341 110677 Numerical File, 5-2500

This Air Intelligence Information Report was written on 14 October 1955 by Lt. Col. Thomas S. Ryan, the U.S. air attaché in Prague, Czechoslovakia. Three American travelers had passed through Prague on 12 and 13 October after a trip through the Soviet Union, and one of them, Lt. Col. E. U. Hathaway, gave the attaché an account of what they had seen in the Trans-Caucasus. It is the Air Force side of the same sighting the CIA recorded in CIA-UAP-006 and CIA-UAP-D020.

What the report says

According to the summary, the three observers were firmly convinced they had seen genuine flying discs. Two sightings occurred at 1910 hours on 4 October 1955, about ten minutes after the train left a station on the line. The first disc climbed almost vertically at fairly slow speed, its outer surface turning slowly to the right, to about 6,000 feet, then sped up sharply heading north. A second disc did the same about a minute later. The takeoff area was one to two miles south of the line, where two searchlight beams pointed almost straight up.

The attaché called the report’s significance for the Air Force’s UFO project “remarkable,” saying it lent credence to many saucer reports. The source is rated B-2, roughly “usually reliable, probably true.”

A different conclusion elsewhere

The CIA, debriefing the same party, was more cautious and judged steeply climbing aircraft or missiles the likelier explanation (CIA-UAP-D021). The two reports show how much the reading of a sighting could depend on who wrote it up.