Sighting Report — Rapid City, South Dakota, 8 July 1964

On July 8, 1964, TSgt David Moody received a telephone report from Lt Scott, the Base Public Information Officer at Ellsworth AFB in Rapid City, South Dakota. The report concerned two separate accounts of an unidentified aerial phenomenon that had been called into a local television station. The witnesses, a tourist and a local resident, remained anonymous. The tourist described the object as looking like a rocket with a green tail, while the local resident reported that the object appeared from the southeast and exhibited a bluish glow. The sighting occurred at 0520 local time. Following the initial report, no further investigation was conducted because the names of the witnesses were not provided, and Lt Scott was advised that a formal report was unnecessary as all available information had been captured during the telephone call. The final assessment categorized the object as an astronautical event, specifically a meteor, noting that the description was consistent with meteor analysis and potentially linked to a sighting in Wyoming on the same date.