1951: December UFO|UAP & Entity Sightings Archive

December 1951 closes the year with two Unidentified daylight cases on the same day. On December 7, a K-25 guard at Oak Ridge, Tennessee watched a square gray object rise into the clouds and drop back for two minutes, and a Sunbury, Ohio farmer with a telescope watched a silvery sphere break into a dark cloud and about 100 specks. Both are documented in full via standalone reports linked below, along with the Deke Slayton sighting near Hastings, Minnesota, where a future astronaut chased an object he first took for a balloon, and the Okulov taiga encounter in northern Russia.
Around those cases sit a Nebraska landing story reported eight months late and filed under psychological causes, a Kansas City policeman’s sighting under a B-36, and a run of explained reports from Jupiter at Keck, Kentucky, Venus at Hamden, Ohio, a helicopter lighting test at Alexandria, Virginia, a meteor at Buffalo, New York, and a balloon found at McDonough, Georgia.

Date: Winter 1951
Location: Near Safonovo, Arkhangelsk region, northern Russia (USSR)
Time: Evening
Summary: Fifty-year-old hunter Semyen Stepanovich Okulov, camped alone in the taiga along the Pesha River, heard a strange buzzing sound and watched a bright cloud release a floating, inverted-plate-shaped craft. He put out his fire and hid, and watched it descend near the ground, project a misty column of light, and show several skull-shaped, hairless humanoid heads through its portholes. After about 30 minutes it left in a burst of sparks. The next morning Okulov found a circular patch of melted snow at the site, and a fellow hunter independently said he had seen lights fly into a cloud the same night. See the Detailed Report.
Source: Georgiy Markovich Naumenko, personal investigation, 1971, in Extraterrestrials and Earthlings: Testimonies of Contacts, Moscow, 2007

Source Status: A single-investigator account recorded two decades after the event.

Date: December 1951
Location: Red Springs, North Carolina
Time: About 9:00 p.m.
Summary: Sam Coley’s 12-year-old son called his father and his 17-year-old sister outside to see an object coming down from the sky. It looked like two saucers joined together with a cabin-like bulge at the center and made almost no noise beyond a slight purring sound. It stopped about six feet above the ground roughly 300 yards from the house and gave off no light except from windows in the central cabin, where Coley reported seeing a man inside. After hovering about ten minutes it left almost silently, “like a bolt of lightning.” The police chief who interviewed the family was reported to have lost his initial skepticism.
Source: Jacques Vallée, Magonia case 87; Humanoids catalogue; reports attributed to State Defense Director E. Z. Jones and the Red Springs police chief

Date: December 1951 (reported July 24, 1952)
Location: Northwest of Peru, Nebraska (reported as Nebraska City, Nebraska, on the Blue Book card)
Time: About 3:00 a.m.
Summary: A man returning home to Lincoln from Indiana saw a blue light in the northwest sky shoot across the road and disappear to the southeast. After missing his turn-off on Highway 73 south of Nebraska City and heading south toward Auburn, he saw an orange glow in the sky about five minutes later. As he approached it, the glow became very large and bright orange, and he saw a kettle-shaped object sitting on the ground ten to fifteen yards from the road. He stopped his car beside it and watched for 10 to 20 seconds. He described it as 25 to 30 feet across and cast-iron in appearance, with a row of 10-inch portholes about a foot from the top glowing orange, a bluish flame coming from the holes, and a second row of similar size below. There was no light or activity in or around the object, and no antenna or projection. He told the FBI in Omaha about it on July 24, 1952, saying he had waited because he thought his report would be treated lightly. Blue Book attributed the case to psychological causes because of the nature and delay of the report.
Source: Project Blue Book record card; Air Force Office of Special Investigations spot intelligence report, 13th District Office, Offutt Air Force Base, July 29, 1952; Jacques Vallée, Magonia case 86; FUFOR Index

Source Status: Blue Book rated the case Other (Psychological).

Date: December 7, 1951
Location: Oak Ridge, Tennessee (west of the K-25 gaseous diffusion plant)
Time: 8:15 a.m. EST
Summary: A contractor guard in a security tower at the K-25 plant saw a smooth, square, gray-white object about 20 feet wide, resembling a piece of canvas, rise and fall above a ridge about a mile to the north-northwest. It rose straight up to the cloud base, dropped back to within about 300 feet of the ridge, climbed away at an angle into the clouds, came out again, circled slowly, and went into the clouds a final time over about two minutes, with no sound. Security patrols searched the ground first, and the air defense station was not told the object was airborne until about 10:00 a.m., when two F-47s sent over the area found nothing. The Air Force analyst concluded the guard saw something as stated but was wrong about how far and how fast it traveled. This sighting follows the site’s Oak Ridge and Knoxville sightings of October 1950 to January 1951 by about eleven months and is treated as a separate, isolated later case. See the Detailed Report.
Source: Project Blue Book record card; Air Intelligence Information Report IR-64-51E, 30th Air Division, December 24, 1951; Berliner’s Blue Book Unknowns list

Source Status: Blue Book rated the case Unidentified. The guard’s name is redacted in the file, so the name used in some published lists is left out.

Date: December 7, 1951
Location: Kansas City, Missouri
Time: About 2:12 p.m.
Summary: A Kansas City police corporal opening his garage door looked up and saw a B-36 flying southwest at about 10,000 feet. At a slightly higher altitude, an object was moving northwest, which he described as perfectly round with an inner core like the fuselage of a small airplane with tapered, stubby wings. He watched it for about a minute before it disappeared. It was rather transparent but gave off a metallic sheen and made no noise. He called the weather bureau, which said there were no balloons around and that none could be traveling from southeast to northwest. The weather bureau’s meteorologist later said winds at 10,000 to 12,000 feet were blowing southwest to northeast at about 70 mph and that a balloon at that altitude could not have behaved as described.
Source: Project Blue Book record card; Kansas City Times, December 8, 1951; Air Technical Intelligence Center radio message to Central Air Defense Force

Source Status: Blue Book rated the case Other (Insufficient Data). The officer is named in the newspaper clipping but his name is redacted in the Air Force message, so he is not named here.

Date: December 7, 1951
Location: Sunbury, Ohio
Time: About 4:30 p.m. EST
Summary: Farmer Carl Loar heard a jet pass over his barn, then noticed a faint glinting speck high in the sky. Looking through a powerful telescope, he saw a shining, silvery sphere to the north that first seemed stationary and then moved to a point over his head. Over about half an hour he saw two tiny particles of light appear on either side of it, then a kind of explosion with no flash, a dark cloud, and at least 100 more specks of light. The sphere finally moved into the west and was hidden by a cloudbank. His wife saw it faintly without the telescope, and Perkins Observatory in Delaware, Ohio had no astronomer available when he phoned. The Air Force recorded no investigation and no conclusions. See the Detailed Report.
Source: Project Blue Book record card; Air Force status report No. 2; Ohio newspaper article by Paul Gapp; Berliner’s Blue Book Unknowns list

Source Status: Carried as unexplained on Berliner’s list.

Date: December 10, 1951
Location: Buffalo, New York (Como Park Boulevard, about four miles southwest of Buffalo Municipal Airport)
Time: 6:20 p.m. EST
Summary: A US Air Force captain driving east on Como Park Boulevard saw a large, white, extremely brilliant globular object, which he compared to a welder’s torch when first lit. He estimated it at 400 feet in diameter, with a blue-white center and a white edge, and a fiery, tapered cone trailing about a quarter of a mile behind it with pulsating red-orange flashes. He put it at 3,000 to 4,000 feet and about 240 knots, traveling south to north. After about 15 seconds it vanished near Buffalo Municipal Airport as though switched off like an electric light bulb. He had his window down and heard no sound. The air defense station and the airport control tower had nothing in their logs.
Source: Project Blue Book record card; 136th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron report of December 12, 1951, Niagara Falls Municipal Airport

Source Status: Blue Book rated the case Astronomical (meteor). The captain’s name is redacted in the file.

Date: December 12, 1951
Location: Near Hastings, Minnesota (about five miles southeast of the town)
Time: 3:50 p.m. CST (2150Z)
Summary: Capt. Donald K. Slayton of the Minnesota Air National Guard, later one of the original Mercury Seven astronauts, was flying an F-51 on a test flight at 10,000 feet when he saw a white object about a mile away and 1,000 feet below his left wing tip. It first looked like a kite and then like a round white object 18 inches to 2 feet across, which he took to be a weather balloon drifting downwind. He turned left 180 degrees toward it and saw it turn left and seem to gain speed, so that he realized it was not floating but maneuvering. Closing to about 500 yards, he saw what looked like two disks about a foot apart, spinning, and could not find the object again when he turned back. The Air Force report records the observation as lasting three to four minutes. Slayton gave his own later account in his 1995 autobiography, Deke!, and later accounts add a sudden climbing turn and ground tracking at very high speed that are not in the Blue Book file. See the Detailed Report.
Source: Project Blue Book record card; AF Form 112 Air Intelligence Information Report No. 3-51, 133rd Fighter-Interceptor Wing, December 19, 1951; Donald K. Slayton, Deke!, 1995; Project 1947; FUFOR Index; Richard Hall

Source Status: Blue Book evaluated the case as Was Balloon, though the pilot’s own report describes the object as maneuvering.

Date: December 17, 1951
Location: McDonough, Georgia (about three miles south of town)
Time: Not reported
Summary: The commanding officer at Dobbins Air Force Base asked the Air Force to identify a balloon found near McDonough. The finders described it as a plastic balloon about 30 feet in diameter with three nylon shroud lines and a simple cord and snap device for suspending a load, with the suspension cord cut in a way that suggested blasting. Navy authorities said the balloon was probably used by the Air Training Command for training purposes.
Source: Project Blue Book record card; Office of Special Investigations report of investigation, February 6, 1952, and routing sheet of February 14, 1952

Source Status: Blue Book rated the case Balloon (a physical specimen).

Date: December 22, 1951
Location: Hamden, Ohio
Time: Early morning (the Air Force was notified about 6:25 a.m.)
Summary: A man driving on State Route 75 south of Hamden toward Wellston said a light in the southeast appeared to be following his car. He later said it was in the sky about 40 miles east of Wellston, traveling vertically, too bright to be a star and circular with fire around the edges. The tower at Lockbourne Air Force Base also reported a bright light southeast of the station. Sunrise was at 7:18 a.m., and the light faded with the coming of daylight.
Source: Project Blue Book record card; Air Technical Intelligence Center and Lockbourne notes; Air Force letter to the witness of January 15, 1952

Source Status: Blue Book rated the case Astronomical: Mars, Venus, Spica and Saturn were in the southeast along the ecliptic, Venus being the brightest.

Date: December 22, 1951
Location: 5 miles east of Columbus, Ohio
Time: 10:30 a.m. EST
Summary: Capt. Walter J. Koby of the 166th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron, flying an F-84C at 15,000 feet and heading west, saw a silver object that looked like an airplane without a tail section, tumbling or rolling, heading east at least 20,000 feet up. He counted ten or more rolls in about a minute before he lost it in the sun, and he put its speed at about that of a jet fighter, over 300 mph. He started a turn to give chase, but further searching failed to find it. Other squadron pilots said they were not in that area at that altitude.
Source: Project Blue Book record card; 166th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron report and signed pilot statement, December 27, 1951; Dan Wilson

Source Status: Blue Book rated the case Probably Balloon. A handwritten note on the card says to see the “Hell Roarer” folder for a possible explanation.

Date: December 28, 1951
Location: Alexandria, Virginia (10 to 15 miles west-southwest of the U.S. Capitol)
Time: 6:35 p.m. EST (2335Z)
Summary: Two Air Force officers flying a C-45 at 7,000 feet reported a round, blue-white, soft light about 3 feet across with a hazy inverted truncated cone on top. It stayed in view for about 15 minutes, first seemingly stationary about 10 miles west of the Capitol dome, then moving south-southwest, dropping to about 1,000 feet, moving north-northwest about ten miles, and curving in a wide arc southeast to east to northeast to north to northwest, ending a few miles southwest of central Alexandria. It disappeared while they were switching fuel tanks. An F-94B scrambled to look and did not see it.
Source: Project Blue Book record card; 121st Fighter-Interceptor Squadron report, Andrews Air Force Base, December 28, 1951

Source Status: Blue Book rated the case Aircraft: a helicopter confirmed as testing a new lighting system.

Date: December 31, 1951
Location: Keck, Kentucky
Time: About 7:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. CST
Summary: Nine adults on a porch saw a brilliant red-orange object above the tree tops whose brilliance and movement they said were unlike any star. It seemed to come forward and then go farther away, flashing like a large diamond with a blue-white brilliance and flashes of yellow, red-orange and green, as if bouncing on a rubber band. At about 7:45 p.m. it seemed so far away it was hardly visible, then grew larger and brighter again. Between 9:00 and 9:45 several stars fell, and later four more blue-white objects, smaller and closer together, followed the path of the first. The group watched until 9:00 p.m., and two of them kept watching until 10:00 p.m.
Source: Project Blue Book record card; typed witness statement with sketch, January 1952

Source Status: Blue Book rated the case Astronomical (Jupiter), noting that Jupiter was overhead to the south at 60 degrees elevation and set in the west about four hours later.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Two Unexplained Cases and a Long List of Explanations

December 1951 shows how a year’s reporting ends: two cases the Air Force could not explain and a long list it could. Oak Ridge and Sunbury, both on December 7, are the only Unidentified entries in the month, one from a security tower beside an atomic plant and one through a farmer’s telescope. Oak Ridge has an Air Force analyst who believed the guard saw something and doubted only the speed, and a response that came two hours late. Sunbury has no investigation at all, only a clipped newspaper story and a one-line status report.
The rest of the month shows the work of the explainers. Jupiter accounted for a three-hour show at Keck, Venus for a light that followed a car at Hamden, a helicopter for a blue-white light over Alexandria, and a balloon for the Hastings chase, though Slayton’s own report has the object turning and accelerating. Nebraska and Kansas City sit at the other edge, a story told to the FBI eight months late and a policeman’s report with too little data to judge.