Winter weather photos
Northeastern vs. West Liberty-Salem
House destroyed in fire
Recalling Cold War days of innovation and UFOs
Monday, December 22, 2008
Extras
Photos
A 1940s snapshot shows Donald Rizer in the cockpit of the XP-84, the prototype of the first atomic jet-fighter.
Donald Rizer in his early Army Air Forces days.
As an experimental jet mechanic in the early Air Force of the 1940s, Don Rizer helped the F-84 get off the ground. He also was sent on UFO search missions. SPRINGFIELD, Ohio — A world war had just ended with the splitting of atoms.
Daring flyboys were going higher and faster than man knew he could go.
New enemies were emerging. New sides were forming.
And then something happened in New Mexico.
In Roswell.
This was the nascent Air Force Donald Rizer served in.
By the time he was initially discharged in 1948, the Springfield resident had gone from feeding cavalry horses at a base in Texas to personally watching Chuck Yeager fly faster than the speed of sound in the California desert.
He went from tinkering on airplanes at Crabill Airport in Springfield to chasing UFOs across the western night sky.
Now 81, Rizer recalls this era of strange new aircraft and stranger new sightings in a video on SpringfieldNewsSun.com.
As someone always interested in aviation, Rizer considers himself lucky that he was sent to Muroc Airfield (now Edwards Air Force Base) in the Mojave Desert in 1946.
There, he became one of the military's first jet mechanics.
"This," he said, "was the place to be."
From rockets to flying wings, Rizer helped put the wild in wild blue yonder.
"In October of '47, when they broke the sound barrier, we all witnessed and knew what had happened," he said. "We were told right then, 'Don't tell anybody.' They didn't want the Russians to know what we could do."
At the start of the Korean War in 1950, Rizer was called back to duty, eventually retiring from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base as the civilian chief of base operations in 1987.
But if watching a man go Mach 1.06 40 years earlier was weird, chasing UFOs was frankly out of this world.
Because of his dealings with the latest in aviation, Rizer was picked to go on UFO search missions in the wake of the alleged spaceship crash at Roswell in July 1947.
Put on alert, he was handed an infrared camera and put on a C-47 whenever a sighting was reported in California.
"They had to take it serious," he said. "People were demanding an answer."
Six decades later, some people are still waiting.
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0352 or amcginn@coxohio.com.
Comments
By ChabrellIgaN
April 1, 2009 1:37 PM | Link to this
Zdraste! Vot takoi vot u vas horoshiy sait. Spasibki.
By Disowned Sky
January 1, 2009 12:49 AM | Link to this
Is it just me,or did this article get edited way down from the original. The story drops off a cliff.
By John
December 30, 2008 10:43 AM | Link to this
Never seen one. But there are just too many credible, intelligent people that claim to have seen one for me not to believe.
By mary
December 24, 2008 12:34 AM | Link to this
Yes I do, why would we be the only beings in the universe?
By c dean
December 23, 2008 10:26 PM | Link to this
I did see what I could not explain twice. Once in Hardy va and the other time in Wythville va.I called and reported the first one but it was just weather balloons so they said. It wasent a balloon. The second I just kept to myself.Why report it you end up looking like a fool.If they are here the fact will be covered up even if one landed down town.I hope i live long enough to know for shure.
By bob
December 23, 2008 10:08 PM | Link to this
The question is quite broad.Do you believe in UFO’s? Yes I believe in things that I cant Identify that fly. But if you are asking do I believe in flying machines from other planets, that is another question. I believe that somewhere in the vastness of space and the billions of other planets out there, that intelligent life exsists. Can they travel to this planet in flying machines….That is and should be the real question.
By Lungfish
December 23, 2008 4:57 PM | Link to this
My father was involved in UFO pursuits out of 29Palms in the 1950s. There was a tasked group specifically engaging UFOs with aircraft and cameras. . Apparently there was a “UFO Officer” stationed at every major US base…. See the Twining Memo and related materials to see how serious the USAF (founded Sept 47) took the matter of flying disks.
For more great info, www.NARCAP.org and I invite Mr. Rizer to contact them directly, they operate confidentially….
By Malcolm J. Brenner
December 23, 2008 1:29 PM | Link to this
The whole question, “Do you BELIEVE in UFO’s?” is so BOGUS! “Belief” doesn’t pertain to UFO’s the way it does, say, to questions like “Does God exist?” or “Is there a life after death?” because there’s apparently no way to answer those questions scientifically. UFO’s are not a supernatural phenomenon, they are a sighting of an unexplained aerial object or appartition (lights, clouds, etc.) A small but consistent percentage of UFO events are genuinely mysterious and deserve investigation.
By RW
December 23, 2008 11:10 AM | Link to this
Yes I do. But I also think that given the vastness of space, that if there was a civilization capable of traversing these distances. Their technology would be so advanced that they would and could be here and we would never know. I think it’s more likely that our current UFO’s are merely mankind itself conducting some type of time travel, looking back on ourselves.