Castleton, N.Y., April 1949 - Incident Number: 296April 1949

On April 6, 1949, school bus driver Ray Werking made a sighting near Castleton, New York that caught the attention of the U.S. Air Force. While driving his route about one mile north of the town, he observed three shiny silver objects flying in a "C" formation toward the east. The objects appeared roughly the size of a full moon (about twenty inches in diameter), with a rounded, hub-cap-like shape. Werking estimated they were at the height of a thirty-five story building (at a forty-five degree angle) and about five to eight miles away. He watched them spin rapidly while moving slowly through the air, then disappear into a nearby cloud after about a minute. The sky was clear with scattered dark clouds. Werking considered himself a reliable observer, being a produce farmer and school bus driver.

Air Force investigators located and interviewed Werking on May 27, 1949. They found no other witnesses to the incident despite efforts to contact people in the surrounding area. Checks of local radar stations and police records turned up no corroborating information. The case file includes maps of the region, weather data, and official routing documents. The OCR quality of pages 7 through 22 is too poor to extract meaningful details from sketches, diagrams, or supplementary information that may have been included. The file was compiled as part of Project Grudge, the Air Force's UFO investigation program, and remained in official channels through June 1949. No conclusion about the objects' origin appears in these declassified documents, which are reproduced below as held by the National Archives in 33 pages.