Selfridge AFB, Mich, March 1950March 1950

On the evening of March 9, 1950, military personnel at Selfridge Air Force Base near Detroit observed something unusual in the sky and on radar that the Air Force could not explain.

The first sighting came around 11:05 p.m. A first lieutenant who was driving near the base exchange building saw a yellowish light descending slowly over the installation. He stopped his car to watch. The light hovered at roughly 5,000 feet for about a minute, then moved westward for approximately 50 miles. It then turned south for a similar distance, reversed course, and flew north again, all within four minutes. The officer noted that the light did not appear to grow smaller as it moved away, making it hard to judge distance. He compared the brightness to a house window viewed from 50 to 75 feet away on a dark night. The object moved in ways he said distinguished it clearly from any airplane he had seen.

Later that same evening, around 7:43 p.m., radar operators at the base picked up an unusual blip on their scopes. The target appeared at 40,000 feet and held steady for three minutes before fading, then reappeared five minutes later moving northeast at an estimated 1,500 miles per hour. Over the next several hours, the operators detected multiple radar returns with erratic vertical movements, sometimes climbing from 30,000 to 45,000 feet in a single minute. A controller who was a rated pilot with nearly 3,000 hours of flying time stated he watched the blip closely and was struck by its behavior. The operators were careful to check their accuracy by comparing the radar altitude of nearby jet aircraft to their pilots' actual flight levels, and the readings matched.

An Air Force intelligence officer from nearby Wright-Patterson Air Force Base requested detailed information about the radar equipment, weather conditions, and whether any fighter pilots had reported unusual activity. The command's technical experts examined the possibility that atmospheric conditions might have caused false radar echoes. However, they concluded that the large difference in frequencies between the two radar sets involved, combined with how consistently both sets tracked the object, made this explanation unlikely. They also noted that the object's reported accelerations exceeded the capability of any known aircraft, and that it remained stationary in the air for extended periods. The experts stated: "In summary, no known electronic phenomena, nor combinations of several electronic phenomena could conceivably produce all of the observations covered by the attached reports."

The Air Force evaluation of this case appears in the file as "unknown," and the case was forwarded to Air Materiel Command headquarters as an unconventional aircraft sighting. The full case file is reproduced below as held by the National Archives, consisting of 9 pages.