James Tuck Correspondence, 1970s

James Tuck was a British-born physicist at Los Alamos who worked on the Manhattan Project and later led the lab’s early fusion research. This short file of personal correspondence, probably from the 1970s, shows that he also took a quiet scientific interest in UFOs. Names of his correspondents are redacted.

What the letters show

In one letter to the U.S. Army Engineer School at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, Tuck asks for the “recipe” used for simulated atomic-bomb demonstrations. His reason: he was interested in the large atmospheric vortices, or ring-shaped swirls, produced by such explosions, as described in Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects, the 1969 report edited by Edward Condon (see the Condon Report).

In a second, handwritten note, a correspondent refers to Tuck’s interesting report on ball lightning and encloses comments on it by “a UFO believer,” from James McCampbell’s 1976 book Ufology, newly on the shelf at a local library. The writer adds that McCampbell’s chapter on flight and propulsion strengthened his own belief that Einstein’s search for a unified field theory had been on the right track.

Context

Ball lightning and atmospheric vortices are among the natural explanations scientists have proposed for some UFO reports. Another Los Alamos-linked document in the release is the 1986 club invitation in DOE-UAP-D003.