December 1948 — three cases: the first green fireball sighting near Albuquerque, Dr. Lincoln LaPaz's desert search for debris that was never found, and the North Ambridge, Pennsylvania wheel formation. thinkaboutitdocs.com.
1948: December UFO|UAP & Entity Sightings Archive
December 1948 is the month the Green Fireballs became a named phenomenon in their own right — not a single sighting but a sustained, weeks-long wave of brilliant green meteor-like objects over the most sensitive nuclear installations in the United States, investigated in real time by astronomer Dr. Lincoln LaPaz and a team of intelligence officers who found, again and again, that the fireballs refused to behave like meteors. This closing month of 1948’s archive gets a dedicated companion report on the phenomenon’s origin, given its scale and its direct institutional lineage into Project Twinkle, the classified 1949-1951 Air Force investigation it prompted. The month also carries a Turkish contactee account disclosed nearly three decades after the fact, and a poltergeist-adjacent entity case from rural Scotland.
Date: December 1948
Location: Gümüş, Niğde, Turkey
Time: Noon
Summary: 15-year-old shepherd Behçet Öçal, eating lunch, watched a bright light land nearby on a mound of rubble. Three beings emerged — a woman and two men, all the same height, the woman with long hair in a tight dress, the men bald with “instruments” in place of ears and implements on their belts, all wearing a bright plaque-like object on their upper chests. They told the boy they came from another world and would not harm him, promising to appear to him “often” and “send pictures.” Öçal claims ongoing contact since, aided in devising a star map identifying “Kur” as the center of the universe. Three weeks after the first encounter, the beings returned; one raised a hand and Öçal felt a strong “energy wave,” fainting and later being diagnosed by a doctor with what appeared to be a strong electrical shock and a deep sun tan.
Source: Hürriyet (Istanbul newspaper), December 1977, UFOlar Geliyor
Source Status: INSUFFICIENT DATA — the account was not published until nearly 29 years after the claimed event, and carries classic contactee-genre markers (ongoing telepathic-adjacent contact, a cosmology/star-map revelation, a physical “energy” effect). Retained as a documented published claim, not as an established event.
Date: December 1948
Location: Aberdeenshire, Scotland
Time: Night
Summary: A witness reported frequent nighttime disturbances by a small, “Oriental”-looking creature roughly 3-4 feet tall with an almost demonic face. Around the same period, objects in his room reportedly moved on their own, small shadowy figures visited at night, and loud knocking was heard on the walls and headboard. His hands would sometimes glow bright blue, and he reported seeing both a bright blue figure and a very tall, black-cloaked figure — the latter witnessed by three other household members simultaneously.
Source: UFO Sightings UK
Source Status: INSUFFICIENT DATA — thinly sourced to a general enthusiast site; the case’s mixture of poltergeist and entity elements sits outside standard UFO sighting patterns and may reflect a distinct folkloric or paranormal tradition rather than a UAP encounter specifically.
Date: December 1948
Location: Holloman, New Mexico
Time: Night
Summary: Nocturnal lights were reported.
Source: Luis Schoenherr
Date: December 3, 1948 (BBU #257)
Location: Fairfield-Suisun AFB, California
Time: 20:15
Summary: A silent, round, white light was first sighted two miles north of the control tower by two air traffic controllers. Its speed was 400 mph while approaching, slowed to 200 mph, then departed at 500 mph in a vertical climb. Duration: 25 seconds.
Source: Project Blue Book, case #257; Donald E. Keyhoe, Flying Saucers Are Real, p. 79; Richard Hall, The UFO Evidence, p. 130; UNICAT, case #626
Date: December 5, 1948
Location: Los Alamos, New Mexico
Time: Unknown
Summary: More than one object was observed by military witnesses near a nuclear test site for 96 minutes.
Source: MUFON
Date: December 1948
Location: Sandia Mountains, New Mexico
Time: Evening
Summary: Eight objects were observed at a military facility for 30 seconds (LaPaz).
Source: Edward J. Ruppelt, Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, Doubleday, 1956
Date: December 5, 1948: The Green Fireballs Begin
Case Status: Unexplained (institutionally significant — see Full Report)
Summary: At 9:27 PM, a USAF C-47 crew — Capt. William Goede, copilot Maj. Roger Carter, and a flight engineer — flying 10 miles east of Albuquerque at 18,000 feet, saw a brilliant green fireball flash across the sky ahead, arcing upward from near the Sandia Mountains before leveling out, too large and too flat in trajectory for a meteor. It was the second such sighting reported that night; a Pioneer Airlines DC-3 crew had seen an identical green fireball 22 minutes earlier near Las Vegas, New Mexico, so close it prompted evasive action. Overnight, reports poured in from across northern New Mexico. Dr. Lincoln LaPaz, called in by Kirtland AFB intelligence officers, attempted to triangulate the fireballs’ flight paths using the same methods he used for genuine meteorites — and found nothing at the predicted impact sites, despite repeated searches. It was, LaPaz later said, the first time he seriously doubted the green fireballs were meteorites at all.
Source: Brad Sparks; FOIA; Edward Ruppelt’s own detailed first-person account Source Status: VERIFIED — named military aircrews, a named credentialed astronomer conducting real-time field investigation, and extensive corroboration across dozens of independent northern New Mexico observers that same night.
Date: December 5, 1948 (BBU)
Location: Northwest of Las Vegas, near Montezuma Mission, New Mexico
Time: 21:35
Summary: Pioneer Airlines Flight 63 pilot Ernest Van Lloyd and copilot James Smith saw a pale green (variously described as white or whitish-orange) fireball with a pale green trail approaching head-on while flying west at 9,000 feet in a C-47; they attempted evasive action as the object dropped close to ground level before disappearing. Duration: a few seconds.
Source: FOIA
Date: December 6, 1948
Location: Stocksjö, Sweden
Time: Unknown
Summary: An object was observed by one witness (Burman), accompanied by electromagnetic effects, animal reactions, and a noise.
Source: Karl Gösta Rehn
Date: December 6, 1948 (BBU)
Location: Albuquerque, New Mexico
Time: 22:55
Summary: AESS officer Joseph Toulouse, driving west, saw a green fireball almost directly overhead above the Sandia Base nuclear weapons assembly site, slightly northwest, arching downward from east to west, about a third the size of the full moon, with a flaming tail.
Source: FOIA
Date: December 7-8, 1948
Location: Los Alamos, New Mexico
Time: Unknown
Summary: More than one object was observed by military witnesses near a nuclear test site.
Source: MUFON
Date: December 8, 1948 (BBU)
Location: About 20 miles east of Las Vegas, New Mexico
Time: 18:33
Summary: Two AFOSI special agents, Capts. Melvin E. Neef and John J. Stahl Jr., returning from a green fireball investigation aboard a Beech T-7, saw a green fireball 30° to their left, roughly 2,000 feet above their 13,500-foot altitude, which shot past them in nearly level flight before appearing to burn out and drop suddenly, scattering reddish-orange glowing fragments for under a second. A daylight aerial search of the ground site found nothing.
Source: FOIA
Date: December 8, 1948
Location: Chanute AFB, Illinois
Time: Unknown
Summary: No further detail preserved in the surviving source material.
Source: McDonald list; FUFOR Index (BBU)
Date: December 8, 1948
Location: Hallowell, Sanford, and Augusta, Maine
Time: Dusk
Summary: A meteor-like object was observed by several witnesses briefly.
Source: Newspaper (name not preserved)
Date: December 9, 1948
Location: Near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Time: Unknown
Summary: No further detail preserved in the surviving source material.
Source: Undocumented (BBU)
Date: December 11, 1948
Location: Los Alamos, New Mexico
Time: Unknown
Summary: More than one object was observed by military witnesses near a nuclear test site.
Source: MUFON
Date: December 12, 1948
Location: Los Alamos, New Mexico
Time: Unknown
Summary: A silent green fireball was seen by Dr. LaPaz, who assessed it as “most certainly not a conventional meteorite fall” — appearing at full intensity instantly, maintaining constant brightness, and traveling on a nearly horizontal path before breaking into bright green fragments, with the complete absence of sound (despite a fireball bright enough to be seen at such distance typically producing an explosive report) standing out to LaPaz as the single most anomalous feature.
Source: Richard M. Dolan, UFO’s and the National Security State, Volume One: 1941-1973, Keyhole Publishing, 2000
Date: December 12, 1948 (BBU)
Location: Starvation Peak, near Bernal, New Mexico
Time: 21:02 (±0.5 min)
Case Status: Unexplained
Summary: Dr. Lincoln LaPaz, USAF Capt. Charles L. Phillips, and CAP intelligence officer Lt. Allan B. Clark, returning from a green fireball investigation, saw a green fireball of at least magnitude -4 traveling east to west low above the horizon in almost perfectly level flight, curving downward only in its final tenth to two-tenths of a second before disintegrating into 3-4 pieces, with no sound. Cross-referenced against an independent AESS guard witness at Los Alamos, LaPaz triangulated the object’s altitude at 8-10 miles along a 25-mile flight path, calculating a speed of 39,000-43,000 mph — far beyond any known meteor or aircraft of the era.
Source: FOIA
Date: December 17, 1948 (BBU)
Location: North Ambridge, Pennsylvania
Time: 01:30
Summary: Train conductor Hildebrand and yardmaster Werner, in the railyard, saw a formation of eight white, luminescent, rotating spherical objects, resembling wheels revolving around hubs, approaching from the north high above the horizon at roughly 45° elevation. Just before reaching overhead, the formation made a controlled dive and a sharp 90° right turn to the west, with the topmost object leading the others, fading from view while still high above the horizon. Duration: 30 seconds.
Source: FOIA; FUFOR Index
Date: December 18, 1948
Location: Great Falls, Montana
Time: Unknown
Summary: Two objects were observed by one witness (Doakes).
Source: Doubt Magazine
Date: December 20, 1948 (BBU)
Location: West of Los Alamos, New Mexico
Time: Unknown
Summary: An AESS observation post sighted a green fireball with a triangulated 7-8-mile west-to-east flight path, calculated by LaPaz based on an independent observation at a different site.
Source: FOIA
Date: December 24, 1948
Location: Ouchy, Lausanne, Switzerland
Time: 07:13
Summary: A flying disc was observed by one witness.
Source: Gillieron, UFO-DOC
Date: December 28, 1948
Location: Los Alamos, New Mexico
Time: Unknown
Summary: No further detail preserved in the surviving source material.
Source: Undocumented
Date: December 30, 1948
Location: Atoka, Oklahoma
Time: 16:00
Summary: An object, about 1 foot across, was observed from a car in clear weather by one experienced male witness (Tinnin) for a few seconds.
Source: Gert Herb
Date: December 30, 1948
Location: Sweden
Time: Unknown
Summary: No further detail preserved in the surviving source material.
Source: McDonald list (BBU)
Date: Late December 1948
Location: Colonia Santa Ana, Guatemala City, Guatemala
Time: 01:00
Summary: A witness, stepping outside at night, noticed diffused light beside a wooden fence taking the form of a woman in a white robe-like garment with long black hair, facial features indistinct. Frightened, he asked who she was; when she raised an arm in apparent response, he fired his loaded gun directly at her, and she vanished in plain sight. No footprints or trace were found afterward.
Source: Eduardo Mendoza Palacios
Date: Late December 1948
Location: Mojave Desert, California
Time: Unknown
Summary: A crashed disc incident with trace remnants; metallic traces were found. One disc was observed by several witnesses at an airport.
Source: MUFON
Date: 1948/1949: Sunrise Beach, Missouri Sighting
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
December 1948 — 1948 Closes With the Green Fireballs
This archive’s first full year of the modern UFO era, 1947, opened with Kenneth Arnold’s sighting and closed with a triangular fire found on the ground in California. This second year closes with something larger in scale: a sustained, weeks-long wave of green fireballs concentrated almost entirely around Los Alamos and Sandia Base — the two most sensitive nuclear-weapons installations in the country — investigated in real time by a credentialed astronomer whose own meteorite-tracking methods kept failing to find any impact debris. The December 5 case, when two separate aircrews saw the same phenomenon 22 minutes apart, marks the effective birth of “the green fireballs” as their own named, tracked, and eventually formally investigated category — a lineage this archive follows into 1949’s Project Twinkle. The month also carries a Turkish contactee account disclosed nearly three decades later, and a rural Scottish case blending entity and poltergeist elements.
“This was the first time that he seriously doubted the green fireballs were meteorites.”
Edward J. Ruppelt, describing Dr. Lincoln LaPaz’s reaction after repeated failed searches for green fireball debris, December 1948.
SEO METADATA
SEO Title: December 1948 UFO Archive | The Green Fireballs Begin
Meta Description: December 1948: a weeks-long wave of green fireballs over Los Alamos and Sandia Base launches Dr. Lincoln LaPaz’s real-time investigation and the phenomenon that would become Project Twinkle.
Focus Keyphrase: Green Fireballs December 1948 Los Alamos
Additional Keywords: Lincoln LaPaz green fireball investigation, Sandia Base 1948 UFO wave, Kirtland AFB green fireball, North Ambridge Pennsylvania 1948 wheel formation, Gumus Turkey contactee 1948
Tags: Green Fireballs, Los Alamos, Sandia Base, Lincoln LaPaz, New Mexico, 1948, Unexplained
IMAGE PROMPT
Three-panel period press photography dossier collage, indigo-charcoal palette with one diegetic warm accent color per panel, period-accurate late-1940s photographic register, tactical HUD stamp overlays.
Panel 1 — Location: skies east of Albuquerque, New Mexico, near the Sandia Mountains. Date: December 5, 1948. Time: 21:27, night. Number of Witnesses: a C-47 aircrew. A cockpit view from a period military transport aircraft, the crew startled by a brilliant green fireball flashing across the sky ahead, arcing up from near a dark mountain range before leveling into flight.
Panel 2 — Location: the New Mexico desert, en route to Starvation Peak. Date: December 1948. Time: night. Number of Witnesses: Dr. Lincoln LaPaz and a search team. A small group of investigators with flashlights and survey equipment, searching an open desert landscape at night for meteorite fragments that were never found, a triangulation map spread on the hood of a period vehicle.
Panel 3 — Location: a railyard, North Ambridge, Pennsylvania. Date: December 17, 1948. Time: 01:30, night. Number of Witnesses: 2, a train conductor and yardmaster. Two railyard workers looking up as a formation of eight glowing, wheel-like spherical objects, arranged like spokes around a hub, banks sharply and dives away to the west.
Include a small credit stamp reading “thinkaboutitdocs.com — UAP/Entity Archive by Date” in the lower corner of the collage, styled as part of the tactical HUD overlay.
SEO IMAGE METADATA
Image Title: December 1948 UFO & Entity Sightings — The Green Fireballs
Alt Text: Three-panel dossier collage: the first green fireball sighting near Albuquerque, LaPaz’s desert search for debris, and the North Ambridge Pennsylvania wheel formation, December 1948
Caption: December 1948 — three cases: the first green fireball sighting near Albuquerque, Dr. Lincoln LaPaz’s desert search for debris that was never found, and the North Ambridge, Pennsylvania wheel formation. thinkaboutitdocs.com.
Description: Three-panel archival-style illustration collage summarizing the December 1948 UFO cases in this archive, closing out the year with the birth of the Green Fireball phenomenon over New Mexico’s nuclear installations. thinkaboutitdocs.com.
