A Silver Cylinder with a Flame Tail over the Adirondacks

Lt. Col. Phillip J. Kuhl was at 10,000 feet in C-45 AF 7110 on the leg from Bedford in Massachusetts to Griffiss Air Force Base at Rome, New York. Maj. Earl Goodrich was his co-pilot. At about 09:06 on 20 September 1949 Kuhl saw something at his four o'clock about thirty miles off. It was a cylinder of silvery or aluminium colour. Behind it streamed an orange-and-white flame "more than twice the length of the object". It looked rocket or jet propelled. The report describes a slow descent at high speed from about 20,000 feet until it vanished into the overcast at 7,000 feet. There was no sound and no photograph.

What is on the record

The account is an Olmsted Flight Service Center report dated 22 September 1949, kept in Project Blue Book's 1940s case files. The archive folder that holds it is labelled Goose Bay, Labrador, but that is only the filing. The report places the object near 43°40'N 74°55'W, about thirty miles north-east of Griffiss over the Adirondacks.

The same file holds a second report from about an hour later. At 10:00 1st Lt. William E. Archbold was flying a C-47 twenty miles west of Hooksett in New Hampshire. He saw a silver fuselage-shaped object diving with a steady orange flame. The two sightings are filed together. Nothing in the pages read links them or evaluates either one. Two daylight pilot reports of a flame-tailed object in a dive an hour apart would fit a bright daylight meteor. The file does not test that or any other explanation.

Outside the file the Hatch database lists the Rome sighting and notes the separate pilot report. Johnson's sighting calendar also carries it but gives the aircraft as a C-54. The report itself says C-45.

Why it sits where it does

L4 · OFFICIAL RECORD: a released government record names who saw it. Kuhl made the report and Goodrich sat beside him as co-pilot, and they are the two men the record identifies. Nothing from outside the file stands beside them in the archive. The tier measures sourcing, not truth. What dived into the overcast north-east of Rome is not resolved here.