Unresolved UAP Report, Catalina Island, March 15, 1955 — Department of War File
The file contains a report by Paul J. Carr of Avalon, California, who reported observing a bright orange object, approximately the size of a nickel held at arm’s length, on the evening of March 15, 1955.
Incident Overview
On March 15, 1955, 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 four pages: two index cards and a two-page teletype message. The message is the original report. It was sent by the Combat Operations Center of the 670th Aircraft Control and Warning Squadron at San Pedro, an Air Defense Command radar unit on the mainland, to the 27th Air Division at Norton Air Force Base, to Air Defense Command at Ent Air Force Base, to the Air Technical Intelligence Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and to the Director of Intelligence at Air Force headquarters in Washington. It states that it was sent in accordance with Air Force Regulation 200-2, the standing order for reporting unidentified flying objects. Despite the radar unit’s name at the top, the sighting was purely visual. The message enters “none” under optical aids.
The witness is named as Paul J. Carr of Descanso Street, Avalon. His occupation is entered as unknown. The message describes one round object, the size of a nickel, orange changing to red, and “very bright.” He “just happen[ed] to notice” it. He put it at 45 degrees of elevation on a bearing of 340 degrees when he first saw it, and at 10 degrees on the same bearing when it faded out of sight, so it dropped straight down through some 35 degrees in the north-north-west, toward the mainland across the channel. The whole sighting lasted two seconds. The time is given only as “night.” The weather was “clear dry and cool,” with unlimited ceiling and unrestricted visibility. The message is signed off with a comment from the squadron’s intelligence officer, Captain Clifford E. Brant: “flight path and length of time in sight, suggest UFOB was probably a meteor.” Someone has added “Prob. meteor” by hand. Receiving stamps date the message 16 March 1955.
The two cards disagree slightly. The Project 10073 record card ticks “Was Astronomical,” writes “Meteor” beside it, and comments “Probable meteor.” The second card, a UFOB index card on a form dated October 1954, ticks “Possibly Astronomical” and adds: “Possibly astronomical, but due to the brevity of the sighting, no further investigation was deemed worthwhile by this organization (4602d AISS).” That card also gives the date-time group as 15/2231Z, which is the time the teletype was sent, not the time of the sighting. The record card more honestly enters the time as “unknown.”
The 4602d Air Intelligence Service Squadron was the Air Defense Command unit given the job of field investigation of reports in 1954, so that Project Blue Book’s small staff at Wright-Patterson did not have to chase every case. Its comment here is a triage decision. A two-second light with no time recorded offered nothing to check against, and the squadron chose not to try.
What the government released
The file contains a report by Paul J. Carr of Avalon, California, who reported observing a bright orange object, approximately the size of a nickel held at arm’s length, on the evening of March 15, 1955. The provisional assessment associated with the report includes a comment from the preparing officer that the sighting is possibly astronomical, and that the incident did not warrant further investigation.
The case in this archive
This report 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 meteor explanation fits the report well. A bright meteor, often called a fireball, lasts a second or two, can be brighter than any planet, and commonly shifts colour as it burns, with orange and red among the colours witnesses describe. A meteor seen heading roughly away from the observer, or falling steeply, can look as if it drops straight down. Fading out above the horizon, as this one did at about 10 degrees, is how most meteors end. Every element in Carr’s description matches that ordinary event, and nothing in it argues against one.
What the file cannot do is confirm it. There is no time of sighting, so no one can now check it against other reports of a fireball over southern California that night. There was one witness, and the details came from a single glance lasting two seconds. The “size of a nickel held at arm’s length” is a measure of how bright and striking the light was to him, not of its size or distance. The difference between the two cards, “Was Astronomical” on one and “Possibly Astronomical” on the other, shows the evaluation was a judgment, not a measurement.
The release of the file does not change that judgment. The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office has made no modern determination about this incident, and the release is not an endorsement of anything in the record. On the evidence in the file, a meteor is the plain reading.