Gloucester, MassachusettsApril 1963

On the morning of April 16, 1963, a resident of Gloucester, Massachusetts saw an oval-shaped object in the sky. The object had no wings or tail and was bright silver in color. The witness asked the Air Force to identify what they had seen.

The case file does not contain detailed information about the object's behavior, the length of the sighting, or other specifics that would normally appear in a complete investigation. The initial case card notes that the description was consistent with a balloon, but also flags that the duration of the sighting was not reported and no flight path was indicated. The Air Force marked the case as having insufficient data for evaluation and requested that the witness complete a full questionnaire.

Pages 5 through 11 of the file contain the Air Force's standard questionnaire form, which appears to have been sent to the witness but the OCR (optical character recognition) of those pages is too degraded to read the handwritten responses clearly. Without legible answers to those questions, the summary of observations cannot be accurately reconstructed from the document.

The Air Force's working conclusion was that the object was probably a balloon. The full case file, comprising 11 pages as held by the National Archives, is reproduced below.