UFO Sighting Report — Jones Beach, New York, 3 September 1953

This document is a military intelligence report regarding a UFO sighting that occurred on September 3, 1953, at Jones Beach, New York. The report, originating from HQ 2500th Air Base Wing at Mitchel AFB, details an observation made by two civilians whose reliability was assessed as 'fair'. The witnesses described a single, luminous, silver, dirigible-shaped object that appeared to be the size of a baseball. They reported that the object traveled on a straight horizontal course through a 30-degree azimuth before fading away after approximately 20 to 30 seconds of observation. The witnesses also claimed the object may have had eight windows arranged in two tiers of four. The weather conditions at the time were described as a very dark night with haze and ground fog, and broken to overcast cloud cover. Major James A. Geyer, the investigating officer, provided a skeptical assessment of the event. He noted that there was considerable air traffic in the vicinity, but that the object was observed well below the cloud cover. He suggested that the sighting was likely a result of light reflections from either an automobile spotlight or the rotating beacon atop a tower at Jones Beach, which reflected off the cloud bank. Major Geyer explicitly dismissed the reported windows as a 'figment of the imagination' of the observers. The report was processed under Air Force Regulation 200-2 and forwarded to the Air Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC) at Wright-Patterson AFB.