Pullman, Wash., July 1949 - Incident Number: 403July 1949

On the afternoon of July 17, 1949, a woman in Pullman, Washington saw an unusual object in the sky. The wife of a College of Washington professor reported watching it for about five minutes between 2:30 and 3:30 p.m. She described the object as a spinning halo, rotating end over end but not in the flat plane you would expect from a spinning disc. The halo appeared to rotate together with the object itself, and she saw it moving rapidly toward the east at a very high altitude. The object was shiny and white.

This sighting drew attention because it matched an earlier report in the Pullman Herald from July 15, which described a separate incident on July 12. Three men reported seeing a large, shiny object floating eastward in a rolling motion, very high up and glinting in the sunlight. Like the later sighting, their object was also visible for about five minutes.

The U.S. Air Force's 25th Air Defense Division received the witness account through naval intelligence channels and forwarded it up the chain of command in early August 1949 as part of Project Sign, the Air Force's formal UFO investigation program. However, the case file does not contain a final Air Force evaluation or conclusion about what the object might have been.

The complete case file, as preserved by the National Archives, spans six pages of scanned documents.