Project Blue Book Case File
Gulf of Mexico, August 1962August 1962
Summary
The OCR text from pages 8, 9, and 10 is too heavily degraded to read reliably. However, the readable portions from the first seven pages describe the following case:
On August 12, 1962, the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Triton spotted a brilliant round object over the Gulf of Mexico in the early morning hours. The object had a yellow and white color and resembled an incendiary device, with a long tail similar to a meteor. It was very bright and moved at about the speed of a jet aircraft at medium altitude, traveling nearly parallel to the ocean surface. The object was visible for roughly three minutes as it crossed the sky. Another ship, the SS Carl Schmedeman, also reported seeing a similar bright object with a red and white trail in the same general area around the same time. The witnesses described clear skies with unlimited visibility and stated the object was definitely not a falling star. The Air Force's evaluation of this case appears in the metadata as "unknown," meaning the official investigation did not reach a firm conclusion about what caused the sightings.
The full case file is reproduced below as held by the National Archives across 10 pages of microfilm.
Reported location
Gulf of Mexico, August 1962
Date of incident
August 1962
State / country
? / XX
Page count
10 scanned pages
USAF evaluation
unknown
Microfilm
T1206, Roll 46