Baltimore, MDSeptember 1955

On the night of September 9, 1955, two observers in Glen Burnie, Maryland, spotted unusual blinking lights moving across the sky in a west-northwest direction. The first observer, 1st Lieutenant Hurlbut Bonney, noticed the lights around 12:18 a.m. while standing outside his home. He saw red, blue, white, and green lights that seemed to blink in sequence at five-second intervals. There was no clearly visible shape or body to the object, only the lights themselves. Bonney's wife watched the same phenomenon with him. About four minutes later, a second observer, Albert Merkel, a line draftsman for Westinghouse with twenty-five years of electronics experience, spotted the same lights from a civilian observation post in Glen Burnie. He initially wondered if he was seeing a weather balloon, but the object's steady course and constant altitude ruled that out in his mind. Both men reported the sighting to the Baltimore Filter Center (a facility that collected reports from civilian air defense observers).

The Air Force investigator who followed up on the case noted that several military aircraft were flying in the Baltimore area that same night. An F-80 had taken off from Andrews Air Force Base near Washington at 2:07 a.m. and flew in the Baltimore area at 10,000 feet. Additionally, two F-86 fighters from Andrews had been in the vicinity between about 12:35 a.m. and 3:35 a.m., conducting practice bombing runs and intercept training. The investigator discovered that both F-86 and F-80 aircraft have blinking lights that cycle through red, green, and white colors at approximately five-second intervals, which matched what the observers had reported seeing.

The investigator checked with radar stations, the control tower at Friendship Field, and various other installations. No pilots reported seeing anything unusual. No weather balloons had been launched from stations in the area, and astronomers contacted by the Air Force offered no explanation beyond the suggestion that the lights came from aircraft. A civilian observer at New Oxford, Pennsylvania, also reported seeing an object with blinking lights moving eastward around the same time.

In his final assessment, the preparing officer concluded that the sighting was probably caused by blinking navigation lights from one or more of the jets known to have been flying in the area. The color sequence, the timing of the sighting, the aircraft operations, and the fact that no unidentified radar returns were recorded all supported this conclusion. The approving officer concurred. The full case file is reproduced below as held by the National Archives, comprising 13 pages of documents.