Project Blue Book Case File
Hamel, MinnesotaAugust 1948
Summary
Based on my review of the OCR'd file, I can provide this summary:
On August 11, 1948, between 1200 and 1215 hours CST (Central Standard Time), two children, ages 8 and 10, witnessed an unusual object near their home in Hamel, Minnesota. The children described a dull gray, round object approximately two feet wide and one foot thick, shaped like two plates stacked together. The object descended gently to the ground about twelve feet away, making a sound like a steam whistle when it landed. Upon contact with the earth, the object spun once and then shot straight up to about twenty feet, stopped, whistled again, and climbed to roughly thirty feet. At that height, the object maneuvered around tree branches and telephone wires before accelerating to the northeast and disappearing.
The investigation that followed was notably thorough. An Air Force agent visited the landing site and found a depression in the ground approximately two feet in diameter, with dented and flattened rocks. Soil and rock samples were collected and sent to the Federal Bureau of Investigation Laboratory for analysis. Photographs of the area were also taken. Multiple government agencies became involved, including the Army's Chemical Corps, which requested more detailed analysis of the soil evidence. However, the OCR quality degrades significantly in the later pages, making it difficult to determine what conclusions, if any, the analysis reached or what the Air Force's final determination was.
This case file is reproduced below as held by the National Archives across 30 pages.
Reported location
Hamel, Minnesota
Date of incident
August 1948
State / country
MN / US
Page count
30 scanned pages
USAF evaluation
unknown
Microfilm
T1206, Roll 3