What were the mysterious 'metal shavings' found in a Conecuh County, Alabama pond in 1952?

Fighter plane deploying chaff as countermeasure.

I was looking through some old editions of The Evergreen Courant the other day and ran across a short, unusual news item that I thought was interesting. The item appeared in Bob Bozeman’s weekly column, “The Week’s Wash,” that ran in the Sept. 4, 1952 edition of The Courant. It read as follows:

“The flying saucers must not operate in our area or at least no one that I’ve heard of has seen any. Walter Overby came in with something a little unusual last week, tho’. He had several pieces of what looked like metal shavings. Said he found thousands of them floating on his fish pond and a few in the water. I still don’t know what they were, but they must have been something dropped from a plane.”

Those of you who remember Bob Bozeman, the father of present-day Courant publisher Robert Bozeman, will remember that he was a highly-respected newspaperman, who was later inducted into the Alabama Press Association’s Hall of Honor. Bob, who passed away in 1991, was also a decorated U.S. Marine, who was wounded in action in the Pacific during World War II. I make mention of all this to show that he was a man who’d been around the block a time or two and was familiar with different types of military equipment.

Despite my best efforts, I could not find out much about Walter Overby, but Robert Bozeman remembers him well. Robert said that Overby lived in the Brooklyn area and was a veteran slightly younger than Bob. Overby was also apparently a Freemason and would sometimes attend meetings of the Alabama Grand Lodge in Montgomery.

Based on what I could find out, I believe Overby’s fish pond to be the pond that he built in 1947, not long after the end of WWII. In the Sept. 11, 1947 edition of The Courant, it was reported that Overby had “cleared the site for his farm fish pond and is now completing the dam.” Apparently, this pond was about three acres in size, but exactly where this pond was located, I do not know.

Based on Bob’s short report, Overby had several pieces of the shavings to display, and they were apparently light enough to float on the surface of the pond. A close reading of the report indicates that some of the shavings were “in the water,” that is, below the surface. It would be interesting to know how big they were and how thin they were.

Bob’s description of the metal shavings reminded me of the chaff that is sometimes ejected by military aircraft as a countermeasure. These thin strips of metal show up on enemy radar as a bunch of different targets. In theory, during all the confusion, the friendly aircraft will have time to escape from the bad guy.

Question is, if the metal at Overby’s pond was chaff from a military aircraft, why was it ejected in the vicinity of a pond in Conecuh County? Was it part of some kind of Cold War training exercise or is there some other explanation? Maybe it was something top secret?

In the end, let me hear from you if you know anything more about this incident. I would be especially interested to know where Overby’s pond was located or if any of these shavings still exist for examination. Perhaps with the right amount of information, we might be able to solve this 68-year-old mystery.