Medina, New YorkAugust 1962

In August 1962, a resident of Medina, New York wrote to the U.S. Air Force describing an unusual discovery. During a rainstorm on August 17, pieces of shiny foil had fallen from the sky along with the rain. The writer, uncertain what the material was, enclosed some samples and asked whether they might be related to space needles the Air Force had previously launched into orbit.

The Air Force's response came swiftly. Officials identified the foil as chaff, a radar countermeasure deliberately dropped by military aircraft. When released from planes in bundles during practice missions, chaff separates into individual pieces that each create false radar blips on monitoring screens, masking the movement of the aircraft below. The material falls slowly enough to allow planes to evade detection. There was nothing mysterious about the discovery, the Air Force explained. The foil was simply the byproduct of a routine training exercise.

The case file includes a separate sighting report from Ogden, Utah, dated August 17 to 18, 1962, describing a lemon shaped object observed by a railroad worker and his grandson. However, the OCR text for that report is heavily garbled and largely illegible, making it impossible to extract reliable details from the surviving pages.

The Air Force concluded that the foil found in Medina was chaff. The full case file is reproduced below as held by the National Archives, comprising 9 pages.