IDLEWILD AIRPORT, NEW YORKNovember 1953

On the evening of November 2, 1953, a New York City police officer riding a bus from Idlewild Airport spotted six unidentified objects hovering over the airport. The man reported seeing them arranged in two groups of three, one group stacked above the other, at roughly eight thousand feet. He described each object as battleship gray and roughly the size of a fifty-cent piece held at arm's length. What caught his attention most was their unusual shape, which he compared to Navy blimps or the upper portion of a sailboat's rudder. The objects appeared to remain in a fixed formation, though the lower group seemed to drift east while the upper group drifted west.

The witness made three separate observations as his moving bus offered changing vantage points. On his second look, he noticed that each object had two large white light areas with a darker region in the center. He heard no sound and saw no exhaust or trail, though he was inside a closed vehicle. The entire sighting lasted about three minutes before buildings blocked his view. The officer mentioned the objects to another passenger, who suggested they might be broken pieces of chemical smoke from a skywriting aircraft.

The Air Force investigation that followed was thorough. Agents interviewed airport weather forecasters, who confirmed conditions that evening were fair with scattered high clouds. Control tower operators reported a helicopter, a DC-3 commercial aircraft, and other planes were aloft at the time. Notably, tower personnel recorded no unusual sightings in their official log, though one controller mentioned that a helicopter in flight with running lights could create the impression of multiple aircraft due to light reflection off the rotor blade. A weather balloon observation (called a rawinsonde, used to measure atmospheric conditions) was reviewed from nearby Hempstead, and detailed aircraft movement logs were checked.

The Air Force concluded the objects were unidentified but suggested they might have been clouds or contrails (the white lines left by aircraft at high altitude). The file offers no definitive explanation. The full case file, comprising nine pages, is reproduced below as held by the National Archives.