USNS Muller Sighting off Havana: A Naval Security Group Report, 1969
Off Havana, a Navy intercept ship logged a pulsing white light that threw off rings and a blue-green beam, then became a drifting cloud. An Air Force RC-135 saw the same light that night. A Cape Kennedy missile test is a candidate.
What this record is
This two-page record is a hand-printed transcript of a visual sighting report. It is catalogued as “COMNAVSECGRU Visual Sighting Report, April 30, 1979”. COMNAVSECGRU was the Commander, Naval Security Group, the Navy’s signals intelligence command. The April 1979 date is not the date of the sighting. It comes from the closing line, “This document declassified by COMNAVSECGRU on April 30, 1979.” The observation itself is timed at 0032Z on the 22nd of a month the header gives as August, from a position recorded as “posit of Muller”, 23 degrees 17 minutes north, 82 degrees 19 minutes west. That is in the Florida Straits, roughly twenty miles north of Havana. The transcript does not give the year. Another record in the same NSA series supplies it, as explained below.
What it says
The observers saw a bright white light at a bearing of 026 degrees true, about 15 degrees above the horizon. For the first minute it pulsed or fluctuated in brightness at roughly one-second intervals. For the next two minutes it gave off concentric rings of light that flowed outward from the centre “in a rippling, shimmering fashion,” dimming as they spread. In the fourth minute a bluish-green beam appeared from the central core. It extended outward and downward to the left at about 45 degrees and reached the edge of the rings. About five minutes after the beam appeared, the rings faded, leaving only the core and the beam, which the report compares to a searchlight. The beam then seemed to retract toward the core, growing broader as it did. Finally the beam and core formed “a nebulous cloud-shaped mass” that drifted south with the wind and faded after about 14 minutes.
The report ends with weather data: barometer 29.91, temperature 83 degrees dry and 78 wet, excellent visibility, four-tenths cloud cover of stratus and cumulus, wind east at 12 knots, and an electrical storm forming over the immediate area of Havana.
Context
The report does not describe the ship, but a second record in the series shows it carried an intelligence detachment. That record also fixes the year. The 26-page Northeast Air Command file (see that page) ends with an August 1969 operational report from an Air Force RC-135. Its distribution list includes a detachment aboard USNS Muller and the Naval Security Group activity at Guantánamo. Among its remarks, the RC-135 crew reported that at 0033Z on 22 August a bright white light appeared in the north just above the horizon, rose “like a giant pinwheel or a fireworks display” to about 40 degrees, and went out while the horizon glowed brighter. The time, the northerly bearing and the description match the Muller report closely.
Neither record offers an explanation. A line drawn from the Muller’s position on a bearing of 026 degrees points up the Florida coast toward Cape Kennedy. A published chronology of the Poseidon missile programme records that the tenth Poseidon test missile was launched from Cape Kennedy on 21 August 1969. An evening launch on that date would fall at about the right time, because 0032Z on the 22nd was 8:32 pm Eastern Daylight Time on the 21st. The chronology consulted does not give a launch time, so this is a candidate, not an identification. Still, expanding rings, a beam-like trail and a drifting luminous cloud are what observers typically describe when they see a missile’s exhaust plume lit by sunlight after local sunset.
Status
Unexplained in the record itself, with a plausible conventional candidate that has not been confirmed. The sighting took place about half an hour after sunset at the ship’s position, when a high-altitude plume would still catch the sun. NSA had already released the transcript before it reached the National Archives with the rest of the series in 2025.
Sources
- National Archives catalog entry: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/596347895
- PDF of the record: https://catalog.archives.gov/medialz/electronic-records/rg-615/580103959/457UAP00005_released.pdf
- Related RC-135 report (last pages of): https://catalog.archives.gov/medialz/electronic-records/rg-615/580103959/457UAP00028_released.pdf
- Series: Records from the National Security Agency Relating to Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/580103959
- Poseidon (C3) missile chronology: https://nuclearcompanion.com/data/poseidon-c3-missile-chronology/