Los Alamos green fireball sightings

A January 31, 1949 memo from the FBI's San Antonio office to the Director said Army, Navy, Air Force and FBI intelligence officers in the Fourth Army Area had discussed "Unidentified Aerial Phenomena" at weekly conferences. It said sightings were made near Los Alamos on December 5, 6, 7, 8, 11, 13, 14, 20 and 26, 1948, by OSI agents, airline and military pilots, security inspectors and private citizens, and that another object was sighted on January 6, 1949. The memo named Dr. Lincoln La Paz as generally in charge of the observations and said little concrete information had been obtained.

The second page of the memo described night sightings as lights usually described as brilliant green. It gave an estimated speed of three to twelve miles per second and a height of six to ten miles. It said no debris had been found and that nine scientific reasons indicated the phenomena were not meteorites. The conclusions reached were that they were either unobserved natural phenomena or man made.

A second San Antonio memo, dated March 22, 1949, said G-2, 4th Army reported a conference at Los Alamos on February 16, 1949 on the "Green fire ball phenomena". Investigation had become the primary responsibility of the Air Force Air Materiel Command, and such matters were now handled under the name "Project Grudge". La Paz described his own sighting, the "Starvation peak incident", as lasting about two seconds, with yellow green color and no noise. He listed these as reasons it could not be classed as a normal meteorite fall.

The same memo said there had been more than ten similar incidents since December 5, 1948, and about twenty others with minor deviations, confined to a Los Alamos, Las Vegas and West Texas triangle. On February 14, 1949, higher military authorities were said to believe a natural explanation would ultimately be found. The memo also said the phenomena might be connected with secret experiments by a U.S. Government agency. Flares seen near Camp Hood, Texas, on March 6 and 7, 1949, were concluded to be probably similar.

A Department of Energy file holds a handwritten letter dated 11-23-70 to James Tuck from a redacted sender. The writer said green lights were seen at Los Alamos from 1948 through 1951, usually between nine and eleven at night in the Jemez Mountains. The writer also recalled five objects flying in formation over Los Alamos in the afternoon and pointed to Protective Force logs for dates and times.