Air Police and Patrolmen Track a Blue-green Wheel of Light over Orlando

Between about 01:10 and 02:00 on 31 January 1949 men on night duty around Orlando, Florida, saw a light in the sky. It was a single round glow, green to blue-green and about the size of an automobile wheel. They put it some 500 feet up. It moved slowly south-south-west and in a circular motion, made no sound and stayed in view for 34 to 40 seconds. Five Air Policemen on duty at Orlando Air Force Base saw it. Among them were Private First Class George B. Dias of the 2583rd Base Service Squadron and a Sergeant Osteen. Two Winter Park patrolmen saw it too, one of them named Early, and so did an Orlando patrolman out on patrol. They stood at four points within about seven miles of one another, and their reports agreed. At Tampa's municipal airport the communicator on duty reported a luminous disc in circular motion.

What is on the record

The file is Project Sign's Incident 250, kept with the Blue Book records. Its ATIC card logs the sighting at 01:55 and carries a handwritten evaluation: "Duration and speed rules out meteor … Possible Aircraft". The archive's own machine summary had read the file as concluding a probable meteor. The card says the opposite. One communicator later noticed an odour like burning garbage. The file also holds St Petersburg press clippings on "flying disc" reports over Pinellas County that night, about 90 miles away. The archive keeps those Safety Harbor reports as a separate case that may describe the same light.

The gaps are real. Several other names in the file belong to police and press observers at different points, and their roles cannot be matched cleanly from the scan. This page leaves them out. Searches of NICAP, Hatch, Eberhart, Johnson and Overmeire turned up no entry. The sighting is known only from the released Project Sign file.

Why it sits where it does

L4 · OFFICIAL RECORD: a released government record names who saw it. Dias is the one witness named in full. Osteen and Early appear by surname, and the rest of the eight policemen and the Tampa communicator appear by role. Their reports reach the archive through that file alone. Tiers describe the sourcing and leave the sighting open. What drifted over Orlando that night is not resolved here.