The Minot Air Force Base Report

The whole of this entry is one report. Air Police at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota and people ringing in described a bright light coming down from about twenty thousand feet to roughly five hundred. It tracked across and then climbed back up the way it came. Radar at the time showed a B-52 and nothing beside it. The archive holds no date for the episode and not even a year.

What is on the record

Very little, and it should be said plainly. One telling, one channel, one resolved claimant: Don Gebauer. There are no documents, no primary records and no imagery of any kind. The account refers to Air Police in the plural and to callers. Those people are not named claimants in the archive and their reports do not reach it separately. The count of one is the count.

The single most interesting detail is also the one that cuts against the sighting. Radar is reported to have held a B-52 and nothing else while the light was being watched. A negative on the instruments alongside a positive from the eyes is a pattern worth recording. This file does not have enough in it to say which of the two was wrong.

Why it sits where it does

The case grades L0, the archive's single-account tier. It is here because a report was made and logged in the source material rather than because anything supports it. The honest description of this file is that it is thin, undated and uncorroborated. What was seen over Minot is not resolved here.