Kings Park Long Island, NYMay 1957

On May 24, 1957, at 10:53 a.m., Edmund McCabe was working on a high-tension electrical line near Old Northport Road in Kings Park, Long Island, when he spotted an object in the sky. At first he thought it was a jet aircraft, but as he watched, he realized it had no wings or tail. What struck him most was how slowly it moved, so slowly that he believed any real aircraft would stall out at that speed. He called up to a lineman working on a nearby pole, and that worker confirmed he could see the object too but also saw no wings or tail assembly.

The two men watched the object for about a minute and a half as it traveled across roughly 45 degrees of sky, moving from north to south. The object appeared roughly cigar shaped, about an inch long with a diameter one quarter of its length. It was silvery in color. During the final ten seconds of observation, the object seemed to shrink and then vanished suddenly, as if it had climbed rapidly into the sky. McCabe noted that a C-119 transport plane passed over the same area about an hour later, and a jet flew the opposite direction at 11:20 a.m., but neither matched what he had seen.

The Air Force officer who filed the report considered several conventional explanations. An F-102 fighter jet, which operated from nearby Suffolk County Air Force Base, can look cigar shaped at a distance, but McCabe said the object was moving far too slowly to be a fighter. The officer also considered a weather balloon, possibly one released from LaGuardia Airport in New York City. Wind data showed winds at various altitudes were blowing generally westward, which could fit a balloon's drift. However, a LaGuardia weather balloon should have appeared considerably smaller than what McCabe described, and the exact angles and direction McCabe reported seemed inconsistent with a balloon's expected path given the wind patterns. The officer noted that McCabe's description of the sun being behind him, rather than in front of him, complicated the balloon theory further.

Because the available evidence pointed to no clear explanation, the Air Force marked this case as unidentified. The full case file, 8 pages as held by the National Archives, is reproduced below.