Alexandria, VirginiaOctober 1958

On the evening of October 7, 1958, a 63-year-old man with an engineering degree was walking south on Lee Street in Alexandria, Virginia, when he noticed a bright, silvery object in the sky to the south. The object appeared roughly spherical with an annular ring around its middle, like a planet with an equator. It hung motionless at first, then rapidly climbed and moved away from him until it disappeared on the horizon. The entire sighting lasted about 50 seconds. Based on the object's apparent size relative to a passing commercial aircraft, the witness estimated it to be roughly 600 feet across and about 3 miles distant. He heard no sound.

The Air Force sent investigators to interview the witness, check with airports, weather stations, and other agencies in the area. No one else reported seeing the object. A Capitol Airlines pilot departing Washington National Airport at the same time reported seeing an unidentified aircraft with a nose light flying northward at 3,000 feet near Beacon Field, but this sighting was brief and in a different direction. Weather data from the evening showed clear skies, good visibility, a few fair-weather clouds at 5,000 feet, and a wind component from the south and southwest.

The Air Technical Intelligence Center concluded that the witness had probably seen a reflection of the sun on ice crystals or a thin cloud layer. As the sun dropped below the horizon, it would have illuminated less and less of these crystals, making the bright spot appear to shrink and creating an illusion of motion and increasing altitude. The witness was credible and the object appeared sharp and well-defined, but the lack of corroborating witnesses and the peculiar behavior described, the ATIC reasoned, fit the ice crystal theory. The file was evaluated as "unidentified."

The full case file is reproduced below as held by the National Archives, consisting of 28 scanned pages.