25N 12533W, &NE Vandengerg AFB Calif., December 1961December 1961

On the night of December 4, 1961, two Air Force pilots flying a T-33 trainer jet near Vandenberg Air Force Base in California saw a bright object falling rapidly through the sky. The object was round and bluish white, with a trail of flame or smoke roughly twenty times longer than the object itself. The pilots watched it for between two and four seconds as it descended from about 26,000 feet. The object then flared up, broke apart into approximately four pieces, and faded from view as it disappeared into clouds around 20,000 feet.

The sighting was made by Lieutenant Colonel Gaylord and Captain T.L. Johnson, pilots of an RC-121D aircraft (a radar surveillance plane), flying at 12,000 feet about 45 miles northeast of Vandenberg. A second report came from pilots of a T-33 trainer jet in the same area. Multiple witnesses across a wide region reported seeing the falling flaming object, from Fort Bragg, California to the Sierra Nevada mountains, and from civilian aircraft off the Pacific Coast.

The Air Force's intelligence officer assigned to the case, 2nd Lieutenant Richard A. Kahane, concluded that the object was "possibly a meteor or re-entering ESV" (an unspecified satellite or space vehicle). The Navy's Western Sea Frontier later evaluated the sighting as "no threat" and concluded it was "believed to be meteorite based on reports received by numerous parties over a wide geographical area." The official Air Force evaluation listed the case as astronomical in nature, consistent with a meteor observation.

The full case file is reproduced below as held by the National Archives, comprising seven pages.