Hampton Bays, L. I., New YorkJune 1953

# Hampton Bays UFO Sightings, June-November 1953

On the night of June 24, 1953, a woman in Hampton Bays, Long Island, reported seeing an enormous disc-shaped craft hover above a marsh near her home. She described a cone-shaped object approximately 75 to 100 feet in diameter, with a streamlined aluminum cabin suspended by a polished chrome support column. The craft bore a ring of evenly spaced red lights around its outer deck and featured four teardrop-shaped windows. The woman stated the object hovered silently about 100 feet above a marshy area for roughly two minutes, tilted to reveal its structure, then accelerated rapidly into the sky and disappeared. This became the first of several sightings she would report between June and November 1953.

Over the following months, the witness reported seeing smaller, torpedo-shaped craft with brilliant green and white glowing centers moving through the area. On October 4, she called local police after watching these smaller objects explore nearby homes and the surrounding landscape. A state trooper responded and observed the lights with her, though he later suggested they might be reflections. On October 6, following her third police call, she filed a formal report with the Air Technical Intelligence Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. Throughout September and October, she documented additional phenomena including compass deviations, television interference, fish scales appearing on her dock, and unusual heat imprints in the earth near her property.

In early December 1953, an engineer from American Machine and Foundry Company visited the witness at the request of the Air Force. He confirmed she appeared rational and well-intentioned, but noted that the state trooper who initially responded had concluded the lights were likely car headlight reflections across the bay. The engineer suggested the woman's vivid imagination, combined with her prior reading about flying saucers, may have caused her to interpret natural phenomena as extraordinary. He recommended no further official investigation. The Air Force ultimately classified the June 24 sighting as unidentified.

The complete case file, consisting of 46 pages held by the National Archives, is reproduced below.