SW of Wichita Falls, TexasSeptember 1960

On the morning of September 28, 1960, a bright white light fell from the sky southwest of Wichita Falls, Texas, and was seen by dozens of people across a wide area. The sighting occurred at approximately 4:24 a.m. local time. Witnesses described the object as circular, brilliant, and intensely bright, trailing what some described as a conical tail. Most observers reported the object fell without making any sound. The brightness was remarkable enough to illuminate the ground and nearby structures, and several witnesses believed they saw it strike the earth nearby, though estimates of where it landed varied greatly. The witnesses included Wichita Falls police officers, Air Force personnel, construction workers, a truck driver, and residents scattered across Texas and into Oklahoma.

The object appeared to travel from northeast to southwest, descending rapidly over just a few seconds. A truck driver estimated it fell for 10 to 15 seconds and believed he saw it burning on the ground like a glowing coal for about 20 seconds before the light went out. A retired Air Force intelligence officer watching from Iowa Park provided one of the most detailed accounts, estimating the object fell from 30 degrees above the horizon to about 10 to 20 degrees, a descent that took just 3 to 5 seconds. The wide scatter of observers across a 30-mile area, all reporting the same event at nearly the same time, left investigators confident that a single object had been observed by multiple independent witnesses.

Complicating the investigation was a separate report of material recovered from Wichita Falls later that morning. A housewife reported seeing billowing matter in the sky around 8:30 a.m. and caught a piece that had a rubber-like quality and shrank when touched. A helicopter and ground teams searched the estimated impact area southwest of Wichita Falls on September 28 and again on September 30, but found no debris from the fallen object. Using triangulation from sighting reports in Wichita Falls and Vernon, Texas, investigators estimated the object came down somewhere near Seymour, Texas, but the search yielded nothing.

The Air Force concluded that the object was probably a meteorite of unusual brightness, possibly a fireball-class meteor that burned up completely in the atmosphere. Investigators noted that the lack of any sound, the wide dispersal of observer estimates, and the absence of recovered impact debris all supported this conclusion. As for the fibrous material the housewife collected, the Air Force's Air Technical Intelligence Center assessed it as possibly spider web with no connection to the meteor sighting. The Smithsonian Institution received a sample of the material for analysis, but the case file does not record the results of that examination.

This case file, consisting of 13 pages as held by the National Archives, documents the investigation conducted by the 1127th USAF Field Activities Group from Fort Belvoir, Virginia.