Middletown, OhioAugust 1961

On the night of August 6, 1961, a resident of Middletown, Ohio noticed an unusual light in the sky. Over the next two weeks, he observed the same object roughly ten times, always on clear nights. The light appeared about as bright as a second-magnitude star (comparable to the star Capella) and seemed to follow a regular path across the sky, rising roughly fifteen degrees east of magnetic north and moving toward the southeast.

The witness calculated that the object took approximately twenty-four hours to complete an orbit around the Earth. He tracked its motion carefully, measuring its movement over a three-and-a-half-hour period on the night of August 16 and confirming his orbital period calculation. He found it puzzling that no satellite he had heard of would orbit so slowly, and he wondered whether something at such an altitude would be large enough to reflect this much light.

The Air Force received a detailed written inquiry from the witness on August 22, 1961. When investigators reviewed the case, they noted several key facts. The witness had calculated an orbital period of 23 hours, 55 minutes, and 42 seconds. The actual length of a sidereal day (one full rotation of the Earth relative to the stars) is 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4 seconds. The object's motion, brightness, appearance, duration of visibility, and position all matched the characteristics of the bright star Capella in the constellation Auriga. All evidence indicated the object was probably a star, not an orbiting satellite or unknown craft.

The full case file, held by the National Archives, spans 23 scanned pages.