Trinidad, March 1957March 1957

On the night of March 22 to 23, 1957, a woman in Camarillo, California called the duty officer at nearby Oxnard Air Force Base to report seeing an unusual glowing object in the northeast sky. This single phone call triggered one of the most widely investigated UFO incidents of that era. Before the night was over, highway patrol officers, sheriff's deputies, U.S. Air Force pilots, and radar operators from multiple agencies had been pulled into the search.

What the woman described was striking: a solid, round object, roughly two to three feet in diameter, that appeared to glow with a green light. She said it throb and pulsated. Sometimes it hovered. Sometimes it moved at tremendous speeds. There was no sound. Occasionally a shiny aluminum-like pole jutted from the top. Later in the evening, she reported seeing small red objects appear in the sky nearby. The sighting lasted more than five hours, from just before midnight until after 3 a.m.

The Camarillo woman's initial call set off a chain reaction. The duty officer at Oxnard contacted local police and sheriff's deputies instead of following proper UFO-reporting procedure, which would have directed the call to the Air Force's intelligence unit at a nearby base. Within hours, news of the sighting had leaked to press and curious bystanders. The publicity only grew when F-89 fighter jets were scrambled to search the area and found nothing, and when radar units reported conflicting information about whether an object had been tracked.

An Air Force intelligence team later investigated the incident thoroughly. They interviewed the observer, checked weather conditions, reviewed radar logs, interviewed the pilots and ground witnesses, and studied the local area from the observer's home. What they found was mundane: a barn with red lights on its corners, a telegraph pole with cross-bars, and a very bright star known as Arcturus low on the northeastern horizon. The team concluded that the woman, who was alone with a sick child while her husband was away, had been confused by the interplay of ordinary lights and optical effects created by looking through her kitchen window at a maze of wires and insulators. Temperature inversion in the atmosphere may have bent or distorted the light further.

The Air Force's evaluation: the objects were stars and conventional lights, possibly astronomical.

The full 66-page case file is reproduced below as held by the National Archives.