Albany, GAJanuary 1953

On January 28, 1953, at around 10:50 p.m. EST, control tower operators at Turner Air Force Base in Georgia spotted an unusual circular object in the sky west of the airfield. The object glowed orange, then turned white, and changed colors repeatedly over eight minutes before fading away. Three tower operators watched it together, describing it as larger than a C-47 cargo plane and positioned roughly 15 degrees above the horizon.

What made this sighting unusual was that it was not seen by the tower crew alone. At nearly the same time, a U.S. Air Force pilot flying a T-33 jet trainer northwest of Albany reported seeing a bright light. The pilot observed the object for about seventeen minutes while flying between 4,000 and 10,000 feet. Like the tower operators, he saw it change colors from white to orange. In the final fifteen seconds of his sighting, the object changed shape from circular to triangular, then appeared to split into two triangles before vanishing instantly, as if someone had flipped a switch.

The ground-based radar unit at Turner AFB also picked up targets on its scope around the same time the visual sightings occurred. The radar operators reported seeing three or four objects, with some moving and others stationary. The radar positions did not precisely match the locations the pilots and tower operators reported visually, though the timing of all observations aligned closely.

The file notes favorable weather conditions, clear skies, and that the moon was full. The jet pilot was an experienced officer with over twenty-one hundred hours of flight time. However, the OCR quality of several pages in this file is too degraded to extract additional investigative detail. The Air Force evaluation marked the case "unknown." The file is reproduced below as held by the National Archives, containing 14 pages.