Blackstone, VirginiaJanuary 1954

On the afternoon of January 28, 1954, witnesses at and near Blackstone Army Air Field in Virginia saw a bright, stationary object in the sky. A civilian observer watching from his home at around 5:15 p.m. noticed it first. He described the object as a bright white light that appeared to be between twelve thousand and fifteen thousand feet high. It was positioned at about thirty degrees above the horizon, due north of Blackstone. The object stayed in the same place and did not move for several minutes.

The witness drove to the CAA (Civil Aeronautics Administration) communications station at the air field and told the two employees on duty what he had seen. All three people then watched the object together. At 5:21 p.m., a C-47 military transport plane flew overhead, and the pilot of that aircraft was notified of the sighting. The pilot also reported seeing the object, though he thought it was at a higher altitude, between thirty thousand and forty thousand feet. The object made no sound, left no trail, and gave off no smoke.

The CAA office at Blackstone reported the sighting to Washington Air Route Traffic Control and other air traffic facilities. Investigators later learned that Roanoke, Virginia, had reported three loose weather balloons drifting north and northeast on the morning of January 28. The balloons would have passed at least one hundred miles away from Blackstone, making them unlikely candidates for what was seen. Weather conditions that evening included thin, broken clouds at twenty thousand feet and a north-northeasterly surface wind of six miles per hour.

Military investigators and Air Force pilots who looked into the sighting found no evidence of unidentified objects on radar. A fighter pilot who was directed to investigate the area reported seeing nothing unusual during his patrol. Witnesses could not agree on the object's exact shape or size. The chief of the Blackstone CAA facility stated that he had worked in aviation since 1936 and had never seen anything like it, but he could not determine what the object was, only that it might have been a balloon.

The Air Force's final evaluation, documented on the case card, concluded the sighting was "probably a balloon," though investigators acknowledged they could not rule out other possibilities and admitted uncertainty about its nature. The full case file, comprising ten pages as held by the National Archives, is reproduced below.