Kodiak, Alaska UFO Sighting (April 8, 1949) — USAF Files (D25P56 var 3)
A first saucer wave case from Kodiak, Alaska. While near the Naval Operating Base Post Office, Lieutenant Commander Shepard observed a reddish ball of fire streaking across the sky near Old Woman Mountain.
Background
On April 8, 1949, in Kodiak, Alaska, 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
While near the Naval Operating Base Post Office, Lieutenant Commander Shepard observed a reddish ball of fire streaking across the sky near Old Woman Mountain. The object was approximately two feet in diameter, traveling from west to east at an estimated 2,500 feet altitude. It appeared to disintegrate over Chiniak Bay.
The number of witnesses is not specified in the released document.
Verbatim from the file
“a strange object streaking across the sky, near Old Woman Mountain”. “a reddish ball of fire approximately two (2) feet in diameter”. “It seemed to disintegrate over Chiniak Bay”
Type of case
The case is a visual sighting reported by ground or air observers.
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.