Hebgen Lake, MontanaAugust 1949

On the morning of August 9, 1949, a man working at a lodge near Hebgen Lake in western Montana reported seeing eight disc-shaped objects streak across the sky. The worker, employed as a guide, said seven objects flew over the lake in formation at around 9:30 a.m., with two of them crashing in the surrounding area. A half hour later, he said, a single object appeared and also came down.

The Air Force investigator who interviewed him found his account puzzling. The guide said the objects were about the size of a car tire, metallic gray in color, and moving at roughly 1,500 miles per hour. He heard a siren-like sound before they appeared. The objects stayed in view for only a few seconds before vanishing over distant ridges. The guide insisted that two of them crashed, one hitting the nearby lake with a large spray and another plowing into a wooded area two miles away. Yet neither impact produced any fire, smoke, or explosion.

Agents conducted a thorough three-day search of the wooded area and dragged parts of the lake with grappling hooks, but found nothing. They noted no debris, no disturbed ground, no scorched vegetation, nothing at all to suggest that any objects had crashed. The investigator ultimately doubted the guide's account. In his report, he observed that while the man had a good reputation in the community and was regarded as reliable by his employer, he also had "a decided tendency to exaggerate" in conversation. The guide refused to sign a sworn statement about what he had seen.

The case file took on new significance in October 1949, when a plastic object was discovered on a nearby mountainside. Upon examination, Air Force investigators determined it was an astradome (a transparent dome cover used on aircraft to allow observation) from a C-47 transport plane, made of broken plexiglass. This finding suggested the initial August sighting may have been misidentified debris from an aircraft rather than something truly unknown, though the file does not explicitly draw that conclusion.

The full case file of 48 pages is reproduced below as held by the National Archives.