Cincinnati, Ohio UFO Sighting (October 2, 1961) — FBI Files (D8P187)
Mr. Stringfield reviewed an article in the Cincinnati Enquirer regarding a potential Soviet nuclear explosion in space. He believed this article correlated with information received during an anonymous phone call on September 25, 1961. The article su
Background
On October 2, 1961, 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
Mr. Stringfield reviewed an article in the Cincinnati Enquirer regarding a potential Soviet nuclear explosion in space. He believed this article correlated with information received during an anonymous phone call on September 25, 1961. The article suggested a visible explosion intended to intimidate, potentially seen by millions.
The number of witnesses is not specified in the released document.
Verbatim from the file
“Some Defense Department bigwigs are apprehensive that Russia will climax its campaign of intimidation by a spectacular explosion in space—an immense nuclear blast visible to hundreds of millions of people.”
Type of case
The case is associated with a military installation or nuclear facility.
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.