I was watching an old TNT ufo documentary about a UFO sighting that happened on July 17, 1957. It was tracked all over the country by ground and air based radars. Civilian and Air Force. An airliner had to take evasive maneuvers to avoid hitting it causing injuries to ten passengers. It started on the West coast and flew across New Mexico to Mississippi then back to Texas and then continued north through Oklahoma and Kansas. The persuit was ended when the jets had to land for fuel. Now the UFO was identified with an ALA-5 pulse analyzer as having a

Pulse of 3,000 mega cycle envelope
Duration of 2 micro seconds
Repitition Frequency of 600 cycles/second

Can anyone elaborate on what this means and what sort of craft would have caused this in 1957?

What it means
A pulse analyzer is an unremarkable device similar to an oscilloscope for gathering information about signals that exhibit some sort of repetitive regular structure or pattern.

The signal is a 3,000 MHz (3.0 GHz) signal that occurs in pulses lasting 2 microseconds each at intervals of 1/600 second. Looks to me like an S-band search radar.

What kind of vehicle would emit such a signal?
Any of a number of ordinary Earth vehicles fitted with off-the-shelf radar technology for search or altimetry purposes.

There is nothing remarkable about the signal. As to the correspondence among the signal and the other observations -- are we sure they're connected?

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This is the classic RB-47 encounter:

http://www.ufoevidence.org/cases/case665.htm

Either you were mistaken on what the program stated or they really took some liberties with the facts (no surprise there). Only the RB-47 recorded the radar frequency and I am not aware of any ground radars tracking across the country. You can see the link above. Phil Klass offerred an explanation and it is interesting to note that the UFO was emitting a signal very similar to the ground based radars in the area. No "craft" was ever seen although mysterious lights were seen (one may have been a meteor). The above link is the viewpoint of many UFOlogists and Klass's viewpoint is not on the internet. I realy don't want to go over it point for point but you can find it in the book "UFOs:Explained".

This is the classic RB-47 encounter

I'm not familiar with the prominent UFO anecdotes, so I'm just going on what was reported. If I understand you correctly, then there's no inherent connection between the visual sightings and the electronic detection, and the signal need not be presumed to have come from an airborne source.

I'm a little embarrassed by the latter. Normally I would have asked, "What makes you think the signal came from an airborne source?" The original question included a presumption I did not catch, and which would greatly hinder a useful investigation.

Of course I have no idea what exact model of radar might have produced this signal. If it were very important to know, I suppose we could survey all the S-band radar products produced prior to 1957. Instead of asking whether this signal is really a specific S-band search radar, I would find it more interesting to ask why space aliens would employ a device so suspiciously similar to human-produced radars.

The presumed connection between some particular electronic surveillance and some other particular rash of visual sightings elsewhere is what really sinks an investigational ship. One of the cardinal rules is that you never presume that two observations are connected just because they occurred generally at the same time and are both subjectively remarkable. There isn't a connection until you prove there's one, and proof of a connection is not merely a hypothesis that draws them together.

This is important because many pseudoscientific arguments take the form:

A implies (X and Y)

where A is the hypothesis and X and Y are observations. The combination of X and Y (e.g., signal intelligence and visual sightings) is often considered so extraordinarily improbable that it can be caused only by a very improbable antecedent. And A is usually highly improbable, such as "Aliens visited the Earth."

But if X and Y are independent, then each can have arisen from a separate cause, as in

(B implies X) and (C implies Y).

The proposition (B and C) is usually far more probable than A.

The unwarranted augmentation of "coincident" observations does not generally help an investigation.

__________________
"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

The old documentary said that after the near miss of the American Airlines #966 over El Paso, Texas, the traffic control tracked the UFO traveling along the Gulf Coast and alerted the military. It was tracked by the FAA and military radar and was then persued by the RB-47 around Meridian, Mississippi and then back across Texas and then north.

When you say "tracked the UFO," what evidence do they have that what they puport to have tracked was what the airliner saw visually? What is the evidence that the RB-47 tracked an object that was either what was tracked from the ground or what the airliner saw?

If the same explanation is expected to explain all three kinds of sightings, then there must be a priori evidence that all three kinds of sightings are related.

__________________
"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

A nitpick...

The FAA did not exist as an independent agency until 1958. Prior to the signing of the Federal Aviation Act of 1958, civil aviation was regulated by the Civil Aeronautics Administration.

I think the link describes the event as told by most UFOlogists. Flight 966 did not have a near miss. According to UFOlogist Brad Sparks, flight #966 was hundreds of miles away from the area and had a near miss with another KNOWN aircraft. It seems the documentary is playing loose with the facts.

It seems the documentary is playing loose with the facts.

But a documentary wouldn't do that...

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Apollo: The History and the Hoax
Enter the World of Athran

According to Klass, the radar in question was the CPS-6B/FPS-10 (which was just a variant of the CPS-6B) type air defense radars. The AN/CPS-6 was near Biloxi, when the first recording of the UFO was made. The FPS-10 was found near Dallas (which was during the second part of this UFO event). According to Klass, the scan rate of this signal was at a rate of 4 rpm (apparently they were seeing the signal every 15 seconds) which matches (according to Klass, I could not verify this) the CPS-6B's antenna revolution speed.

The events are confusing and most of what has been written indicate two key points.

1) various lights/moving lights were seen and then disappeared
2) a radar-like signal was recorded by operators at various times that they related to the lights. There were radars in the vicinity that were using this frequency band and could have been the source of the signals.

As you have noted it is difficult to link the two. UFOlogists will but most skeptics will suggest that you can not positively say that the lights were emitting these frequencies. As a result, it is really guess work.

I also agree with your assessment that it is odd that the "UFO" would emit this type of signal, which mimics a radar. What would be the point? As far as I can tell, it is the first, and only time, that a UFO was recorded as emitting such a signal. If UFOlogists were really interested in tracking UFOs (and believed this case was a "real" UFO), you would think they would have all sorts of tracking receivers tuned to this frequency.