September 1948 — three entries: the Los Alamos sighting that became the last case in the Estimate of the Situation, the document's fateful rejection, and the Our Lady of Lipa apparition in the Philippines. thinkaboutitdocs.com.
1948: September UFO|UAP & Entity Sightings Archive
This month’s Los Alamos sighting carries far more weight than its thin, two-line entry suggests: per Project Sign historians, the September 23 sighting of a sun-flashing metallic disc by Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory personnel was the last case folded into the “Estimate of the Situation” — the classified Air Force document that concluded UFOs were most likely interplanetary, and which Air Force Chief of Staff General Hoyt Vandenberg personally rejected and ordered destroyed. No copy has ever surfaced; it survives only through the testimony of the officers who read it before it was burned. This month also carries a second religious apparition alongside a UFO-genre framing — the Church-recognized Our Lady of Lipa in the Philippines — treated here the same way this archive handled the 1947 Tre Fontane case in Italy.
Date: Fall 1948
Location: McDermitt, Nevada
Time: Unknown
Summary: Ghost lights were observed; nocturnal lights were reported.
Source: George M. Eberhart, A Geo-Bibliography of Anomalies, Greenwood Press, Westport, 1980, ISBN 0-313-21337-2
Date: Fall 1948
Location: Lineville, Alabama
Time: Morning
Summary: An anonymous woman drawing water from a well watched a round, luminous ball land in an adjacent cornfield. Two long-haired, bearded men in long robes with sashes emerged; one approached and spoke to her in accented English, telling her not to be afraid and assuring her she would not be harmed if she cooperated and answered simple questions. After roughly half an hour of conversation, she fled into her house, where the second humanoid was standing in the doorway; they departed, and she watched the object ascend. The cornfield showed a flattened, scorched area afterward. The witness reportedly “only spoke of the incident when forced to do so.”
Source: George Butler, Beyond Reality, 9/73
Date: September 1948
Location: Moscow, Russia
Time: Unknown
Summary: One object, roughly 600 feet across, was observed.
Source: Jacques Vallée
Date: September 1948
Location: Port Said, aboard SS Skaug, Egypt
Time: Daytime
Summary: A photograph was taken of an ovoid or oval object with an apparent rough exterior.
Source: J. Bernard Delair, UFO Register, Volume 6 (1975), Data Research, Oxford, 1975
Date: September 1948
Location: Albuquerque, New Mexico
Time: 09:45
Summary: Two objects were observed by one witness (Resseguie) for 30 seconds.
Source: NICAP
Date: September 1948
Location: Near Prescott, Arizona
Time: Night
Summary: Kathryn Brown, driving, felt a sense that something was about to happen, accompanied by a feeling of great power and gentleness; she could no longer hear the car radio or engine and was not afraid. She then saw familiar lights ahead and fell into what she believed was a deep sleep, later discovering she had lost two hours and felt extremely hungry. She recalled being aboard an object and meeting a tall, human-like figure with long brown hair and blue eyes who spoke English and seemed to be the leader; the rest of the crew were shorter, gray-white skinned, wearing space-travel suits, and communicated by mental telepathy. She was shown a command center with a previously invisible window, star maps, dials, and abstract drawings, and was taught to operate the dials before her next memory was of being back in her car.
Source: UFO Watch
Date: September 5, 1948
Location: Kentwood, Louisiana
Time: Unknown
Summary: An object which flew in a straight line across the sky was reported on a river.
Source: Project Blue Book
Date: September 11, 1948
Location: Over San Francisco, California
Time: 23:30
Summary: A yellow, glowing, teardrop-shaped object was seen for several seconds flying west at 800 mph, against the wind, before disappearing into fog.
Source: Bruce D. Berry, Fate, February 1958, p. 58; Loren E. Gross, UFOs: A History, 1948 (Volume 2), p. 75
Date: September 12, 1948
Location: 8-12 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Time: 15:20
Summary: A USAF pilot and copilot flying a C-45 transport saw a round, white object moving at high speed on a southwest heading.
Source: Sparks Database of Bluebook Unknowns, Version 1.7, December 31, 2003
Date: September 12, 1948
Location: Lipa City, Philippines
Time: Afternoon
Summary: Carmelite novice Teresita Castillo, walking in a garden, saw a nearby vine begin to shake, followed by the appearance of a small, shining, female figure standing within a cloud, dressed in white with clasped hands and a golden rosary, requesting that Castillo kiss the earth and return to the same spot for fifteen consecutive days. The figure asked that the vine be blessed and a statue placed at the site of the apparition.
Source: “Our Lady, Mediatrix of All Grace”
Editorial note: This is the well-documented “Our Lady of Lipa” (Our Lady, Mediatrix of All Grace) apparition, a recognized event within Philippine Catholic religious history and pilgrimage tradition, treated here consistently with this archive’s April 1947 handling of the Tre Fontane, Italy apparition — as a documented “high strangeness” account per this archive’s established editorial scope, without endorsing either a religious or extraterrestrial interpretation of the event.
Date: September 13, 1948
Location: Oristano, Italy
Time: 19:00
Summary: 18-year-old Giuseppe Madau, walking home from a religious seminar, heard a loud tone-like sound overhead and saw a round disc with a transparent cupola approaching at roughly rooftop height, holding an oblique position. Inside the dome he could see two fair-skinned, apparently blond men; curious, he waved, and they smiled and waved back. The craft descended silently and flew parallel to the ground, a bright beam of light on its upper section changing from green to orange to blue and enveloping Madau. He perceived an “electronic” sound in his mind telling him to be calm; the sensation became somewhat painful, and he mentally responded that he was not going with them. Frightened, he began reciting a Marian prayer, then heard a loud feminine voice telling him to be quiet; the sensation continued, and he invoked Mary again before it finally stopped. When it ended, the object and the men were gone.
Source: ITACAT
Date: September 18, 1948
Location: Near Grassy Butte, Oregon
Time: Before dawn
Summary: Fred Scott, 63, walking from Antelope to Rome, Oregon, near Grassy Mountain, saw two “flying persons” to his south, 150-250 feet up, one following the other 8-10 feet apart, flying west to east. Their narrow, rounded wingtips did not flap; their legs appeared unusually short, almost as if cut off at the knees. They moved slowly and remained visible while Scott walked for a half to full mile.
Source: Kenneth Arnold; Jerome Clark; Ted Bloecher
Date: September 18, 1948
Location: Southeast Shreveport, Louisiana
Time: 17:00
Summary: A draftsman at home using high-power binoculars to watch an L-6 aircraft (10,000 feet, 60° elevation southeast, 100 mph) for Air Force Day saw a bright white, aluminum, half-spherical object traveling the opposite direction in level flight at roughly 20,000 feet, 2.5 miles away, 100-150 mph heading south, with no trail — lost from view when he tried to see it without binoculars. The object appeared roughly one-third the apparent size of the L-6 but at twice the distance, suggesting an actual size of about 24 feet.
Source: FOIA (BBU)
Date: September 22, 1948
Location: Near Turner AFB, Albany, Georgia
Time: 15:30 EST
Summary: USAF Lt. Martin G. Rubisch, Assistant Combat Operations Officer at Eglin AFB, copiloting a C-47 from Eglin toward Turner AFB at 2,000 feet, saw a shiny, metallic object roughly the size of a radio-controlled target drone but with no wings or rudder, approaching from roughly 1,500-2,000 feet away at about 35° to the left, heading approximately 335°, at 250 mph and 1,500 feet altitude, with no trail.
Source: FOIA (BBU)
Date: September 23, 1948 (BBU #208)
Location: San Pablo, California
Time: Approximately 12:02-12:03
Summary: Retired U.S. Army Col. Horace S. Eakins and Sylvester Bentham saw a two-engine bomber pass low overhead heading southeast, then, far beyond and possibly a mile higher, a strange, fast-flying, irregularly shaped, translucent white “amoeba” headed east, roughly the size of a four-engine bomber, with three appendages in front and two trailing, a dark gray spot (possibly spherical) near its stable center, its arms undulating and its whole form wobbling before it disappeared suddenly, with no trail. A separate, possibly unrelated object — a buff or gray rectangle with vertical lines — was also reported.
Source: Sparks Database of Bluebook Unknowns, Version 1.7, December 31, 2003
Date: September 23, 1948 (BBU)
Location: Los Alamos, New Mexico
Time: 09:40
Case Status: Unexplained (with independent institutional significance — see Full Report)
Summary: A group of Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory personnel, including named witnesses Angier and Fairchild, waiting for an aircraft at the landing strip, saw a sun-reflecting glint in the northern sky from a flat, circular, metallic object appearing like a dime held on edge, slightly tipped, as if roughly 50 feet away. [Full Report]
Source: Case recounted in an unpublished Ruppelt manuscript, said to be included in the TOP SECRET AMC “Estimate of the Situation” — apparently a revised version of the August 5, 1948 initial draft; FUFOR Index Source Status: VERIFIED — named credentialed scientific witnesses at a major national laboratory, and, per multiple independent historical accounts of Project Sign, the last case incorporated into the Estimate of the Situation before it reached General Vandenberg.
Date: September 28 (or 18), 1948
Location: San Simeon, California
Time: Unknown
Summary: No further detail preserved in the surviving source material.
Source: McDonald list; FUFOR Index (BBU)
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
September 1948 — The Last Case in the Document That Was Burned
This month’s most consequential entry is the thinnest one on the page. The September 23 Los Alamos sighting — a group of named scientific personnel watching a dime-like metallic object glint in the sky — is, per multiple independent historians of Project Sign, the final case folded into the “Estimate of the Situation”: the classified Air Force document that concluded UFOs were most likely interplanetary, that reached as high as General Hoyt Vandenberg’s desk, and that Vandenberg personally rejected and ordered destroyed. No copy has ever surfaced in any declassification effort; its contents survive only through the testimony of officers, including Edward Ruppelt himself, who read it before it was burned. This revision builds that context into the Los Alamos entry and gives the Estimate its own dedicated report, consistent with how this archive has treated other institutionally significant documents (the September 1947 ATIC letter, the October 1947 Schulgen memo).
“The ‘situation’ was the UFOs. The ‘estimate‘ was that they were interplanetary!”
Edward J. Ruppelt, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects (1956), describing the Estimate of the Situation.
