United States.San Pedro · a sergeant sees a light hang still, then move away

On November 16, 1953, between 5:05 and 5:15 a.m. local time, at night and under a clear sky, Technical Sergeant Robert J. Currie, 39, an Air Force clerk, was at the corner of Tenth Street and Gaffey in San Pedro (California) when a casual glance at the sky showed him an object. He was the only witness.

According to the teletype that recorded it, the object was round, "saucer shape," the size of a pea, purplish white at first and fading to a purer white until it disappeared. It was a single object, with no trail, no exhaust, and no noise recorded. At first it seemed stationary over Catalina Island; then it moved northwest, toward Los Angeles, on a straight and level path, and was lost from view there: the light faded out. Currie followed it for ten minutes and put it at about 45 degrees of elevation both when he first saw it and when he lost it. The teletype enters an initial azimuth of 0 degrees (north) and the final one as unknown. He used no binoculars or other instrument.

The next day, November 17, headquarters of the 2347th Air Force Reserve Training Center, at Long Beach Municipal Airport (California), sent the report by teletype, headed "UFOB," to Air Defense Command, the Air Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC), the Director of Intelligence in Washington, and Continental Air Command. Everything known about the case rests on that teletype. According to it, the sky was clear and visibility was ten miles. Winds aloft blew from the northwest at 8,000 feet and from the west (250 to 280 degrees) between 10,000 and 50,000 feet. No interception or other air traffic is recorded.

In item 8 the teletype records an outside opinion: astronomers at the Griffith Park observatory in Los Angeles "aver" that objects such as this are "possibly planets," which appear more clearly after rainfall. In item 12 the reporting officer judges the witness "fairly reliable," owing to his association with jet aircraft activity while stationed at Long Beach Air Force Base, and concludes that the astronomers' observation may account for the appearance.

In September 1963, on a Foreign Technology Division form, Project Blue Book summarized the case on a record card. The conclusion reads "Astronomical (JUPITER)." Beneath it the card adds: "Movement of object does not coincide with winds aloft. Astronomers at Griffis Park observatory evaluated observation as possibly planets. Angular velocity, unknown." With the winds sentence the card appears to rule out a balloon: the object was heading northwest and the wind was pushing east. The summary ends with an astronomical note: "Nov 15, Jupiter 5 hrs, 38 min., 45 deg elevation in West." According to a calculation made for this entry, that "5 hrs, 38 min" is not a time: it is Jupiter's right ascension in the almanac for November 15 (5h 37m 58s). In 2026 the Department of War released the document, with the back of the card, under the title "Unresolved UAP Report," although the card treats the case as resolved.

An identified sergeant saw a light for ten minutes, and his unit put it in writing the next day. It is first-hand official documentation from the time, but no instrument corroborates what he saw and no one measured anything: the size of a pea says nothing about the object's distance from the eye, the 45-degree elevation is an estimate, and the angular velocity, as the card admits, is unknown.

Blue Book's explanation fits in the essentials and fails on details the file does not settle. According to an ephemeris calculation made for this entry, for the corner of Tenth and Gaffey, at 5:05 a.m. Pacific time on November 16, 1953, Jupiter stood 46 degrees high, almost due west (azimuth 269), at magnitude −2.6: the brightest object at a useful height, because Venus was barely clearing the eastern horizon. The elevation matches the witness's 45 degrees, and a bright planet looks stationary at first. But three things do not fit.

First, Catalina Island is seen from there between azimuths 184 (Avalon) and 225 (the west end), so Jupiter was between 45 and 85 degrees to the right of the island; and the teletype's 0-degree azimuth points north, toward Los Angeles and not toward Catalina, so the report contradicts itself. Second, in ten minutes Jupiter only sank about 2 degrees and shifted little more than a degree to the north, a displacement hard to describe as heading "toward Los Angeles." Third, at 5:15 a.m. the Sun was still 15 degrees below the horizon: twilight does not put out a planet of magnitude −2.6, so the fading light remains unexplained, unless there was haze in that direction, which the teletype does not record.

There is also another candidate the card does not mention. By the same calculation, Sirius, at magnitude −1.4, stood 31 degrees high at azimuth 217, right over Catalina, and at that height a bright star twinkles in colors, which would fit a purplish white turning white. But Sirius does not explain the 45 degrees, the drift to the northwest, or the fading either. The card does not say where Jupiter comes from: the Griffith astronomers spoke generally of "planets" and not about the case, and the release's official description states that the astronomers pointed to Jupiter, when that name appears only on the card. Even so, the explanation is not refuted: the apparent motion of a fixed light seen without references is a well-known illusion, and a direction estimated from memory before dawn can be far off. It is a weak proposal, not one the record disproves.

The unit, from the reserve and with no specialists, turned the sergeant's account into a teletype, consulted the nearest observatory on its own, and left the judgment to Wright-Patterson (Dayton), which a decade later filed the case under a planet and an elevation figure. The file holds no detailed interview, no drawing made by the witness, and no other witness in a city that was already waking up at that hour.