Vandalia, OhioJanuary 1962

On the morning of January 16, 1962, a woman in Vandalia, Ohio opened her window curtains and saw an unusual sight in the predawn sky. A bright trail was streaking downward in an arc, as if something were falling toward earth. The trail changed colors as it descended: bright orange at the top, shifting to pink, then yellow, then white, and finally gray. When the object leveled off, it briefly left a gray trail behind it before separating from that trail and moving away. The woman described the object itself, now separated from the colorful trail, as resembling a transport aircraft without wings, roughly the size of a DC-6 (a large military cargo plane), at an estimated distance of 1 to 1.5 miles away. The whole event lasted about five minutes. The object moved at a speed she compared to a landing airliner, then disappeared behind trees as if coming in to land.

The Air Force investigator who reviewed this case concluded it was almost certainly a condensation trail left by a jet aircraft from nearby Wright-Patterson Air Force Base (WPAFB). The investigator theorized that the jet was performing a non-standard descent procedure northwest of the base, and that the sun, though not yet risen for the witness, was actually illuminating the upper portions of the trail from above the horizon. The bright orange, pink, and yellow colors the witness observed at the top of the trail, the investigator suggested, came from sunlight hitting ice crystals in the jet's exhaust. The lower portions of the trail appeared darker because they contained black smoke from the engines, which were not yet illuminated by the rising sun. The witness, seeing a real aircraft in the semi-darkness and interpreting an unusual aircraft contrail, was said to have added details to her description based on her imagination. The Air Force evaluation form marked this case as "Probably Balloon," though the detailed analysis indicated the probable cause was a jet aircraft performing an unusual descent procedure.

The full case file is reproduced below as held by the National Archives, comprising 11 pages.