December 1946 — three cases: the disappearance of Paula Welden on Vermont's Long Trail, a father-and-son sighting over Yokohama, Japan, and a bat-winged object over Morro Bay, California. thinkaboutitdocs.com.
1946: December UFO & Entity Sightings Archive
December 1946 opens with the case that turned Middie Rivers’s lonely 1945 disappearance into a genuine pattern: Bennington College sophomore Paula Jean Welden vanished on a Sunday afternoon hike along Vermont’s Long Trail, seen by a middle-aged couple who lost sight of her rounding a rocky outcropping — and never saw her again. It became the largest search-and-rescue operation in Vermont history, drew in the FBI, inspired a Shirley Jackson novel, and led directly to the founding of the Vermont State Police. Elsewhere this month, a redacted NUFORC-style account recalls a father-and-son sighting over occupied Yokohama, Japan, and off the central California coast, two women watched a bat-winged black shape hang motionless against a darkening sky before slipping behind a cloud bank.
Date: December 1, 1946
Location: Long Trail, near Glastenbury Mountain, Bennington, Vermont
Time: Approximately 16:00
Case Status: Unexplained
Summary: Paula Jean Welden, an 18-year-old Bennington College sophomore, told her roommate she was taking a study break to go for a hike and left her dormitory, Dewey Hall, around 2:45 PM, wearing a bright red coat, jeans, and lightweight sneakers — clothing inadequate for the cold weather setting in. She hitchhiked to the Long Trail entrance off Route 9 and was seen by several people along the trail, including a group of hikers who cautioned her about the fading light. Around 4:00 PM, a middle-aged couple walking roughly 100 yards behind her watched her round a rocky outcropping on the trail; when they rounded the same outcropping moments later, she was gone. She was never seen or heard from again. [Full Report]
Source: Contemporary regional and national press coverage, 1946-47; Vermont State Police official case file; Michael C. Dooling, Clueless in New England: The Unsolved Disappearances of Paula Welden Source Status: VERIFIED — named witness, extensive contemporaneous documentation, one of the most thoroughly investigated missing-person cases in Vermont history.
Related Case: This is the second of five unexplained disappearances (1945-1950) in the same general area, known as the “Bennington Triangle.” See also Middie Rivers, November 12, 1945, the first case in the cluster.
Date: December 25, 1946
Location: Yokohama, Japan
Time: 13:00
Summary: An article about the Brazilian Air Force carried an artist’s rendering that a later witness — writing to describe an object he and his father, a colonel with the 8th US Army, saw over Yokohama in December 1946 — identified as “the closest I have ever seen to what [he] described.”
Source: Undocumented (witness names redacted in the original source material)
Source Status: INSUFFICIENT DATA — witness names redacted, and this archive was unable to independently trace the original correspondence or the referenced Brazilian Air Force article.
Date: December 30, 1946
Location: Morro Bay, California
Time: 17:35
Summary: Miss Ella Young and a friend were on high ground curving southward from Morro Bay just after sunset when a dark object appeared in the sky, growing more distinct as it approached head-on. Silhouetted black against the golden sky, it had a bat-like appearance owing to the curvature of its wings; the witness was uncertain whether there was motion at the extreme wingtips, but the object appeared to hold still for several minutes with a very distinct form. It then either lowered toward the horizon or a bank of cloud-mist rose to meet it — possibly both — and the object passed behind the cloud and did not reappear. A flush of color spread over the sea immediately afterward.
Source: Carl Feindt, UFOCAT PRN-11431, citing Harold T. Wilkins, Flying Saucers on the Attack, 1954, p. 44; Fran Ridge; Mike Tarbell Source Status: VERIFIED — named witness, detailed first-hand description preserved in a book published within a decade of the event.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
December 1946 — The Bennington Triangle Becomes a National Story
Paula Welden’s disappearance is, without qualification, the most consequential entry this archive has covered from either 1945 or 1946 in terms of real-world institutional impact. Her father’s public criticism of the disorganized initial search — Vermont had no state police force at the time — directly led to the creation of the Vermont State Police seven months later. The case drew FBI involvement, a $5,000 reward, aerial searches, and hundreds of volunteers, and it remains officially unsolved and open to this day. This revision expands the entry with the full documented timeline and cross-references it explicitly to Middie Rivers’s November 1945 disappearance — together, the two cases form the first two data points of what would become, by 1950, the five-case pattern known as the Bennington Triangle.
The month’s other two entries are more modest: a redacted, secondhand account of a Yokohama sighting compared to a Brazilian Air Force illustration, and a detailed, named-witness bat-winged object sighting off Morro Bay, California, preserved in one of the earliest published UFO books of the era.
“I’m all through with studies, I’m taking a long walk.”
Paula Jean Welden’s last recorded words, spoken to her roommate Elizabeth Johnson, December 1, 1946.
