New Orleans, LouisianaOctober 1950

On October 10, 1950, a father and son in New Orleans watched a bright, noiseless object hover in the sky for five to ten minutes. The object glowed with a whitish-blue light and appeared to be traveling northward at least a mile away and at an altitude of one mile or higher. The two men, standing in the northeast part of the city, disagreed somewhat on the object's shape. The father described it as resembling a section of stove pipe, about two and a half feet long and three to four inches wide. The son said it looked more like the side view of a saucer, roughly thirty to forty feet long and three to four feet thick. Both observers reported that the object seemed to be made of bright lights that glistened like facets on a diamond. It made no sound and left no exhaust trail. They both experienced "peculiar" spots floating in their vision for one to two minutes after staring at it. The object faded slowly in the distance until it became a speck of light and then vanished, but not below the horizon. Despite their prolonged observation, no estimate of the object's speed was made. The neighbors' ducks, normally accustomed to the sight of ordinary aircraft, showed alarm at the silent craft. The observers later reported that they were familiar with conventional aircraft, having military experience or having flown as passengers many times.

Around the same time, on October 10 or 11, a woman at Charity Hospital in New Orleans reported seeing twelve shiny, metallic objects with round bodies and short wings through her window. These objects appeared to be constantly spinning and diving but maintained no fixed pattern or formation. She watched them circle in a northerly direction for approximately two hours. The objects were more than a mile away and not extremely high. They were noiseless, left no visible exhaust trails, and were bright gray to opalescent in color. Like the first sighting, no physical evidence was recovered.

The Air Force Office of Special Investigations compiled these reports along with accounts from other witnesses in Louisiana during the same period, including a family near Jonesville who observed hovering objects on November 6, 1950. The investigation file notes that there were no meteorological conditions that might explain the sightings and no physical evidence to support any particular hypothesis. One of the two official Project Blue Book evaluation forms in the file concludes that the first New Orleans sighting, involving the father and son, was "evaluated as a balloon observation," though the other sighting is listed as having "insufficient data" for a determination. The full case file consists of 12 pages as held by the National Archives.