Dept. of DefenseUnresolvedAmbiguous
Football-shaped object — Sterling, Utah, October 16, 1948 (duplicate entry)
Oct 16, 19481 mile SE of Sterling, Utah500 ft4s
Analysis — our summary
This entry (Incident 186 in the 173-233 compilation) appears to be a duplicate of the Sterling, Utah October 16, 1948 football-shaped object reported by Fred Bash, which also appears in the 101-172 compilation. See that record for full details.
As reported — verbatim from the document
“Same incident as Incident in file 101-172: football-shaped silver object with black stripe, approximately 300 mph, 500 ft altitude, 4 seconds, throbbing sound.”
Analyst notes — caveats & confidence
Incident 186. This is a cross-reference/duplicate of an incident in the companion 101-172 file. This duplication suggests the USAF incident compilation had overlapping coverage between the two volumes. OCR quality extremely poor.
Provenance
Source document38_143685_box7_Incident_Summaries_173-233.pdf
Document typeincident summary compilation
Reporting agencyDept. of Defense
Source pages144
DeclassifiedFirst public at this release (2026)
Held classified~78 years (≥, to this release)
Extraction confidence ModerateHow cleanly this record could be parsed from the source — driven by legibility & redaction. It is not a measure of how credible or anomalous the sighting is.