The Flying Propeller of Indianapolis

The truck had just started across the bridge when the object appeared directly ahead, just above the trees. It was shaped like "a broad short propeller", six to eight feet long, each blade about two feet wide and a foot thick "with cups on upper side of blades". It looked like shiny aluminium. It glided at 25 to 30 mph about 30 feet up. It was banked some 20 degrees to the left and sinking slightly. There was no spinning, no sound and no exhaust. James W. Toney and Robert Huggins stopped on the far side of the cantilever bridge but could not find it again. It seemed to have gone down in the woods.

What is on the record

Project SIGN filed the sighting as Incident 151. The check-list, narrative, sketch and map are in DOW-UAP-D088, released by the Department of War on 12 June 2026. Both men worked for the W. O. Jones Rug Cleaners. The sketch, signed by Lieutenant Russell J. Carey Jr. of Stout Field, shows a two-bladed shape marked "round cups which protrude". The Project Blue Book case file places the sighting at the bridge east of East 56th Street and Fall Creek Boulevard, at 9.55 a.m. Carey and the base press officer Lieutenant John E. Hoskins searched the area and found nothing. It was "densely wooded with many hills and valleys".

Air Materiel Command asked General Electric whether the object could have been the Roto-chute, a rotor-parachute invented by I. B. Bensen. The company replied in December 1948 that it "was definitely not a Roto-chute". AMC's opinion reads: "No satisfactory conclusion can be drawn." A January 1949 letter nonetheless put Incident 151 on a list of cases with the greatest possibility of being balloons. J. Allen Hynek called it "clearly non-astronomical" and asked whether gliders were being tested nearby. "Barring hallucinations," he wrote, it was among the "most tangible" reports "and the most difficult to explain away as sheer nonsense".

Why it sits where it does

L4 · OFFICIAL RECORD — a released government record names who saw it. Two named men saw the object together and the file adds a sketch, a map and a failed search. Project Grudge kept it among its unexplained cases. No independent testimony or press report sits beside it in the archive. The tier measures sourcing, not truth. What glided into the woods off East 56th Street is not resolved here.