Columbus, Ohio, [ILLEGIBLE] 1948 - Incident Number: 154Circa 1948

On August 2, 1948, an attorney and his wife in Columbus, Ohio, watched an unusual object moving slowly across the sky in a southerly direction. They observed it for ten to fifteen minutes as it traveled over the center of the city at an altitude of 1,500 to 2,000 feet. The object had a striking appearance: its outline was dark gray or black, but the center was transparent, so they could see the blue sky through it. The object changed shape three times during the sighting, shifting from a parallelogram to a circle and back again, though it maintained a constant direction of travel. Once during the observation, the object seemed to hesitate, and a thin trail of smoke briefly appeared from its rear before disappearing. The witnesses estimated the object to be twenty to thirty feet in diameter, and they judged its speed at about fifteen miles per hour.

A second witness, a woman in the same area, observed the same phenomenon at approximately 7:50 p.m. that evening. She called her husband out to view it. Like the first witnesses, she watched the object travel from north to south at a slow, regular speed. She observed it for about fifteen minutes and estimated it traveled roughly seven miles during that time at a height of about half a mile. She confirmed the object's changing shape, moving from oblong to circular to oblong again, and also noted the dark outline with a transparent center. She, too, saw the tail of smoke issue from the object's rear, though only once. She described the object as being roughly the size of a small airplane, and noted that it made no sound.

The Air Materiel Command's analysis concluded the object was likely a research balloon. The report noted that the "trail of smoke" could have resulted from a momentary glimpse of trailing apparatus attached to the balloon. A separate investigator who reviewed the case noted its unusual qualities, particularly that it was defined solely by its dark outline with a visible sky visible through the transparent center, and compared it to a floating ellipse or distorted wire hoop. This investigator suggested the most plausible explanation lay in meteorology rather than astronomy.

The full case file, consisting of 14 pages, is reproduced below as held by the National Archives.