Omaha, NebraskaJanuary 1959

On a January night in 1959, a man in Omaha, Nebraska happened to be looking out his kitchen window with binoculars when he spotted something unusual in the sky. The object appeared circular and quite small, roughly one quarter to one third the size of a penny held at arm's length. What caught his attention was the color, which seemed to change from green to purple to blue to white in a repeating cycle, and the object appeared to twinkle.

The observer watched the object from a moderately well-lit section of the city, positioned at about 40 degrees azimuth (roughly northwest) from Omaha at an angle between 15 and 27 degrees above the horizon. He reported that the object moved westerly and climbed steadily higher into the sky. The object appeared to be one bright light in its center with dimmer lights on each side arranged in a horizontal line. He heard no sound and saw no tail, trail, or exhaust.

The Air Force interviewed the observer and examined his binoculars, which provided about 6 power magnification and were standard Navy navigation binoculars. The investigation revealed temperature inversions at specific altitudes that evening. An intelligence officer and weapons controller named Captain Howard T. Moody compared the object's position and behavior to the predicted path of the star Cirrus (also called Betelgeuse), a bright first-magnitude star. The officer noted that the initially rapid apparent movement the observer reported could be explained by the temperature inversions that night, combined with normal twinkling characteristics of bright stars. After discussing these findings with the observer, both agreed the object was most likely a star.

The Air Force marked this case "unidentified," though the file strongly suggests Betelgeuse or Cirrus based on the star's position at the time, the observer's binocular view, and the characteristic color-shifting and twinkling caused by looking at a bright star through the Earth's atmosphere. The full case file is reproduced below as held by the National Archives, consisting of 8 pages.