Jackson, Mississippi UFO Sighting (January 1949) — USAF Files
A first saucer wave case from Jackson, Mississippi. On January 1, 1949, a pilot named Tom Rugh reported an unidentified object while flying a Stinson civilian aircraft approximately 3-4 miles east of Jackson, Mississippi.
Background
In January 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, a pilot named Tom Rugh reported an unidentified object while flying a Stinson civilian aircraft approximately 3-4 miles east of Jackson, Mississippi. The object was sighted at around 1200 feet altitude on the east leg of the Jackson radio range. Rugh was preparing sketches of the object, which he only observed once.
The number of witnesses is not specified in the released document.
Type of case
The case is a pilot or aircrew sighting, observed from the cockpit during flight.
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.