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 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 s1Dayton (Ohio) Journal, 9 August 1957
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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.
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 s2Milton Lehman, This High Man, The Life of Robert H. Goddard (New York: Farrar, Straus and Company, 1963), pp. 309,319-320.. 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.
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.
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. Fourth Army Air Force Intelligence officers, Captain William Lee Davidson and First Lieutenant Frank Mercer Brown, would even go so far as to interview Arnold for six hours, taking a lengthy detailed statement from him.
Alfred Loedding never had a chance to meet Brown or Davidson. It is ironic because eventually Loedding ended up inheriting and expanding the mission of that first effort to look into disc sightings. But by the time Loedding got back to work on the 7th, he would have had no idea what was to come. He may, however, have already started to be absorbed by the events.
It must have been shortly after driving onto Wright Field that morning and parking in front of building 11A that he caught the first hint of the mounting excitement and concern. Walking up to his office in room 252 in the overcrowded pre-war building that had been converted from an aviation museum?he heard the scuttle butt. The Independence holiday had indeed accounted for a huge number of sightings. The term "flying saucers" had arrived and was here to stay.