The Railroad Men at Hobson

Patrolman C. K. Hite looked up because car inspector Ben Rupe called him over. According to the Project SIGN file, Hite then saw "disc-shaped objects traveling from west to east in succession in the same path at about two-minute intervals". Now and then one would "hook back". Occasionally one "seemed to burst and disintegrate". Hite offered his own comparison: "Take a large clock face, cover it with radium, and sail it through the air."

What is on the record

The report reached the Air Force through the FBI. Headquarters Eleventh Air Force in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, received it on 27 May 1948 from Special Agent D. K. Brown of the Cleveland office and sent it on to Washington as a report of "Flying Discs" (DOW-UAP-D100). It names four witnesses: Rupe and Earl Roush, car inspectors; Bob White, a yard clerk; and Hite, a railroad patrolman. The form describes a round, phosphorescent object that looked nine inches across from the ground. It moved with a "great amount of speed" on a heading of 90 degrees at an estimated six to eight miles up and left a "phosphorescent trail in the sky". The number of objects is "not known" and the weather is "unknown". The Eleventh Air Force said it was "not initiating any investigation". The FBI letter and three New York Central letters are listed as enclosures but are not in the release.

Project SIGN logged the sighting as Incident 128 at Middleport, Ohio, and added Hite's fuller account (DOW-UAP-D088). J. Allen Hynek's evaluation in the Blue Book file calls the report "entirely inadequate for a conclusion" and astronomical origin "very improbable". He suggested an aircraft beacon or searchlight reflecting against an overcast, which would look periodic, phosphorescent and fast. He also noted that the weather was not stated.

Why it sits where it does

L4 · OFFICIAL RECORD — a released government record names who saw it. Four men are named, but every version comes down one paperwork chain from the FBI in Cleveland. No independent testimony or newspaper account sits beside it in the archive. The size and the height are both estimates from the ground and cannot both describe a measured object. The tier measures sourcing, not truth. What the railroad men saw is not resolved here.