NOVASSEUR AFB MOROCCO, July 1952 - Incident Number: [ILLEGIBLE]July 1952

On the night of July 13, 1952, a U.S. Army captain sitting in his car at an outdoor theater north of Nouasseur Air Base in Morocco saw an object on fire moving from south to north through the sky. The object appeared to hover over the runway at roughly 500 feet altitude. It took about seven seconds to cross 50 degrees of the horizon. The main body looked like a teardrop shape with medium-intensity light, and the color was light red. Several smaller dots of flame trailed behind the object, appearing to drop from the main body and burn without changing direction, altitude, or appearance. The flame was not the blue-white variety typical of a shooting star, and the object did not resemble a falling meteor in speed, color, or direction.

Later that same night and on July 13, 1952, multiple witnesses across the Casablanca area reported seeing luminous objects. According to one account that appeared in the Atlantic Courier newspaper, a group of nine people watching from the roof terrace of the American Key Club in Casablanca saw a formation of four ghostly shapes flying rapidly from north to south. The witnesses said the objects appeared to be flying in military formation, with one leading and one trailing. They lost sight of the objects as they moved into the bright moonlit area of the sky. The observers ruled out aircraft because the objects had no blinking lights and were completely illuminated with a neon glow, and because no sound accompanied them.

A separate incident occurred on July 13, 1952, at Nouasseur Air Base itself. At approximately 2337 hours (11:37 p.m.), at least seven airmen and several officers from three locations on the base observed a round, bright, bluish-white object that flew in an arc over the flight line and runway before vanishing over the horizon. The object took five to ten seconds to complete its maneuver. All interviewed personnel stated that the object was not a shooting star, flare, or weather balloon. It descended toward the east at a high rate of speed.

The file notes that visible weather conditions during the sightings were good. No information appears in the case file indicating what the U.S. Air Force eventually concluded about these incidents. The complete file, as reproduced by the National Archives, contains 112 pages.