Roberta Jacobs's Gold Domed Disc, Caribou, Maine

Aroostook County, Maine. Winter 1955. The Jacobs home stood beside a farmyard, and a bedroom window looked out over the yard and a barn. Most catalogues place it at Caribou. Otto Binder, writing in 1967, placed it at Washburn, a farm town about 10 miles south-west.

Wednesday, December 21, 1955. About 11 p.m. Roberta V. Jacobs, described as a young married housewife, was turning off the lights to go to bed. Through her bedroom window she saw "a red orange glare in the sky." The glare resolved into a golden object, which came to hover over the barn.

"The shape was like a cup turned upside down on a saucer," she said. The flat lower section spun. The dome above looked like a half moon. "The color was like nothing I have ever seen, pure gold would be as close as I could say." She judged it about the size of a jet plane.

Then she noticed the band between the two parts. "Between the flat bottom part and the half-moon top there was something 'alive.'" She could see no form or outline. It was like a person walking in front of a light, with hurried movements. "Not one but many things."

She felt nauseated. "I felt as though 'they' had a telescope or something pointed at me." For 6 to 8 minutes the disc made a short climb, rotated, hovered and then accelerated away, vanishing toward the south-east. "I thought it was a spaceship," she said later.

She woke her husband. "He took one look at it and said, it was the moon." Later he was less certain, saying he was "not sure that he got a good look at it." On December 24, at 11 p.m., Jacobs checked the moon from the same window. It was nowhere near where she had seen the object, and sat much higher in the sky.

About two months later she filled out an Air Force reporting form, with a sketch of the object's position. Project Blue Book classified the case as Unidentified, one of its roughly 701 unknowns, under case number 3893. Patrick Gross reads the listing as 3823. Don Berliner copied the witness names from the uncensored files at Maxwell AFB in January 1974, which is how her name reached NICAP and Brad Sparks. HUMCAT lists the case as humanoid report 1955-26, and Albert Rosales included it in his humanoid catalogue.

In 2016 the skeptical newsletter SUNlite reviewed the case for its "701 Club" series, and found that no investigation had been done. It placed moonset at about 11:28 p.m. at azimuth 275°, with a low first-quarter moon that can look gold, orange or red near the horizon. The husband's first reaction fit. But the review also weighed the apparent rise, the south-west and south-east directions, the witness's own denial and the strange appearance. Its verdict: "possibly/probably the moon," with too little information for a positive identification.

The other side has its points. The moon would have been sinking slowly in the west, not rising, rotating and leaving to the south-east. Gross notes that the Air Force offered no ordinary explanation at a time when occupant reports were often filed as psychological. Yet her moon check three nights later proves little, since the moon sits much further east and higher each night.

No photographs. No radar. One primary witness. The case survives in print catalogues and web databases, from Thomas M. Olsen in 1966 to Gross's URECAT entry in 2008. It endures as one of Blue Book's quiet unknowns. A golden domed disc over a Maine barn, and a shadow inside it that seemed alive.