White Sands, New MexicoNovember 1957

At about 1 p.m. on November 4, 1957, James Stokes, an electronic warfare engineer at White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico, was driving south on U.S. Highway 54 toward El Paso when his car's engine and radio cut out simultaneously. According to Stokes's report to Project Blue Book investigators, he saw a luminous, egg-shaped object descend across the highway in front of him. Several other vehicles had pulled over onto the shoulder, and Stokes joined them.

Stokes told investigators that the object was a brilliant orange or pinkish color, that it moved silently across the road, and that he felt a wave of heat as it passed. After the object continued out of sight to the east, the stalled vehicles were able to restart and continue on their way. Stokes estimated the encounter at one to two minutes from the moment his engine first cut out to the moment the object passed beyond visual range.

The Stokes incident occurred during the same overnight period as the multiple-witness vehicle-interference reports from Levelland, Texas and the Albuquerque-Kirtland AFB radar-visual case. Project Blue Book treated all three events as related and dispatched investigators to White Sands within days. The file documents Stokes's full debriefing, interviews with two of the other motorists who had pulled over, and meteorological data from White Sands and the nearby Holloman Air Force Base.

The Air Force investigation considered possible explanations including ball lightning, plasma discharge from atmospheric conditions in the high desert, and conventional aircraft from Holloman, none of which appeared to match the witnesses' descriptions of a luminous, slowly-moving object that produced both visual and apparent thermal effects. Stokes reported a mild sunburn-like reddening of his face in the days following the encounter, which he attributed to the heat he had felt from the object as it passed his vehicle.

Project Blue Book filed the Stokes incident as "unidentified" in the program's final tally. The case is widely cited in the Project Blue Book historical literature as one of the strongest single-witness reports from the November 1957 wave, particularly because Stokes held a Department of the Army position with security clearance and a technical background well-suited to evaluating what he had seen.

The full case file (31 scanned pages of original witness statements, the engineer's full debriefing transcript, meteorological data, and internal Air Force correspondence about how to characterize the wave of November 1957 sightings across the southwest) is reproduced below as held by the National Archives.