Newly released Pentagon files show that Santa Catalina Island, a popular tourist spot about 22 miles off the coast of Southern California, was the site of several reported UFO sightings in the 1940s and 1950s.
The Department of Defense (DOD) published 28 files regarding unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) on Oct. 23.
Four of those documents detail reports on Catalina Island, per the Los Angeles Times.
The files were released as part of a federal effort that began in May to make government records about UFOs available to the public. The Pentagon has now put out 478 files across seven releases as part of this ongoing effort.
Eyewitness claims versus skepticism
The earliest Catalina report came in May 1949 from Percy Wackey, who lived in Avalon, the island’s only city. In his letter to Kenneth Arnold, the pilot whose 1947 sighting coined the term ‘flying saucer,’ Wackey claimed that his wife and a local school teacher spotted six objects over the island on April 28 of that year. Air Force officials, however, noted that the secondhand report ‘lacked sufficient data’ to evaluate.
Three years later, in August 1952, three Boy Scouts reported seeing silver “flying saucers” moving faster than a jet. The following year, in November 1953, Air Force clerk Robert J. Currie said he watched a “purplish-white” object hover over the island before heading toward Los Angeles, about 50 miles away.
The last report came from Avalon in March 1955. A man named Paul J. Carr said he saw a bright orange object “the size of a nickel held at arm’s length” drop “straight down” toward the island.
Bill Diamond, president and CEO of non-profit research organization SETI Institute (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), told CBS News that while life likely exists elsewhere in the universe, most UFO reports from that era, and these Catalina accounts in particular, warrant some skepticism. “It’s hard to imagine coming all this way and then flying by for a couple of hours and then leaving,” Diamond noted.
The SETI CEO also pointed out that the reports came from a time when science fiction and space travel had captured the public’s imagination. “There are more pictures of UFOs from that period than there are now, and we have literally billions of very capable high-resolution cameras in the hands of people all over the world,” Diamond explained.
Sources: Department of War, PURSUE UAP File Release, SETI Institute (X), People