The Chugging Ball of Kennewick (c. 1955)

It came in from the west at 200 or 300 feet or less, "a large, shining, metal ball about 30' in diameter". Sergeant Gordon Richardson of the Kennewick Police Department was on night shift near 1st and Washington at about 10 pm. The ball trailed "a tail of fire" until, about three blocks east of Washington Street, "it came to a complete stop". The fire went out with it. While it hung there he could hear "the 'chug chug' of the engine sounding like a tractor engine". After several minutes it "took off with a speed so great that it disappeared from sight in a matter of seconds", leaving no fire or smoke.

What is on the record

The only record is a one-page FBI office memorandum from Special Agent Clement W. Parkhurst to the Special Agent in Charge in Seattle, dated 1 June 1956. It sits in FBI-UAP-D013, the bureau's Washington State file on UFO reports from 1952 to 1960, released by the Department of War on 12 June 2026. Richardson came to the FBI as an informant. He said the sighting had been "about a year ago", which puts it around mid-1955. He had kept it even from fellow officers because they "never pay any attention to what he says". He knew it might sound like a "nut complaint".

Much of the memo is his own reasoning. The ball's builders, he believed, had "mastered the pull of gravity". It came from Russia or "some outerspace planet" and flew too low for radar and too fast for interception. He had not heard of anyone else seeing it. The file records no follow-up, no explanation and no second witness. No outside account was found.

Why it sits where it does

L4 · OFFICIAL RECORD — a released government record names who saw it. Richardson is a named police sergeant. The record is still his own account from a year after the fact. No independent testimony sits beside it in the archive. A tier measures sourcing, not truth. What stopped over Kennewick is not resolved here.