Hanford Plutonium Plant UFO Intercepts

In January and February 1945, the Hanford Engineering Works in southeastern Washington State was the most strategically sensitive facility on Earth — the world's only operational plutonium production plant, secretly producing the fissile material that would be detonated in the Trinity test and the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Its location was classified. Its purpose was known to fewer than a thousand people. And something was hovering over it.

Former US Navy Lieutenant Junior Grade Clarence R. "Bud" Clem, part of a Hellcat F6F fighter squadron based at Naval Air Station Pasco, reported that on at least three separate nights during this period, a huge, bright reddish-orange fireball appeared hovering over the Hanford plant. It was visible from the airfield at Pasco. On each occasion, Clem and other pilots were scrambled to intercept. Lieutenant Commander R.W. Hendershot, who led one of the intercept attempts, described the object as "so bright you could hardly look directly at it." As Hendershot's Hellcat closed on the object, it accelerated away to the northwest at a speed beyond any aircraft in the US inventory at the time.

HQ Fourth Air Force produced a classified document dated January 23, 1945, referencing "unidentified aircraft flying over the Hanford Engineering Company Plant at Pasco on at least three nights in the past month." The document confirms that the sightings were formally reported through military command channels and treated as a genuine security concern. The Thirteenth Naval District arranged for NAS Pasco to maintain both radar coverage and standing intercept capability specifically in response to the recurring overflights. A radar installation was expedited for the area.

On May 21, 1949 — more than four years after the initial incidents — a "flying disc observed in restricted air space over the Hanford Atomic Plant" was again confirmed on radar, prompting an F-82 Twin Mustang scramble from Moses Lake AFB. The intercept again failed. An August 8, 1945 newspaper article had publicly acknowledged that suspected aerial intrusions had prompted the radar installation and Navy intercept arrangements, though the nuclear significance of the Hanford site remained classified at that time.

The Hanford incidents are remarkable for several reasons that distinguish them from the broader flying saucer wave that followed in 1947. They predate all public awareness of the UFO phenomenon by more than two years, occurring before any media framing existed that could shape witness perception. The witnesses were experienced combat-trained naval aviators, not civilian observers. The formal military response — documented intercept operations, expedited radar installation, classified HQ communications — indicates the incidents were assessed at command level as genuine and unresolved. Whatever was hovering over the facility producing America's nuclear arsenal in the final months of World War II was never identified.