The Andrews Field Pursuit

The encounter is brief and the paperwork behind it is not. On the night of 18 November 1948 Combs and Lieutenant Jackson were flying a T-6 near Andrews Field when they saw a greyish globe of fuzzy light. Combs gave chase. The account has the pursuit running for over ten minutes at roughly 600 mph, with the object evading each attempt to close on it before vanishing. The official explanation offered afterwards was a cluster of cosmic-ray balloons. The sighting was later carried on the unidentified list.

What is on the record

Four claimants, one video, one reporting channel: Combs, Lieutenant Kenwood W. Jackson, Glen L. Stalker and John J. Kunbner. As testimony, that is about as thin as anything the archive holds. But testimony is not what this entry rests on. Four government primary documents are attached. Two are Project Blue Book case files from November 1948 for Andrews AFB in Maryland, held through NARA and the Internet Archive. Two more come from the DoW UAP Release 4 collection, analyses of flying object incidents in the United States for 1948 and for 1949.

Those documents do not all carry equal weight for this night. The two analyses are period surveys of many incidents rather than reports of this one, so they belong to the surrounding paperwork rather than to the pursuit. The Andrews case files are the two that speak directly to it. What they establish is that the Air Force logged the pursuit, offered a balloon explanation, and did not in the end hold to it.

Why it sits where it does

The case grades L4, the archive's document-corroborated tier, because government records rather than retellings carry it. That grade is a measure of how the record is sourced and not a verdict on the object. What Combs chased is not resolved here.