United States.Avalon · ten objects passing one by one, told in a letter

On May 1, 1949, Percy E. Mackey wrote by hand from Avalon, the town on Santa Catalina Island (California), a letter to Kenneth Arnold in Boise (Idaho), the pilot whose account of nine objects near Mount Rainier in June 1947 led the press to speak of flying saucers (↗). The letter says that at about eight in the evening of April 28 his wife and a schoolteacher saw "six objects in the sky, not in a groups, but singly", six objects that passed one at a time and not as a group. A few minutes later, at Mackey's daughter's home, on the next street and corresponding block, his wife, daughter and grandson saw "four more", "all traveling in the same direction". Mackey offered to write more fully "if you are still interested in flying disks, saucers etc.", and added at the foot that Avalon is on Catalina Island, about 25 miles from Long Beach.

The letter says nothing else. It does not describe the shape, color, size or brightness of the objects; it does not say whether they made any sound, how long each took to pass, how high they were or where they were heading, beyond the fact that all went the same way. It does not name the wife, the teacher, the daughter or the grandson, and Mackey does not claim to have seen anything himself: he writes what he was told. By our own ephemeris calculation for Avalon, at eight in the evening the Sun was about 17 degrees below the horizon and the new Moon had already set, so the sky was dark.

The file the Department of War published in the seventh PURSUE release (DOW-UAP-D181) has three pages: the Blue Book card, a control slip and the letter. The control slip, an Air Materiel Command transmittal form (AMC Form 10-2, of November 1947), logs under number Q-1216 a first indorsement with the subject "Unknown Aerial Phenomena", sent from the "17th Distr" at Kirtland Field (New Mexico), dated May 20, 1949 with one inclosure, to the IAXS office, where it was recorded on May 26 at 1100; it bears "Conf... 9-7836" in handwriting and "N/R" as its suspense date. The slip does not say how a letter addressed to Arnold in Boise reached Kirtland or who forwarded it. On the letter, someone pencilled "MCIAXS did not acknowledge this ltr", meaning that office never acknowledged it, and in red "Catalina Island" and "Insufficient Data".

The Blue Book summary card is on a September 1963 form, so it was filled in at least fourteen years later. It gives the date as April 28, 1949 with the date-time group 29/0400Z, which is eight in the evening Pacific standard time, the time in the letter; location, Catalina Island; civilian source; six objects; length and course "Not Reported"; ground-visual observation; no photos or physical evidence. The summary reads "Observer sighted six objects. Each flew by alone.", and the conclusion "INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR EVALUATION". The card turns the two people of the first group into a single observer and leaves out the four objects of the second.

Another copy of the file sits in archive.org's Project Blue Book collection (1949-04-6309690), with two pages, the card and the letter, in a different scan and with the names of sender and addressee, the name of Avalon and the distance to Long Beach blacked out. The PURSUE copy shows them in full and adds the Kirtland control slip. The release's official description on war.gov spells the sender's surname "Wackey"; the signature on the letter reads Mackey.

As evidence, it is the least a file can hold: a second-hand account in a private letter, with no named witnesses, no description of the objects and no investigation at all. Both groups were watching together and Mackey's wife was in both, so they count as a single testimony; none of them made a statement to anyone, and the official paperwork that exists only passes the letter along.

No source proposes a cause. The card names no object, the letter offers no explanation and neither does the release's official description. Ten objects passing one at a time in the same direction at night allow ordinary readings, such as aircraft or birds lit by the town's lights, which the file can neither confirm nor rule out because it gives neither the direction nor the appearance; they are our own conjectures and settle nothing. Nor is the lack of an analysis evidence against an ordinary cause: in 2024 AARO resolved 174 cases, all as prosaic objects, although many others remain unresolved.

What the file does document is the 1949 circuit. Mackey knew, almost two years after Arnold's sighting, that Arnold took an interest in such accounts, and his letter ended up in Air Force files by a route the file does not explain, with a control slip and no reply to the sender. No one asked him for the fuller account he offered, and the card written years later reduced ten objects and four witnesses to "six objects" and an "Observer". It is another file from the same island, like ↗ and ↗, that came in through a different door: here there was no teletype, no base report and no interview.