Englewood, OhioDecember 1957

On Sunday, December 1, 1957, around 3 p.m., a man in Montebello, California, and his family witnessed six unidentified objects flying in formation across the sky. When the children spotted them first and shouted about "flying saucers," the man grabbed his 8mm movie camera. He filmed the objects as they moved slowly westward, describing them as oval-shaped and glowing soft white or white-blue-green.

Over the course of the sighting, the man's children reported seeing three separate passes of the objects, each time in a different formation. The first pass came from the west moving east in a tight three-quarter circle. The second pass moved from east to west in pairs arranged in a slightly elongated triangle. The third pass, which the man did not film, came straight across from east to west at high speed. All three passes maintained roughly the same altitude, which the man estimated at between 3,000 and 4,000 feet, comparable to small aircraft he regularly saw over his house.

The film went to the U.S. Air Force's Los Angeles office for processing. Air Force officers who reviewed it, including a colonel in the Public Information office, initially praised the quality and called it some of the best UFO footage they had seen. However, the case became complicated. The Air Force examined the film and concluded the objects were balloon clusters. Yet when NICAP and other observers noted that some film frames appeared to be missing, tension arose over whether the Air Force had removed them. An internal Air Force analysis from late 1957 confirmed that the objects appeared to be floating balloons on a rigid framework, though analysts acknowledged more detailed witness statements and background information would have helped their conclusions.

The full case file, as held by the National Archives, is reproduced below across 36 pages.