January 1946 — three cases: Flagstaff, Arizona's early missing-time encounter with three luminous beings, a C-54 pilot's reversing shooting star over Cherbourg, and a radar/cloud-formation contact near Bridgeton, New Jersey. thinkaboutitdocs.com.
1946: January UFO & Entity Sightings Archive
January 1946 opens the postwar record with a case that would not look out of place fifteen years later: two young men on a foggy Arizona mountainside, a domed disc, three luminous beings, ten hours unaccounted for, and a story that only emerged under hypnosis — a full generation before Betty and Barney Hill made “missing time” a household phrase. The same month, a USAAF pilot over Cherbourg watched a bright “shooting star” streak downward, stop short of exploding, and come back up, and a radar station near Philadelphia sent flying boats to check an unidentified contact that vanished before they arrived, later blamed on an unusual cloud formation. This is the quiet start of the year that would end, in Sweden, with the first great postwar UFO wave.
Date: January 18, 1946
Location: Cherbourg, Basse-Normandie, France
Time: 23:00
Summary: A USAAF C-54 pilot witnessed a bright “shooting star” that streaked downward without exploding, then reversed course and came back up. An unidentified object of unusual appearance and performance was sighted by one experienced male military witness aboard a warplane.
Source: Dominique Weinstein, Aircraft UFO Encounters, Project ACUFOE, Paris, 1999 Source Status: VERIFIED — named military aircrew witness, compiled by a credentialed aviation-UFO research project.
Date: January 19, 1946
Location: Flagstaff, Arizona
Time: Unknown (approximately 10 hours unaccounted for)
Case Status: Insufficient Data
Summary: Two young men, both approximately 20 years old, reported a lapse of time of roughly ten hours near a mountain in foggy weather. Under hypnosis, one witness recalled a car stopping in front of a “Mexican hat”-shaped domed disc; three beings, each wearing a luminous suit and appearing to glide without visible feet, radiating a glow and displaying an apparent capacity for levitation. Telepathic communication was reported. The witnesses’ own conscious recollection could not account for the missing period. [Full Report]
Source: David Webb, HUMCAT: Catalogue of Humanoid Reports
Editorial note: The original archive entry’s phrasing was internally disordered (referencing “Pisula” and mixing witness-count details); the summary above reorganizes the same information for clarity without adding or removing any claim.
Date: January 31, 1946
Location: Bridgeton, New Jersey
Time: 2:23 PM
Summary: Radar detected an unidentified object in the air roughly 40 miles southeast of Philadelphia, near Bridgeton. Flying boats were dispatched to investigate and found nothing. The contact was blamed on an unusual cloud formation.
Source: Jan Aldrich, citing the Philadelphia (PA) Enquirer, February 1, 1946 Source Status: VERIFIED — contemporaneous press citation, precise time and radar detail consistent with a real-time news report rather than later recollection.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
January 1946 — A Quiet Opening, and One Very Early Missing-Time Case
The Flagstaff, Arizona case is the month’s standout entry, and arguably one of the more historically significant early entries in this entire postwar archive: a domed disc, three luminous beings, telepathic communication, and roughly ten hours of missing time recovered only under hypnosis — a narrative structure that would not become a recognizable genre in ufology until Betty and Barney Hill’s 1961 case popularized it fifteen years later. Whether that makes the Flagstaff account an unusually early instance of a real pattern or a later retrofit onto an older, vaguer story is a question this archive can’t resolve from the sourcing available, and the full report treats that honestly.
This revision also removes a significant misdated entry: what was listed as a January 19, 1946 Swedish radar case is almost certainly the well-documented “Operation Charlie” RAF radar pursuit of January 16, 1947 — a full year off, and in the wrong country. That case is held for a future 1947 archive rather than corrected in place, per an editorial decision made this revision. The remaining two entries — a C-54 pilot’s shooting-star reversal over Cherbourg and a radar/cloud-formation contact near Bridgeton, New Jersey — are both plainly sourced and unremarkable by comparison.
“Under hypnosis: car had stopped in front of ‘Mexican hat’ object. Three beings glided, no feet, radiant glow, levitation.”
David Webb, HUMCAT: Catalogue of Humanoid Reports, describing the January 19, 1946 Flagstaff, Arizona case.
