The Silver Bullet over Crescent City

A glint of light made Edgar W. Allen look up from his home in Crescent City. It was about 4.10 in the afternoon of 17 October 1948. He saw a silver object that "resembled a plane traveling at high speed", but it was "shaped like a bullet, no wings being noticeable". It looked nickel-plated. He put it at about 10,000 feet and 25 feet long. It made one short bank, resumed its course south and faded from view after two to four minutes. There was no smoke and no noise.

What is on the record

Project SIGN logged the case as Incidents 200, 200a and 200b, one for each witness. The sheets are in the incident summaries of the Department of War's first PURSUE release, published on 8 May 2026. Allen was a barber in his late forties. Andrew N. Siler was a fisherman from Grants Pass in Oregon, standing at the Crescent City Light Station. The sound of a Piper Cub made him look up, and he saw a silver egg-shaped object like "a small blimp" going south at about 300 mph. It had no wings or tail and made no noise of its own. Ernest Haley was a dry cleaner. He saw a small silver object like a small plane south-east of Battery Point at 20,000 to 25,000 feet. It turned 45 degrees and banked right. A bright flash came off it as the sun caught its top, and it turned sharply south and faded.

The accounts differ in places. Allen's form says egg-shaped "with fins" and his narrative says a tail was visible. Siler saw no tail at all. Height estimates run from 5,000 to 25,000 feet. The investigators wrote that "local flight schedules revealed no known flights" and that there were no releases of test vehicles nearby. J. Allen Hynek's index for Project Grudge later filed Incident 200 among the cases that suggest balloons or ordinary aircraft.

Why it sits where it does

L4 · OFFICIAL RECORD — a released government record names who saw it. Three named men describe one object at one moment from different places in town. All three accounts come down through the same Air Force file, and no newspaper report sits beside it in the archive. The tier measures sourcing, not truth. What crossed the sky over Crescent City is not resolved here.