================================================================ PROJECT 10073 RECORD CARD -- TRANSCRIPTION File: 1955-12-7340117-CARIBOU-MAINE.pdf Transcribed by Claude Sonnet 4.6 for GlitchyMatrix.com/bluebook/ ================================================================ FIELD 1 -- DATE: 21 December 1955 FIELD 2 -- LOCATION: Caribou, Maine FIELD 3 -- DATE-TIME GROUP: Local [blank] / GMT 2300 (N) 22/0[illegible]00Z [Note: "N" designation and GMT rendering partially obscured. At 2300 EST, GMT would be 22/0400Z. The local field is blank; the time appears on the GMT line.] FIELD 4 -- TYPE OF OBSERVATION: Ground-Visual [X] Ground-Radar [ ] Air-Visual [ ] Air-Intercept Radar [ ] FIELD 5 -- PHOTOS: No FIELD 6 -- SOURCE: Civ (Civilian) FIELD 7 -- LENGTH OF OBS: 6-8 min. FIELD 8 -- NUMBER OF OBJECTS: 1 FIELD 9 -- COURSE: Unk (Unknown) FIELD 10 -- BRIEF SUMMARY: Round obj. color as of gold, about the size of a jet fighter, had the brightness of the sun, only was not hard on the eye. FIELD 11 -- COMMENTS: [blank] FIELD 12 -- CONCLUSIONS: [ ] Was balloon [ ] Probably balloon [ ] Possibly balloon [ ] Was aircraft [ ] Probably aircraft [ ] Possibly aircraft [ ] Was astronomical [ ] Probably astronomical [ ] Possibly astronomical [ ] Other [ ] Insufficient data for evaluation [X] Unknown [Note: "Unknown" is the checked box. This may correspond to the database classification of UNIDENTIFIED, though "Unknown" and the formal UNIDENTIFIED evaluation are sometimes treated as distinct in Blue Book records -- this case has essentially no investigation documented. Flag for DB classification review against actual form.] Form: ATIC FORM 329 (REV 26 SEP 52) Supplemental documents present: - ATIC Form No. 164 (13 Oct 54) civilian questionnaire, pages 1-8, completed by primary observer. Marked INCL#1. Questionnaire date: 20 February 1956 (approximately 2 months after sighting). Address: R.F.W. 1, Caribou, Zone 5, Maine. Observer: Female, age 27, housewife. Education: Grade school, approximately 1.5 years high school. - Second ATIC Form No. 164 civilian questionnaire (INCL#1 1/2 per notation). Substantially similar content. Possibly a second copy or second observer's report. - U.S. Air Force Technical Information Sheet (Summary Data), pages 9-10, signed Feb. 20, 1956. This form contains a multi-page handwritten narrative from the observer (pages 9, 10, and continuing), constituting the primary detailed account of the sighting. See analysis for key content. - Hand-drawn site sketch, page 12, showing topography of observer's property, farm buildings, Caribou Lake, and Washburn Road. Object position marked relative to the farm structure. - Mailing envelope: Return address showing "Mrs. [REDACTED], R.F.W. [Route?], Caribou, Maine." Addressed to: "Air Technical Intelligence Center, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Department of the Air Force, Ohio." Postmarked Caribou, 1956. ================================================================ SEARCH INDEX TERMS ================================================================ Caribou Maine Washburn Maine Aroostook County 1955 December winter solstice night 11 PM housewife civilian female single witness dome disc saucer rotating bottom gold golden bright sun Caribou Lake Washburn Road Loring AFB Loring Air Force Base SAC Strategic Air Command close low altitude physiological effects nausea rotating bottom still top melt snow physical trace unknown unidentified no investigation direct report ATIC 6-8 minutes very fast ================================================================ CASE ANALYSIS -- Claude Sonnet 4.6 ================================================================ THE OFFICIAL CONCLUSION ----------------------- The ATIC record card marks the conclusion as "Unknown" -- the case appears to have been received directly from the observer without any documented investigation or follow-up analysis. The comments field is blank; no investigator evaluation, no site visit, no weather cross-check is recorded. The observer self-reported directly to ATIC by mail, submitting her questionnaire and narrative in February 1956, approximately two months after the December 21, 1955 sighting. The file contains the observer's documents and nothing else. WHAT THE EVIDENCE SHOWS ----------------------- On the night of the winter solstice 1955, a 27-year-old housewife living on a farm in the Washburn/Caribou area of Aroostook County, Maine was turning off her kitchen light to go to bed at approximately 11 PM when she noticed a reddish-orange glow through her window. She assumed it was a fire on Washburn Road and decided to watch it. It grew progressively brighter. Then, in her words, "it just came right out of the sky." What she described: a round object, gold-colored ("no color I have ever seen -- gold is close"), about the apparent size of half a full moon at arm's length. The ATIC card summarizes its size as approximately that of a jet fighter. The brightness equaled the sun but was not painful to look at. The object had a flat bottom portion and a dome on top -- "a cup turned upside down on a saucer" -- with the saucer being more oval or egg-shaped. The bottom portion rotated at very high speed ("almost too fast for the eyes"), while the top dome remained still. The outer circle moved with the ship as a connected unit. The observer called to wake her husband Freddie, who was asleep upstairs. By the time he reached the bottom of the stairs, the bottom had stopped rotating and the object accelerated rapidly. He took one look and said it was the moon, then returned to bed. The observer watched the object depart, "just exactly like it came," and then noted a lingering light in the sky after the object itself was gone. Duration: 6-8 minutes per the ATIC card; "past 8 minutes" per the questionnaire. No sound was heard. The object was positioned near or over Caribou Lake, approximately at the level of the farm roof based on the observer's site sketch -- a very low altitude. The next morning, the observer noted what appeared to be a small rivulet of melted snow below and near where the object had been: "just like a small stream of water over the snow. Like in the spring when the lake [opens] up above, the water will melt down little streams down across the snow." She speculated the object may have been hot but stated she saw nothing land or leave from it. The observer reported to officials December 27, 1955. She subsequently verified the moon was not in the direction she had seen the object by checking on Christmas Eve. On December 26, her husband admitted: "You know I wish I had taken a good look at that thing, it couldn't possibly have been the moon." POINTS OF INTEREST / WHAT GIVES ME PAUSE ----------------------------------------- The observer's narrative runs several handwritten pages and is among the most vividly rendered first-person accounts in the archive. What distinguishes it is not sensationalism but specificity: the initial misidentification as a fire, the growing brightness, the surprise, the rotating bottom, the physics of the light persisting after the object disappeared. She gets small details right in the way people do when they are actually remembering something. The most remarkable element she describes is something she saw between the dome and the flat bottom: movement. Not one movement but many, rapid, like "a person walking in front of a light." She writes: "I couldn't see any form or outline but it was like hurried movements. Not one but many things." This element has made her physically ill -- nauseated -- at the memory ever since. She writes carefully: "I say not human because what ever it was has made me sick to my stomach ever since." And: "I just can't explain it on paper but there was life there I'm certain. Nothing human, but alive." This is difficult to evaluate. The observer may have been projecting expectation onto ambiguous visual phenomena at the interface of a very bright object and its dark surround. Or she may have observed something real that she had no framework to describe. What can be said is that the sensation struck her with genuine force and has not left her. It is not a detail that sounds performed. The proximity to Loring Air Force Base is the critical geographic fact. Loring AFB, home to Strategic Air Command B-36 and B-52 bomber operations and nuclear weapons storage, was approximately four miles south of Caribou city center in December 1955. The observer's farm was north of Caribou near Caribou Lake. Whatever flew over that landscape that night was in the immediate vicinity of one of the most strategically sensitive airfields on the American East Coast. No Air Force follow-up is documented in this file. The melt trace is a detail worth noting without over-claiming. The observer found it the next morning, described it carefully by comparison to spring runoff, explicitly noted she did not see anything land. It could be coincidental. It could also reflect heat radiation from a low-hovering object on a below- zero night. There is no physical specimen, no measurement. The husband's corroboration, limited as it is, matters. He saw something. He initially dismissed it as the moon. Five days later he told his wife it couldn't have been the moon. That trajectory -- dismissal followed by quiet reconsideration -- is the opposite of the pattern of someone embellishing a fabricated story. BOTTOM LINE ----------- This case received no investigation. There is no analyst evaluation, no site visit, no weather data cross-check. What we have is a self-report from a 27-year-old rural Maine housewife who had the education and vocabulary she had, and who wrote several pages to ATIC trying to describe something she clearly could not get out of her mind. The conventional explanations are all weak here. The moon is eliminated by the observer's own subsequent verification. The proximity to Loring AFB makes experimental aircraft a non- trivial candidate, but no 1955 aircraft hovers at low altitude for 6-8 minutes with a rotating base and then departs at extreme speed. Ball lightning in December is rare and does not produce the observed duration or appearance. The pitch-dark sky rules out astronomical objects. What the record shows is a woman who saw something close, at low altitude, near her farm on a December night -- something that frightened and nauseated and moved her simultaneously -- something her husband briefly confirmed and could not explain away five days later -- and then mailed her account directly to Wright-Patterson because she thought they should know. The "Unknown" classification is the honest answer for this case. ATIC received the report and filed it without comment. ================================================================ https://glitchymatrix.com/bluebook/ GlitchyMatrix Project Blue Book Archive All 10,808 declassified USAF UFO case files, 1945-1969 ================================================================