Ft Worth, TexasJanuary 1958

On the evening of January 23, 1958, an attorney and lay astronomer in Fort Worth, Texas stepped into his driveway to observe the scheduled passage of Sputnik II. He had brought his five-year-old daughter along, as they usually looked for satellite passes together in the early evenings. After failing to spot Sputnik in the western sky where they expected it, he was watching the eastern horizon when his daughter called out, "There it is." Looking up, he saw a bright, star-like object moving northeastward across the sky at about a 45-degree angle above the horizon. The object appeared as luminous as nearby stars and moved with the same slow, majestic sweep he had observed during previous Sputnik sightings.

The object traveled across roughly 10 degrees of the night sky before it appeared to slow down. Within moments, it either vanished or merged into his line of sight with a nearby star in the constellation Gemini, which he later identified as Castor. The entire passage lasted less than a minute. The witness described the object as round, bright, and distinctly white or blue-white in color, with no unusual glow, no blinking lights, and no other visible features beyond what one would expect of a distant moving star.

The investigation that followed cast considerable doubt on the witness's interpretation. The U.S. Air Force contacted the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the U.S. Moonwatch network (teams of amateur astronomers tracking satellites in daylight and darkness). None of the Moonwatch units across the country, several of which were observing Sputnik on that night, reported seeing any object moving in the direction the Fort Worth witness described. The Dallas Air Defense Command Filter Center, which monitored radar in the area, reported nothing unusual during the time of the sighting. No American astronomical observatory recorded any unusual occurrence.

The Air Technical Intelligence Center concluded the object was probably a jet aircraft of the F-100 series flying at high altitude. The reasoning was that F-100 fighters, when suddenly cutting their afterburners on or off, can create an appearance similar to what the witness described. A member of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory concurred with this assessment. The official case file is reproduced below as held by the National Archives, comprising 22 pages.