Jackson, Mississippi UFO Sighting (January 1, 1949) — USAF Files
A first saucer wave case from Jackson, Mississippi. On January 1, 1949, an object was sighted approximately two miles east of Jackson, Mississippi, at 17090 hours.
Background
On January 1, 1949, in Jackson, Mississippi, U.S. government investigators recorded an unidentified-object incident later released to the public on May 8, 2026 as part of the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE). The incident is one of the first wave of “flying saucer” reports that swept the United States after the Kenneth Arnold sighting of June 1947 and the Roswell incident of July 1947. The case appears in U.S. Department of Defense documents.
What the document records
On January 1, 1949, an object was sighted approximately two miles east of Jackson, Mississippi, at 17090 hours. The object was described as cigar-shaped, dark blue or black, and approximately 60 feet long with a 10-foot diameter at the front, tapering towards the rear. Witnesses included the airport manager and two other individuals.
The number of witnesses is not specified in the released document.
Type of case
The witnesses described the object as airship-like or cigar-shaped.
Status
All records released under the PURSUE program are designated unresolved by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) by default. The federal government has not concluded that the events were anomalous, has not concluded that they were conventional, and has not ruled out either possibility. Conventional candidates for sightings of this period include experimental aircraft, weather balloons (especially the Project Mogul series in the late 1940s), atmospheric optical phenomena such as sundogs and lenticular clouds, and astronomical objects including Venus, the Moon, and meteors near the horizon.