Great Kills, New YorkJune 1954

On the night of June 14, 1954, at 1:30 a.m., a resident of Great Kills, Staten Island reported seeing an unidentified object in the sky north of his home. The witness described it as a white sphere roughly the size of a golf ball held at arm's length, with reddish coloring at its outer edges. The object appeared in his normal line of sight while he was standing on Giffords Lane, facing north.

The object moved horizontally across the sky in a shallow arc, traveling about 15 degrees of arc from right to left. It then descended back to its original height. The witness observed the object for approximately 2 to 3 seconds. Immediately after it vanished, he heard a sound that might have been an aircraft coming from the opposite direction. The western sky also lit up briefly in what he described as "heat lightning," though no sound of thunder was heard.

The witness was a 29-year-old telephone switchman living in Brooklyn. He reported having 20/20 vision and had not been drinking. He mentioned that a man in his thirties, an acquaintance whose name he did not know, had been working nearby and may have also seen the object. An Air Force investigator encouraged the witness to try to locate this possible second witness.

The investigators noted in their report that the object's description and the witness's account of a "meteor sighting" appeared in the file comments. However, the full case file provided no stated conclusion from the Air Force about what the object actually was. The complete investigation record is reproduced below as held by the National Archives (7 pages).