Project 10073 Record Card and Related Correspondence — East Moline, Illinois, October 1952

This document contains a collection of records regarding a UFO sighting reported on October 11, 1952, in East Moline, Illinois. A civilian woman, while waiting at a traffic light at 7th Street and 17th Avenue, observed an object she described as being shaped like a hat box with an inverted saucer on top, featuring port holes around the side. The report was initially filed by E.H. Mann of the Civil Aeronautics Administration at Quad City Airport, Moline, Illinois, and forwarded to the Military Flight Service at Wright Field. The Air Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC) subsequently reviewed the report and determined that the sighting fell into the 'unimportant' category. The official record card for Project 10073 explicitly labels the report as a 'poor report' and attributes the sighting to an 'inexperienced observer'. The file also includes a separate, unrelated report concerning a sighting by military personnel (Robert Sonnett and James W. Wallace) involving an object observed near Atlantic City, which appears to have been included in the same file bundle. This secondary report details a much more complex observation involving an object that appeared to have a tail of white light and was tracked by radar, though it was ultimately determined that no meteorological conditions could account for the sighting. The primary East Moline report, however, remains brief and dismissive, reflecting the military's standard procedure for filtering out reports deemed to be of low intelligence value.