Richmond, IndianaNovember 1948

Early on the morning of November 5, 1948, a bright light appeared in the eastern sky above Richmond, Indiana. The object resembled a star, but was roughly five to ten times larger and much brighter. Two callers contacted the local newspaper, the Palladium-Item, at 4:35 a.m. to report it. One described it as looking like "a flare hanging from a parachute." The light flickered noticeably as it hung in the clear sky, growing dim and bright by turns.

Dale Stevens, a sports writer working at the newspaper's office that morning, watched the object for several minutes before taking a photograph of it. He noted that it seemed to flicker a great deal. By 4:55 a.m., a cloud moved in front of it and blocked it from view entirely. The object remained visible for roughly twenty minutes. A photographer at the Palladium Publishing building also captured an image of the light. Professor David Telfair of Earlham College suggested it might have been a flare dropped from a passing aircraft.

The Air Force's investigation focused heavily on whether the object could have been related to balloons or aircraft. An internal memo noted that no weather balloon could have reached Richmond at the time of the sighting, since the release time and sighting time were nearly simultaneous. Military officials also explored whether military flares could explain the observation. They noted that parachute flares typically burn for only five to eight minutes and would not account for a twenty-minute sighting. However, the OCR quality of much of the investigative file is too poor to extract additional details about the analysis.

The Air Force ultimately classified this case as unidentified. A weather service memo suggested the incident "very likely has an astronomical explanation," and the evaluations in the Project GRUDGE report list case 197 (Richmond) under high-probability astronomical phenomena. The full case file, comprising 26 pages as held by the National Archives, is reproduced below.