Hilliard, OhioSeptember 1961

On the evening of September 14, 1961, a woman driving near Hilliard, Ohio with her four sons saw a bright object hanging low over the road ahead of them. She was traveling west on Roberts Road at about ten miles per hour when she first noticed it. The object appeared as a golden gleam at first, then changed into a big white ball, roughly the size of a grapefruit held at arm's length. She stopped the car to get a better look.

The object seemed to stand still at first, she reported. Then it suddenly sped up and rushed away into the sky. As it rose, the woman said it flickered and changed brightness. When it was high up, it looked like a shiny milk-white ball. She watched for about twenty minutes total before it disappeared. The weather was clear with a slight breeze, and there was no sound from the object at any time.

The woman was confident enough in what she had seen to write to the Air Technical Intelligence Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base two days later. She said her nine-year-old son thought it looked like something from a space movie. However, she had not reported the sighting to anyone else because she had read too much about UFOs and did not want to be labeled a "nut" or a "fool."

The Air Force's investigation considered several explanations. An analyst noted that the planet Mars was positioned near the witness's horizon on that date. Mars had a magnitude of only +1.9 at the time, making it relatively bright, but atmospheric refraction (the bending of light as it passes through layers of air with different temperatures) could have made it appear much brighter and more dramatic to the observers. The analyst concluded that the description and apparent motions matched what would be expected from an object viewed under these atmospheric conditions.

The Air Force officially rated this case as unidentified. The full case file as held by the National Archives consists of 7 pages.