Washington, D. C., June 1959June 1959

On the evening of June 3, 1959, a retired Air Force officer and his wife spotted something unusual from the roof of their home in Washington, D.C., at around 11 p.m. The object appeared as a bright orange ball, roughly the size of Jupiter as seen from Earth. It traveled in an almost perfectly flat path across the sky, moving from west to east at tremendous speed. The entire sighting lasted between 20 and 30 seconds. The witnesses made careful note that no sound accompanied the object, and its color and brightness remained steady throughout.

The couple ruled out several conventional explanations. The witness, who had 11 years of Air Force experience and a personal background in astronomy, knew it was not an aircraft because it lacked the pulsating lights that planes display over populated areas. It was not a meteor, he reasoned, because it stayed visible for far too long and followed a trajectory that was far too horizontal. The two planets visible that night, Venus and Jupiter, were in different parts of the sky and moved very differently from what they observed. The object simply did not match any standard explanation they could imagine.

The Air Force investigation that followed examined the report from multiple angles. Analysts checked satellite records, considered astronomical phenomena, and reviewed whether the object could have been explained by radar data. The handwritten analysis on the final page of the file is difficult to read in places, but it notes the object's extreme speed and attempts to correlate observations with known satellites and celestial bodies. The file notes that the conclusion was that the object was probably a fireball, a type of exceptionally bright meteor, though the analysis suggests some uncertainty about whether the object's characteristics fully matched that explanation.

The full case file is reproduced below as held by the National Archives, comprising 8 pages.