone unseen by anyone else. The finding is narrow: it is not an identification of the kind that closes a case with “weather balloon” or “equipment malfunction.” It does not propose what Burns saw. It states only that the Air Force could not confirm he saw a landed craft. Gehman’s radiation reading is not ruled out anywhere in the file; it is simply outweighed, in the Air Force’s own accounting, by the missing ground traces and the missing independent witnesses.
What the File Doesn’t Settle
Three things are left open in the paperwork as it stands. The contradiction between the two Geiger readings is noted, with different instruments, different timing, and different weather named as variables, but it is never resolved beyond that naming. Whether Cook and Funk were ever formally interviewed by Air Force investigators is not addressed anywhere in the correspondence, even though the final report leans on the claim that no additional witnesses existed. And a dispute over the height of nearby power lines, used by investigators to judge whether Burns’s size estimate for the object was plausible, is raised in the file and never settled there. None of these gaps are evidence of anything. They are simply where the paper stops.
Gehman’s Later Objections
After the case closed, Gehman pushed back on the Air Force’s methods. He argued that Moody’s Beta-Gamma meter was not built to register alpha particles, and said Moody had adjusted the instrument as its readings began to climb during the January visit. He also disputed the claim that no corroborating witnesses existed, saying Cook and Funk had confirmed his original measurements. None of this appears in the Blue Book file itself. It comes from statements Gehman made afterward, once the Air Force had already reached its finding.
What’s Left
Two Geiger counter readings, taken three weeks apart, in different weather, with different instruments, pointing in opposite directions. An Air Force conclusion that answers whether there was enough evidence to confirm a landing, not what Burns actually encountered on Route 250. A dispute over witnesses and power-line heights that was never chased down on paper. None of it proves a beehive-shaped object came down in a Virginia meadow. None of it explains one away either. The file, as it exists, simply stops there.