The Flying Football above Sterling

Fred Nash heard it before he saw it. He was hunting deer on a mountain ridge at 9,000 feet east of Sterling, Utah, at a quarter to twelve on 16 October 1948 when a throbbing noise or "steady purr" made him look up. Passing about 500 feet overhead was an object "resembling a flattened football". It was black with a silver stripe running from front to back. There was no exhaust, but an opening showed in the centre of its rear, and Nash thought he saw "a movement like a 'paddlewheel'". It held a straight course a little west of north towards Salt Lake City at an estimated 300 mph and was in sight for four seconds or longer.

The sound was the strangest part. It was not like an aircraft or a petrol engine, the summary says, "although there was a definite throb or 'put', 'put', 'put'". Under that ran "a sound of steady clicking, like a 'shirt tail flapping in the wind.'" He thought the clicking might have been a camera.

What is on the record

The account is Project SIGN's Incident 186, a typed summary sheet and narrative in the incident summaries released by the Department of War in May 2026. It places the sighting one mile south and eight miles due east of Sterling, though the eight is overtyped and could be a five or six. Nash is named with his trade, a used car dealer and aircraft mechanic, and his standing in the Latter Day Saints church. The sheet gives the object's size as about nine inches long, six wide and three thick. It never says whether that is how big it looked or how big he judged it to be.

The investigator found that Nash's character "seems to indicate reliability". He also tested him on distance. Nash put a nearby tree at "over one hundred feet high"; the agent reckoned it about 40 feet against a power pole. That doubt reaches every height and speed on the sheet. No explanation is offered, and Brad Sparks' catalogue of Blue Book unknowns lists the case.

Why it sits where it does

L4 · OFFICIAL RECORD — a released government record names who saw it. Nash is the only witness, and no independent testimony or press report sits beside the summary in the archive. The tier measures sourcing, not truth. What passed over the ridge is not resolved here.