Columbus, MississippiApril 1953

On April 28, 1953, around 6:30 p.m., a group of thirteen girls at Mississippi State College for Women in Columbus spotted an unusual object in the sky. One student called Columbus Air Force Base to report the sighting at about 10:55 p.m. that night, more than four hours after it happened. She said the object was small, had little lights on it, and that she and twelve other girls watched it slowly turn and move upward before disappearing over the college.

The Air Force sent the case to its Air Technical Intelligence Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. The intelligence officers asked Columbus Air Force Base for more details. They wanted to know which direction the object was traveling, whether any aircraft were nearby at the time, and whether weather balloons had been launched in the area. They also requested information about weather conditions, especially wind patterns at high altitudes. The Columbus Air Force Base operations office did not obtain these answers, and no further investigation was conducted.

The investigation file notes that thirteen witnesses saw the object from the college campus for approximately fifteen minutes. The observers did not take photographs or sketches. No physical evidence was produced. No aircraft was known to be in the area. The file gives no other details about what the girls saw or how investigators tried to explain it.

The Air Force concluded only that the case contained insufficient data to make a determination. A notation at the end of the file suggests the object may have been a balloon, though the file provides no investigation or analysis to support this. The full case file is reproduced below as held by the National Archives, spanning 8 pages of microfilm.