The Rocket over Adapazari

"There have been reports lately to the effect that shining objects like meteors have been sighted in various parts of the country." So began an item in the Istanbul newspaper Yeni Sabah on 5 May 1948. According to "authorized circles", one passed over Adapazari and was seen to explode in the air. Parts of it fell into a nearby village and killed a sheep dog. The paper said the thing had been found to be a rocket and that experts would inspect the debris. Observers put it at 200 metres over the town, coming from the north-west. Rumour, the item adds, tied it to "flying disc" experiments run by the Russians at a station on Mount Alagoz "close to the eastern frontiers".

What is on the record

The item reached the Air Force in an attaché's report from Ankara dated 10 May 1948. Project SIGN logged it as Incident 170. The Department of War has released the file twice: in the incident summaries of its first PURSUE release on 8 May 2026, and again as DOW-UAP-D088 on 12 June 2026. Both carry the same text. No observer is named. Alagöz is another name for Mount Aragats, then in Soviet Armenia.

The Air Attaché in Ankara was told to investigate, to draw in the Turkish General Staff and to trace the article's sources. In November 1948 Air Force headquarters asked again for "a further report of the incident at Adapazari and reported experiments by Russians on Mount Alagoz". No answer appears in the release or in the Project Blue Book case file, and nothing describes the debris.

J. Allen Hynek's evaluation in that Blue Book file calls an astronomical cause "extremely unlikely". The information is very limited, he wrote, but it "points definitely to the probability that the object or objects sighted were rockets". He filed it under rockets, flares or falling bodies.

The archive once split this into two cases, one at Adapazari and one at "Maras". Maras appears on no page of the records, and this page treats it as a misreading of the same file.

Why it sits where it does

L2: the record reaches the archive through more than one carrier, but it names no witness. Every version traces back to one newspaper item and one attaché's report, and no independent account sits beside it. The tier measures sourcing, not truth. What exploded over Adapazari is not resolved here.