Rogue River Disc Sighting, Gold Beach, Oregon

Tuesday, May 24, 1949. About 5:00 p.m. A small boat on the lower Rogue River, near Gold Beach in Curry County, Oregon. It sat some two to two and a half miles upstream from the river mouth, near Elephant Rock. The day was clear, with "no clouds in the sky."

Five people were aboard, three men and two women, though some accounts count six. Two of the men worked at the NACA Ames Aeronautical Laboratory at Moffett Field, California. Gilbert Rivera was a draftsman. Don Heaphy was a mechanic on the supersonic wind tunnel. With them were Roy McBeth, his wife, and a woman the files suggest was Elizabeth McBeth.

The object came from the east. At first it looked "circular and standing on edge." Rivera said it appeared "round and shiny, something like a 50-cent piece." Through 8× Navy binoculars, it took shape. Heaphy described a "pancake-like shape, somewhat thicker in the center than the edges, perfectly flat on the bottom with a small fin." It looked like aluminum or some other shiny metal, yet through the glasses there was no glare. The trailing edge seemed "somewhat wrinkled and dirty looking."

No wings. No lights. No propeller, no antenna, no exhaust. No sound. Estimates put it 25 to 35 feet across and about 5000 feet up. At its closest it seemed the size of a C-47.

Then it moved. Rivera said it "made a turn on its vertical axis with no tilting or banking and started to move in a southeasterly direction." It picked up speed. When it vanished, about 90 seconds later, it was "travelling as fast or faster than a jet plane." The whole event lasted two and a half to three minutes.

They did not call the newspapers. About three weeks later they went to the security office at Moffett Field. Signed statements followed, dated August 2, 1949. AFOSI agents interviewed Heaphy, Rivera and McBeth. Both NACA men held security clearances.

Project Grudge filed the case twice, once as "Other (kites)" and once as "Aircraft." The record card was blunt: "No data presented to indicate object could have NOT been an aircraft. Conclusion: AIRCRAFT." The Air Force also suggested a radar testing "kite" from Treasure Island, in the San Francisco Bay area, might have blown north to Gold Beach.

Researcher Mike Swords later argued that Air Force Director of Intelligence Charles Cabell treated the case as a real unknown. In 1955 the Battelle Memorial Institute study, published as Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14, listed it as Case 10 among its unknowns, with witness sketches. NICAP says Battelle ranked it the best of twelve cases that resisted explanation.

Bruce Maccabee rejected the kite. Upper winds that day blew from the west and northwest, never above 50 mph, and kites "are not pancake-shaped." A kite would have kept descending, not hovered and sped away. Researcher Joel Carpenter suggested a blimp in 2001, then dropped the idea after reading the report. It resurfaced in 2009 on the James Randi Educational Foundation website. Maccabee called it "at best, unconvincing and more likely just plain wrong," pointing to the single fin, the missing gondola and a departure far faster than any blimp.

Maccabee concluded it "could only have been an observation of the 'real thing'," calling it "one of the most credible and most detailed visual-only UFO sightings that has ever occurred." A 2025 paper by Kevin H. Knuth and colleagues revisited it. Portland Monthly compared it with the 1950 McMinnville photographs.