Project 10073 Record Card and Correspondence — Sighting of 20 May 1958, Mount Prospect, Illinois

This document collection details a UFO sighting reported on May 20, 1958, by a 50-year-old housewife in Mount Prospect, Illinois. The witness, while driving in a southwest direction at dusk, observed a stationary, bullet-shaped object that appeared shimmering gold and bright, roughly the size of a quarter. The report was formally processed by the 62nd Fighter Interceptor Squadron at O'Hare International Airport under Project 10073. Military intelligence conducted an interview with the witness the following morning. The official conclusion reached by the Air Technical Intelligence Center was that the sighting was an optical illusion caused by the observer driving directly into the sun, resulting in refraction. The file also contains subsequent correspondence from 1959 involving Maribelle Cormack, the director of the Roger Williams Planetarium, who forwarded the witness's account to Dr. Donald H. Menzel at Harvard University. In her correspondence, Cormack provided additional details from the witness, describing the object as a 'saucer' approximately eight feet above the ground, dull gun-metal gray in color, and appearing like two soup dishes fastened together. Dr. Menzel responded to both Cormack and the witness, dismissing the report as an 'inferior mirage' and noting that the description was too fragmentary for serious identification. The military records confirm that radar checks with the 755th AC&W Squadron and other local airports yielded no corresponding traffic at the time of the incident.