Unresolved UAP Report, Catalina Island, April 28, 1949 — Department of War File
This file contains correspondence from Mr. Percy Wackey of Avalon, California to Mr. Kenneth Arnold of Boise, Idaho. Mr. Wackey relayed that his wife and another individual reported observing six objects over Catalina Island on the night of April 28, 1949.
Incident Overview
On April 28, 1949, in Catalina Island, California, the Department of War preserved a documentary record that was declassified and published on October 23, 2026 as part of the seventh tranche of the Department of War’s Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE).
The file runs to three pages, and the most interesting of them is the last. It is a handwritten letter in blue ink, headed “Avalon, Calif., May 1st, 1949” and addressed to Kenneth Arnold of Boise, Idaho. The writer says that at about 8 o’clock on the night of 28 April his wife and a school teacher saw six objects in the sky, “not in a group, but singly.” A few minutes later, at his daughter’s home on the next street, his wife, his daughter and his grandson saw four more. All of them, he writes, were “traveling in the same direction.” He closes with an offer: “If you are still interested in flying disks, saucers etc., please let me know and I will write more in full.” The letter is signed Percy E. Wackey, P.O. Box P-1, with a line added at the foot explaining that Avalon is on Catalina Island, about 25 miles from Long Beach.
Why write to Arnold? On 24 June 1947, Arnold, a Boise businessman and private pilot, reported nine fast-moving objects near Mount Rainier in Washington State. Newspaper coverage of his account gave the country the phrase “flying saucer,” and for the next few years his was the best-known name attached to the subject. Members of the public wrote to him with their own sightings, and a letter to Arnold was, for a man on Catalina in 1949, the obvious way to tell someone who might care. The file does not show how the letter then passed from Arnold into Air Force hands.
The second page is a routing slip under the subject “Unknown Aerial Phenomena.” It records a transmittal from the 17th District at Kirtland Field, New Mexico, dated 20 May 1949, with one inclosure, recorded on 26 May 1949. The first page is a Project 10073 record card, the index card the Air Force’s project files used for each case. It gives the date-time group as 28 April 1949, 0400Z on the 29th, lists the source as civilian, the number of objects as six and the type of observation as ground-visual. Length of observation and course are both entered as “Not Reported.” There were no photographs and no physical evidence. The summary reads, in full, “Observer sighted six objects. Each flew by alone.” The conclusion is “Insufficient data for evaluation.” The card is printed on a form dated September 1963, so it was typed when the files were indexed years later, not in 1949.
By the spring of 1949 the Air Force’s study of these reports had been renamed. Project Sign became Project Grudge in February 1949, run from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, and Grudge took a firmer line that most reports could be explained as misidentified ordinary things. A one-page letter with no times, shapes, sizes or directions gave its analysts nothing to work with, and the pencil note on the letter suggests nobody asked for more. It reads: “MCIAXS did not acknowledge this ltr.” The red notation beside it says “Insufficient Data.”
What the government released
This file contains correspondence from Mr. Percy Wackey of Avalon, California to Mr. Kenneth Arnold of Boise, Idaho. Mr. Wackey relayed that his wife and another individual reported observing six objects over Catalina Island on the night of April 28, 1949. A handwritten annotation and contemporary documentation associated with the letter indicate a conclusion by the U.S. Air Force that the incident lacked sufficient data for evaluation.
The case in this archive
This letter is one of four Air Force files from Catalina Island released together in PURSUE Release 07, and the Catalina Island case history reads them side by side.
Status of the case
The record shows less than its card suggests. Percy Wackey does not say he saw anything himself. He relays what his wife, a teacher, his daughter and his grandson told him, so the Air Force received the account at second hand, and through a third party in Idaho. His letter describes ten objects across two sightings a few minutes apart, but the card records only six, which means the later index condensed the letter rather than copying it. There is no description of what the objects looked like: no colour, no shape, no brightness, no estimate of speed or height, and no direction beyond “the same direction.” Lights or objects passing one at a time over a town after dark fit many ordinary explanations, and the letter holds nothing that would let anyone choose between them.
“Insufficient data for evaluation” was a fair verdict, and it remains the only one the paper supports. The offer to “write more in full” was never taken up, so whatever detail the witnesses could have given is gone. The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office has made no modern determination about this incident, and the release of the file is not an endorsement of anything in it. Its value is as a small example of how a private letter about lights in the sky reached a government file in 1949, and how little that file could do with it.