The Falling Polished Sphere at NAS Miramar (Cmdr. J. L. Ingersoll), 1955

In 1955, Naval Air Station Miramar sat north of San Diego, busy with Navy jets. Today it is MCAS Miramar. On Wednesday, 2 February 1955, a commander with about 26 years in Naval Aviation left the station through the east gate in his own car. He was bound for the U.S. Naval Hospital in Balboa Park. Don Berliner's list of Blue Book unknowns names him as USN Cmdr. J. L. Ingersoll. In the released file, his name is blacked out.

It was 11:50 a.m. Just off the east end of the main runway, he watched two F7U3 aircraft flying wing to wing, with an FJ3 crossing their path and a second FJ3 behind. Sensing an emergency, he checked their landing gear: all down. Then he saw something falling below the jets. "My first thought was a part of the airplane, possibly the canopy, had been ejected and was falling."

The object was off white, with "an apparently high polished surface." It looked solid. Spherical, or nearly so. He put it 3 to 5 miles away, somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 feet, and "no less than 25 to 35 feet in diameter." It could, he wrote, "conceivably have been 100 feet in diameter."

It continued to descend at a steady rate of "approximately 3 to 500 feet per minute." Then it came to a complete stand still for 5 to 10 seconds. A reddish brown color appeared. And the sphere "practically instantaneously accelerated to a tremendous speed certainly not less than 1000 to 1500 miles per hour," on a course of about 170 degrees. Behind it hung a short vapor trail of brown hue, which the high wind quickly broke up.

The next day, 3 February 1955, he put it in writing for the Office of Naval Intelligence in San Diego. He was familiar with "the normal illusions one can see in connection with high speed, highly polished or high gloss painted craft," and this was something else. "The object I observed today was not an aircraft in the normal sense as we apply the term, it was a solid object." A definite mass, not a reflection and not an optical illusion.

The 11th Naval District forwarded the report, and it reached the Air Technical Intelligence Center at Wright-Patterson AFB. ATIC asked for more information on its technical form. Whether that form ever came back is not shown in the surviving file. Project Blue Book logged the sighting as case 3416, with a verdict of Unidentified. The seven-page file now rests in the National Archives on microfilm T1206, Roll 22.

No hoax claim has been made, and no conventional explanation has been published. The only mundane idea in the record is the witness's own first guess, the falling canopy, and he rejected it himself. The record has its limits. This was one man, alone, with no way to measure distance, and his size and speed figures rest on a range he admitted he could not confirm. NICAP annotator Brad Sparks estimates the whole event lasted about 15 to 27 seconds.

The case lives on in Berliner's The Blue Book Unknowns, in Loren E. Gross's history of 1955, in the NICAP file titled "Sphere Falls Then Accelerates," and in Patrick Gross's transcription of the commander's letter. On the very same day, in Venezuela, an Aeropost crew reported a spinning object with portholes and a red ring. A separate case. The same date.