The Disc over the Rogue River

The binoculars were good enough to show that its skin was dirty. At about five in the afternoon on 24 May 1949 an employee of an aeronautical laboratory's supersonic section was by a river with some colleagues, two and a half miles from its mouth. By eye the object was reflecting sunlight. Through 8-power binoculars the glare was gone and it was plainly metal. It then "moved off in horizontal flight at a gradually increasing rate of speed, until it seemed to approach the speed of a jet before it disappeared. No propulsion was apparent." The sighting lasted two and a half to three minutes.

What is on the record

The released record is Case X (serial 1119) in Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14, the statistical study the Battelle Memorial Institute completed for the Air Force in 1955. The Department of War released a CIA record copy as CIA-UAP-015, and a second copy sits in the CIA's own reading room; the two count as one source. Battelle printed it as one of twelve "good UNKNOWNS", the only reports it judged detailed enough to model. Two sketches accompany the case: a flat oval with a raised fin, "rough and wrinkled in rear" and "dirty and spotty in color". The report then set it aside. "The object had a fin or rudder," it notes, and no other good unknown did, so no single model of a flying saucer could be built.

The report names no one and no river. Bruce Maccabee's analysis for NICAP identifies it as the Rogue River near Gold Beach, Oregon. His account has five people out fishing, two of them from the NACA Ames laboratory. The Blue Book file on the Rogue River sighting holds an Air Force interview with a woman in the same party, who described a round silver object the size of a C-47. Its record card gives the conclusion "AIRCRAFT" because nothing showed it could not have been one. Maccabee reports that Project Grudge also listed it under kites, an explanation he rejects.

Why it sits where it does

L0 · a single account. The archive's two copies are one record, and it is anonymised, so the archive holds no identified witness from it. The names in circulation come from outside analyses and are not used for the grade. The tier measures sourcing, not truth. What crossed the sky above the river is not resolved here.