Vernal, Utah UFO Sighting (October 10, 1957) — FBI Files
A cold war / blue book era case from Vernal, Utah. On October 10, 1957, the Air Force received numerous reports of an unidentified object near Vernal, Utah.
Background
The date is the story’s spine: October 10, 1957 was six days after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, and the United States was in the grip of the most intense skyward attention in its history. Newspapers printed satellite-tracking schedules; families stood in backyards at dusk watching for a moving point of light. Sighting reports to the Air Force surged through October, and the great 1957 flap was only beginning — three weeks later, the Levelland, Texas vehicle-interference cases would produce one of the most consequential UFO events of the decade. The Vernal report belongs to the leading edge of that wave, filed from a small ranching town in Utah’s Uinta Basin — a region that decades later would attract sustained attention of its own as the home of Skinwalker Ranch.
What distinguishes the Vernal entry from routine Sputnik-month excitement is the description. A satellite is a star-like point in motion; the Vernal witnesses described an object “like the moon” — an extended disk — trailing a blue flame that “pulsed like a heart,” and the reports were numerous enough that the Air Force mounted an immediate ground investigation, looking for a landing site or debris. It found neither, and the case entered the file unresolved. On October 10, 1957, in Vernal, Utah, U.S. government investigators recorded the 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
On October 10, 1957, the Air Force received numerous reports of an unidentified object near Vernal, Utah. The object was described as resembling the moon and trailing a pulsing blue flame. Despite an immediate investigation, no object or evidence of a landing was found.
The number of witnesses is not specified in the released document.
Verbatim from the file
“looked like the moon”. “trailing a “blue flame that pulsed like a heart""
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.