It’s a bird, it’s a plane, no it’s … decades-old reports of UFOs on Catalina Island!
The most famous of Southern California’s Channel Islands is the site of several newly released — yet unverified — reports of unidentified flying objects compiled by the U.S. government, according to a review of the latest tranche of records from the Trump administration.
Of the 28 files about unidentified anomalous phenomena released Friday, four of them detail bizarre sightings from Catalina during the 1940s and 1950s, including one of “flying saucers” spotted by three Boy Scouts.
The records are the seventh tranche released by the U.S. Department of Defense as part of an effort by the Trump administration to allow Americans to “make up their own minds about the information contained in these files,” according to a prior statement from the Pentagon.
The Pentagon has been working on declassifying documents related to UFOs for years, and Congress created an office in 2022 for that purpose. Its 2024 debut report revealed hundreds of previously unknown UAP incidents, but found no evidence that the U.S. government had ever confirmed a sighting of alien technology.
Still, there’s been increased interest in such reports, especially from online sleuths and conspiracy theorists who believe the government has been covering up evidence of extraterrestrial life, particularly at the notorious Nevada military site, Area 51.
The reports out of Catalina began about two years after the infamous crash in Roswell, N.M., where the government maintains it recovered a weather balloon, but skeptics say it was a UFO.
The first report came from a man named Percy Wackey (that last name was spellchecked several times) who lived in Avalon. He wrote in a May 1949 letter that his wife and another unnamed individual “reported observing six objects over Catalina Island on the night of April 28, 1949,” according to the files released Friday. But a handwritten annotation said that the U.S. Air Force determined the letter “lacked sufficient data for evaluation.”
Then, in June 1952, three Boy Scouts at Camp Fox reported seeing silver “flying saucers” that appeared to be moving “faster than a conventional jet” while on a hike on the island, the new records showed. The scouts said the object climbed quickly before appearing to disintegrate.
The report, taken by an Air Force colonel a few months after the sighting, noted that the experience of the observers was “meager at best,” and said no attempt was made to establish the reliability of the report.
About a year later, another report detailed someone seeing a “round, purplish-white object” over Catalina on Nov. 16, 1953. The report said the object was seen “remaining stationary, then moving northwest toward Los Angeles over approximately 10 minutes.”
And while the report said the unnamed person making the report was “fairly reliable” due to his association with “military jet aircraft activities,” local astronomers said that Jupiter could possibly explain the sighting.
Then finally, in 1955, Paul J. Carr of Avalon “reported observing a bright orange object, approximately the size of a nickle [sic] held at arm’s length” for about two seconds, on the night of March 15. The report taken by a unidentified officer said the “sighting is possibly astronomical” and did not warrant further investigation.
The four reports are the only that occurred on Catalina of the 478 files released thus far.
The Associated Press contributed to this article.
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