Oak Ridge, Tenn, December 1950December 1950

Between 0820 and 0830 hours on December 18, 1950, seven officials traveling in two cars on the turnpike near Oak Ridge, Tennessee spotted an unidentified flying object. About the same time, radar operators at McGhee Tyson Air Force Base near Knoxville also detected something unusual on their scopes. The sighting took place in a restricted military area.

The witnesses in the first car saw a bright white light shaped like a circle through their windshield. The light was much brighter than a full moon and appeared to have some shape or form, not just a point. To them, it looked like sunlight reflecting off a metal surface, perhaps from a distant aircraft. The object seemed to be traveling northwest at an elevation of 15 to 30 degrees above the horizon. During the roughly 30 seconds the group watched it, the object appeared to shrink in size before a ridge blocked their view. The second group of witnesses described the same light, noting that it gradually darkened around its edges until most of the glow concentrated into a bright spot resembling a large star. Because the vehicle was moving and changing direction, the witnesses could not agree on whether the object was actually flying away or simply fading due to changing light and viewing angle.

At 0839 (8:39 a.m.), the radar station picked up what operators called a "small paint" (a faint radar target) southeast of Oak Ridge on a bearing of 130 degrees magnetic, moving at 60 miles per hour at an estimated height of 500 feet. The target vanished from the radar scopes at 0845 (8:45 a.m.). Fighter jets attempted to intercept but found nothing. Weather conditions at the time were clear, with northeast winds at 7 miles per hour and a temperature of 20 degrees Fahrenheit.

A Department of Defense intelligence review noted skepticism about the radar data. The radar operators reported the target only after receiving word of the visual sightings, suggesting either that they had not been watching carefully before or that they were reporting minor radar noise and interference. The brief time the object appeared on radar, combined with the weak signal, made it impossible to establish a solid radar track. No definitive explanation for either the visual or radar sighting appears in the file. The complete case file is preserved here as held by the National Archives, spanning 10 scanned pages.