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This U.S. Air Force Project Blue Book case file, hosted by The Black Vault, covers a fireball seen on 9 December 1965 over Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Canada, and concludes it was a meteor. It holds memos on calls about Acme, Pennsylvania, where a search from the Oakdale Radar Site found nothing, plus letters from witnesses and a photographer. It also includes a Sky and Telescope article on the Great Lakes fireball and letters identifying material found in Lapeer County as chaff.
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
Detroit). The crew had sighted an object trailing smoke south of Detroit. "Within the next few minutes many other radio messages were received from airborne observers in Michigan, Ontario, and Ohio. Many pilots thought an airplane was down in Lake Erie. When all the bearings were plotted on a map, they intersected in an approximately 300-square-mile area between Toledo, Ohio, and Pelee Island (see map). This agreed with sightings from the Cleveland area. "The next day I drove farther west to the region of Fremont, Sandusky, and Port Clinton, Ohio. Although these cities were nearer the end of the fireball's trajectory, very few people had noticed the phenomenon, probably because it was high in the sky rather than close to the horizon. However, several reports placed the fireball to the north. One observer at Port Clinton-on the south shore of Lake Erie—also saw the fireball to the north, indicating quite clearly that no impact occurred south of the lake. "I then telephoned police stations and local operators on all inhabited islands in the western end of Lake Erie, inquiring if anyone had seen the fireball. No one had, but many persons heard a loud detonation or sonic boom at that time. Several people were certain that it came from the west or northwest. This sonic boom had also been heard by many in Port Clinton, but not farther east. "In view of the small population of these islands (Pelee Island; North, Middle, and South Bass islands; and Kelleys Island) and the fact that most inhabitants stay inside as much as possible in December, it is not surprising that there were no observers of the fireball. "Calling Colchester, Ontario, on the opposite shore of the lake, I talked to Mrs. Margaret Lankin, who with her daughter had been hanging clothes when the fireball appeared. About 30 seconds after it disappeared, they heard loud detonations. "I also talked by telephone to Richard Champine, who took the accompanying photograph. His name had been given to me by the FAA in Oberlin. "It is clear that only one fireball occurred and that this became nonluminous a number of miles above the western end of Lake Erie. Most observers agreed that it burst into several pieces at the end of its trajectory. "The fireball was observed by many people in Ontario, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and to a lesser extent in neighboring states. In newspaper accounts, a great many supposed impact sites were reported, both in southwestern Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio. Fragments were claimed to have fallen in Ohio and Michigan. "These imagined happenings arose from the impossibility of estimating the distance of an object in the sky. Almost everyone who saw the fireball thought it (Continued on page 82)
Document, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 37 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.