Albuquerque, New MexicoNovember 1957

Around 10:45 p.m. on November 4, 1957, a Civil Aeronautics Administration radar operator at the Albuquerque control tower at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico noticed an unidentified return on his scope, holding steady at low altitude over the base perimeter. Within minutes a second CAA controller and the Air Force tower controller had the same return on their separate radar systems, and an airliner on final approach reported visual contact with what its pilot described as a brightly-lit, oval-shaped object on or near the runway.

According to the controllers' joint statement, the object descended slowly to within feet of the ground at the south end of the field, held position for an estimated minute, then accelerated upward at high speed and disappeared off radar. The object did not show standard transponder responses, did not match the flight plan of any aircraft scheduled to be in Albuquerque airspace, and remained visible to ground witnesses throughout the descent.

The Kirtland incident occurred during the same forty-eight-hour period as the Levelland, Texas vehicle-interference reports approximately three hundred miles to the southeast, and Project Blue Book initially treated the two events as parts of a single regional wave. Investigators dispatched to Kirtland interviewed all three radar operators, the airliner pilot and his passengers, and ground personnel who had been working the flightline that night. Air Force Counter Intelligence, base meteorology, and the local FAA office all contributed material to the case file.

Internal Air Force memoranda from the days following the incident document an extended discussion among investigators about whether to attribute the event to a low-altitude weather phenomenon or to leave it open. The base meteorology office reported that conditions on the night of November 4 were clear, dry, and stable, with no temperature inversion or unusual atmospheric activity that would account for a stable radar return at that location.

Project Blue Book filed the Kirtland AFB incident as "unidentified" in the program's final tally, the same classification the program assigned to the Levelland incident the same week. The case became one of the most-cited radar-visual encounters of the 1957 wave, frequently grouped in subsequent Air Force and civilian analyses with the other November 1957 incidents from across the southwestern United States.

The full case file (138 scanned pages of original radar logs, the CAA controllers' joint statement, the airline pilot's report, weather data for the night of November 4, internal Air Force correspondence, and follow-up inquiries from journalists and members of Congress) is reproduced below as held by the National Archives.