San Antonio, TexasMarch 1953

An undetermined number of lights appeared over San Antonio, Texas, on the evening of March 25, 1953, moving in unusual patterns that neither radar nor conventional explanations could account for.

The sighting began around 10:15 p.m. CST when an Air Force officer and his wife noticed a bright point of light in the northern sky. At first they thought it was a star, but the light was moving south at a very high speed. They called their neighbors and several family members came outside to watch. Over the next hour and a half, multiple lights appeared one after another, always traveling from north to south. The lights resembled stars in brightness and size, and no sound accompanied them at any time. Most interesting was that roughly half the objects made a complete circular path with a diameter of about fifteen miles before continuing south and fading gradually from view. One light passed through the halo around the moon and left behind a faint trail similar to a vapor trail, though it did not persist.

The local radar station made contact with the lights to no effect, returning negative results. Control tower personnel at both Kelly and Brooks Air Force Bases confirmed the visual sighting. An analysis from Ohio State University's McMillin Observatory noted that the circular maneuvers ruled out a simple meteor shower, and suggested the objects might be astronomical phenomena or aircraft like helicopters, but the data remained puzzling. The Air Force's weather analysis at Kelly found no known unusual phenomena in the air at the time that could have caused such a sighting.

The Air Force evaluated the case as unidentified, meaning they could not match the sighting to any known phenomenon or object. The full case file is reproduced below as held by the National Archives, 63 pages.