TATUILL, NMSeptember 1950

On September 17, 1950, a geologist working for Amerada Petroleum Corporation reported seeing an unusual glowing object while driving a truck to a wildcat oil well near Tatum, New Mexico. The witness, an Army Reserve member, observed the object at approximately 5:50 p.m. during a heavy rainstorm and wrote down a detailed account the same evening.

The object appeared as an orange-red ball, wider in its center than at its edges. Over the course of a few minutes, the witness saw it three separate times. In the first sighting, the object hung in a vertical position for about ten seconds, then seemed to move forward before receding. After a brief pause, it reappeared much closer, in a horizontal position roughly one to one and a half miles away. The witness described this second viewing as lasting fifteen to twenty seconds, or perhaps even a minute. The object seemed to glide slowly toward him with smooth, steady movement. Though he briefly considered stopping, he decided to keep driving and moved quickly down the muddy, water-filled road. The object eventually banked slightly, with the south end rising and the north end dipping, before heading back west and disappearing. Seconds later, he saw it a third time, now heading south and looking more like a round ball, before it vanished. The witness emphasized that the object never seemed to move at high speed and appeared too large to be any aircraft he had ever seen, including a B-36 or B-29 bomber.

The witness also reported seeing what he thought might be a gray, hill-like mass in the distance to the west, roughly 200 feet high and about a mile away, though no hills existed in the area. Later, while at the oil rig, he observed two patches of light to the south on the horizon, with four small clouds visible in the illuminated area that slowly descended to the ground. He found the rainfall itself strange, remarking that level clouds to the north and west appeared stationary and did not seem to be producing rain, yet rain was falling from that direction.

The Air Force intelligence officer who filed the formal report noted that the witness had not been interviewed in person and no corroborating information had been received. The officer also commented that the witness's receptiveness to seeing unusual objects "may have been favorably conditioned by an article in the current issue of a nationally distributed magazine." The Air Force classified the case as unidentified and indicated that further investigation was not planned.

The full case file, held by the National Archives, consists of 9 pages.