Cincinnati, Ohio UFO Sighting (October 11, 1954) — FBI Files (D34P50)
A cold war / blue book era case from Cincinnati, Ohio. Multiple disc-shaped objects were reported over Cincinnati, Ohio, often in groups of three.
Background
On October 11, 1954, in Cincinnati, Ohio, 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 a Cold War-era case investigated under the Air Force’s Project Blue Book or its predecessors. The case was filed with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, whose Knoxville, Albuquerque, Los Angeles, and other field offices routed UFO reports to headquarters under the Bureau’s standing protocols for the protection of vital installations.
What the document records
Multiple disc-shaped objects were reported over Cincinnati, Ohio, often in groups of three. These objects were described as orange-red, silent, and approximately 60 feet in diameter, hovering around 300 feet above the city. Reports spanned a week, and similar sightings were occurring internationally.
The number of witnesses is not specified in the released document.
Verbatim from the file
““orange-red col- ored, silent, disc-shaped and 60 feet in diame- ter,””. ““seem to indicate a pattern””. “Cincinnati is sup- posed to be a megnetic fault line and that per- haps the saucers come here to recharge.”
Type of case
The witnesses described the object as disc- or saucer-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.