Marysville, Calif, December 1953December 1953

In the early evening of December 28, 1953, a resident of Marysville, California watched an unidentified flying object for about thirteen minutes. The object appeared to be shaped like a saucer, roughly the size of a baseball, and shone with a brilliant bluish light that did not radiate outward. The witness saw the light reflected off a nearby filling station building. The object moved at an estimated speed of 140 to 190 miles per hour, hovered briefly, and eventually faded into the night sky. It was sighted at an altitude of approximately 300 feet before descending to between 100 and 150 feet.

The Air Force's investigation considered and ruled out a jet aircraft with afterburner. An afterburner would have produced sound that the observer, being so close to the object, could not have failed to hear. The illusion of hovering also contradicted the jet hypothesis.

The file includes extensive weather data collected from multiple California weather stations on December 28, 1953. However, the OCR quality of these weather charts is poor, making detailed interpretation difficult. The Air Force gathered surface observations, upper-atmosphere readings, and meteorological profiles, presumably to rule out natural phenomena such as balloons or weather-related optical effects. Despite this comprehensive data collection, the weather records do not appear to have led to a definitive conventional explanation.

On the cover sheet, the Air Force concluded the case was "unidentified," meaning investigators could not determine the object's source or nature. The file consists of 36 pages held by the National Archives.