Miramar NAS, CaliforniaFebruary 1955

On the morning of February 2, 1955, a Navy commander driving a private vehicle near Miramar Naval Air Station in California noticed something odd in the sky. He was watching several Navy aircraft landing when he spotted an object below one of them. At first, he thought a part of the aircraft, perhaps the canopy, had been ejected and was falling. The object had an erratic-looking motion but descended steadily at about 3 to 5 hundred feet per minute. The observer estimated the object was between 10 and 20 thousand feet up when he first saw it.

The object appeared off-white in color with a highly polished surface that gleamed in the sunlight. It was not a reflection, the officer insisted, because it was actively reflecting sunlight. As he watched, the object changed to a reddish-brown color. Then something remarkable happened: the object almost instantaneously accelerated to an extremely high speed, which the officer estimated at no less than 1,000 to 1,500 miles per hour. It left behind a short brown vapor trail that quickly faded in the wind.

The observer, who had spent about 25 years in Naval Aviation, was clear about what he had seen. It was not a conventional aircraft, not a reflection, and not an optical illusion. He described it as a solid object with definite mass, probably spherical in shape, and estimated it was between 25 and 35 feet in diameter, though he acknowledged it could have been as large as 100 feet. He was unable to determine its exact size or exact altitude because of the distance and his concentration on the aircraft's landing.

The Air Force's Air Technical Intelligence Center received the officer's detailed written report and requested additional information from him on a technical form. The center did not identify the object. The official Air Force evaluation listed the case as "unidentified." The complete case file is reproduced below as held by the National Archives, 7 pages.