Holloman AFB, New MexicoMay 1949

On the evening of May 12, 1949, a Harvard Observatory astronomer driving near Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico spotted something unusual in the eastern sky. The observer, who was watching the moon rise, noticed what appeared to be two bright, fuzzy stars. At first, he thought they might be Castor and Pollux, stars in the constellation Gemini, but he quickly realized that made no sense. Gemini was in the west that night, not the east. The two objects were nearly identical in size, each about one-fourth the diameter of the full moon, and they had a white color with possibly a greenish tinge.

The observer watched the objects for about four minutes as his car traveled at 50 miles per hour along the road. During that time, he noticed the southern object suddenly vanished. He asked the driver to stop the car, but the northern object disappeared at almost the same moment. The northern one had appeared slightly brighter than its companion. The observer was wearing bifocals and deliberately shifted his head and lowered the car window to confirm the objects were real and not an optical illusion. He remained uncertain whether what he saw might have been clouds behaving in an unusual way, though he noted the behavior was strange.

Based on the distance the car traveled and the objects' apparent lack of movement relative to the horizon, the observer calculated that the objects were at least 180 miles away. He acknowledged that the whole phenomenon was puzzling and admitted there seemed to be no completely satisfactory explanation, though he noted a bare possibility that the patches were clouds. The Air Force classified the sighting as unidentified. The full case file, as held by the National Archives, is reproduced below in 7 pages.