A Fishing Party, an F-82 and a Silver 'Baseball' over Caddo Lake

A Shreveport man was out in a boat on Caddo Lake about a mile west of Mooringsport on the afternoon of 22 May 1949. With him were his wife, their son and the son's guest. An F-82 was crossing the lake and they were watching it. Then they noticed something else. It was silver, oblong and metallic-looking. It looked about the size of a baseball and was very high and perhaps two miles away. They put it at 8,000 to 10,000 feet. It flew silently in a straight line to the south-east for three to four minutes until it faded from view. The father judged its speed at 500 miles an hour.

The father was a paint-shop foreman at Barksdale Air Force Base. The son worked for a loan company, and he reported the sighting after reading in the Shreveport Times about an object like a baseball.

What is on the record

The report sits in Project Blue Book's 1949 files under Caddo Lake. Most names in it are redacted. The father's appears once, as W. S. Craya, and the scan may have misread it. The archive's machine summary also turned Mooringsport into "Morningsport". The narrative gives the speed as 500 miles an hour, though one badly scanned field reads 900.

The Barksdale intelligence officer who took the report had his own sighting to compare. From Bossier City at the same time he had watched a B-36 at about 30,000 feet. He doubted the family's estimate of the altitude and judged their object was probably that bomber. His opinion went onto the Project 10073 record card as "probably aircraft". Nothing in the file argues with it.

No outside catalogue lists the sighting. NICAP, Hatch, Berliner, Eberhart, Johnson and Overmeire were all checked for that date and place. NICAP's Caddo Lake entry is a different case: a 1955 radar sighting involving a B-47.

Why it sits where it does

L4 · OFFICIAL RECORD: a released government record names who saw it. It identifies two people: the father, whose surname is uncertain, and the son who made the report. The mother is mentioned but not named, and the son's guest is unnamed and of unknown age. Nothing outside the Blue Book file records the afternoon. The tier measures sourcing, not truth. The Air Force's answer was a B-36, and nothing here contradicts it.