Dayton, OhioNovember 1953

On November 14, 1953, Mrs. Ethel Coleman of Lebanon, Ohio was photographing a solar eclipse using an Eastman 35 mm camera equipped with infrared and red filters. The camera was mounted on a tripod and remained stationary throughout the session. During the ten-minute interval between exposures, she saw nothing unusual through her viewfinder.

When the film came back from the developer, Coleman found something unexpected. In two frames only, a small round, milk-glass object appeared in the photographs. It looked, she said, like a "moon." In one frame, the object appeared near the sun's glare; in the other, it had descended vertically about ten degrees and seemed to hover in front of some bare winter trees. The object appeared identical in size and brightness in both frames.

The Air Force investigation included analysis by film experts. One analyst, Mr. Herbert Clark, ruled out Newton Rings (optical artifacts caused by lens contact) based on the object's shape and symmetry. Another analyst, Mr. Ken Hock, initially suggested the objects were sundog reflections (a type of optical phenomenon caused by light bending through ice crystals). However, Clark and others questioned this explanation. They noted that infrared film with a red filter should have eliminated the sun's glare, yet other frames showing the sun contained no such objects. Furthermore, other frames from the same roll showed the sun but no unexplained objects.

The analyst who wrote the case file proposed an unusual hypothesis: that the object was a material but non-metal device, spherical in shape and operated under remote control. He based this partly on the photograph showing the object hovering in front of trees, where the hazy outline of a tree fork could be seen through the sphere's outline, suggesting the object was transparent or translucent.

The case file offers no final conclusion from the Air Force. The OCR text becomes difficult to read in places, and no official determination appears in the available pages. The full case file is reproduced below as held by the National Archives across ten pages.