Rock Garden, Tenn, September 1955September 1955

On September 9, 1955, two housewives sitting in their front yard in Rock Garden, a residential area near Alcoa, Tennessee, noticed an unusual object moving across the sky. One of the women, age 31, saw it first coming from the north around 6:11 p.m. She called her neighbor, age 33, to look. The object appeared almost square in shape and brownish in color, about the size of a large beach ball held at arm's length. It seemed solid and moved slowly in a circular pattern overhead. As it turned eastward, it sped up, passed behind some trees, and disappeared from view. The sighting lasted roughly ten to fifteen minutes, though the witnesses only looked through binoculars briefly as the object was leaving.

The Air Force investigators who followed up on the report noted a troubling inconsistency. When first interviewed, the main witness described the object as almost square and brownish. But in a follow-up conversation, she changed her account, saying it was pointed like a rocket with small stubby wings. This shift made the investigators skeptical about how reliable her other details were, including how long she actually saw the object.

The Air Force checked multiple possible explanations. Three commercial airliners were in the area at the time, but all reported seeing nothing. Two military jet fighters were also airborne, but their pilots reported negative sightings. Weather stations in Nashville and Knoxville, Tennessee, and Asheville, North Carolina, had released weather balloons earlier that day, but meteorologists concluded those balloons would have risen too quickly and traveled too far to match what the witnesses described. The Knoxville Filter Center, which tracked aircraft and unusual objects on radar, reported no observations. No experimental aircraft were in the area. The local astronomer reported no unusual astronomical activity.

The investigating officer concluded that the object might have been some type of balloon, possibly one not launched by official weather stations, or conceivably an aircraft. However, he found the witness unreliable due to her changing descriptions, and he suspected she may have misidentified one of the known aircraft in the area. The Air Force evaluation listed the case as "unknown," though the investigators' skepticism about the witness's credibility came through clearly in the file. This case file, comprising 10 pages, is reproduced below as held by the National Archives.