Silver Springs, MarylandSeptember 1953

On the night of September 30, 1953, a homeowner in Silver Springs, Maryland, stepped outside and spotted an unusual object in the sky. The man, who owned a local equipment company, described seeing a silvery, spheroid (ball-shaped) object about six to eight feet across, gliding silently at roughly 300 feet above a house across the street. The object moved parallel to Colesville Road in a southwest direction and appeared to be heading toward a nearby golf course. It gave off no light of its own, yet seemed very bright. He watched it for about two minutes before it disappeared from view.

The sighting occurred on a clear night with good visibility. A plane passed overhead about twenty minutes later, which the observer noted for comparison. The object moved too slowly to be a meteor, according to the investigator who reviewed the case. A second observer also reported seeing an unidentified object over the Arlington area of nearby Virginia around the same time, described as elliptical in shape with a glowing blue color similar to a match flame, though the details of that sighting are less clear in the file.

The Air Force Intelligence officer who filed the report, 2nd Lt. Albert N. Hutchinson Jr., noted that the brightness and altitude estimates were above what could be expected from ordinary observation, and concluded it was unlikely the object was a conventional aircraft. The investigator also found that a meteor had been sighted by others in the region at roughly the time of the Maryland sighting.

The Air Force did not reach a firm conclusion about what the object was. The case file, which includes the formal sighting reports, witness interviews, and weather data, is reproduced below in its 15 pages as held by the National Archives.