Levittown, N.Y., October 1957October 1957

On October 10, 1957, a person in Levittown, New York, saw a round area of light larger than a basketball. The object appeared blue-green with a trail three or four times its size. It showed up ahead of their car while traveling and faded from view after about two or three seconds. The sighting was ground-based and visual.

The same morning, reports flooded in from across the western United States of a much larger fireball event. A Navy transport plane pilot, Lt. Commander W. F. Norris, nearly collided with a bright object near the Utah-Colorado border. He reported it descended sharply at tremendous speed, trailing multicolored light, and appeared to crash 20 to 30 miles east of Myton, Utah. Air Force personnel, civil aviation officials, and military pilots all saw the object from scattered locations in Texas, Colorado, Wyoming, South Dakota, Montana, and Utah. Witnesses described it as a huge fireball, sometimes white and sometimes blue-green with a blue flame tail. Some observers said it looked like the moon pulsing with blue fire.

Search teams were dispatched, but the terrain was rugged and covered in snow, making a full ground search difficult to complete. An astrophysicist who conducted a fireball survey concluded the object had disintegrated above ten miles altitude near Avon and Eagle, Colorado, far from where searchers initially looked. Scientists and Air Force officials quickly ruled out the possibility that the object was part of the Soviet satellite Sputnik or a manned U.S. missile. The Air Force found no evidence of missile testing that day. The file indicates that the Air Force labeled the fireball as unknown, though a spokesman told the press it appeared to be a meteor.

The full case file is reproduced below as held by the National Archives, comprising 25 pages.