Incident 88: the Hackensack disc, 3 August 1947

The only accounts are the three FBI interviews, made eight to ten days after the event, and they disagree on almost every detail⁠[1]. Casella put the time at about 7:45 pm and described a round, black object thirty to forty inches across, which he could not say was a globe or a disc. Truex's girlfriend put it at about 7:30 and called it round, silver-blue and apparently revolving, in view for about a minute; from where she stood, she said, it could not have looked more than six inches across. Truex put it at 8:00 pm and gave two to three feet across, 15 to 20 seconds in sight, no colour, and a shape 'more like a large, flat child's cup than anything else', oval on top and pointed below; he said he first took it for a child's balloon but saw no wind and no string⁠[1].

Two of Casella's details were not borne out. He said Truex's girlfriend had remarked that it looked like a bird on the horizon; she did not recall saying so. He said a man on a porch across the street had seen it and pointed it out; the girlfriend saw no one pointing, and the neighbour on that porch said she and her mother had seen nothing and that no man had been there⁠[1]. Truex was seventeen, born in April 1930, and had enlisted in May 1947; the teletype gives one witness's age as twenty, and the Air Force card records the source as 'Army EM', an enlisted man⁠[1]⁠[2]⁠[4].

What all three agree on is a single small, round object, moving steadily and fairly fast in a straight line toward the north, silent and with no exhaust, seen against a clear evening sky for between a quarter of a minute and a minute⁠[1].

The Air Force record is the folder for Incident 88 in the Blue Book microfilm, nineteen sanitized pages⁠[4]. Five concern Hackensack: an index card on Temporary ATIC Form 329, a form dated 2 January 1952, made when the early files were catalogued; the two-page check-list; Hynek's one-paragraph note; and an extract of his evaluations from the Grudge report's incident index⁠[4]. Hynek's note reads, in full: 'It seems clear that no astronomical interpretation can be given to this incident. Information is so meager that little else can be said. If the object observed was only 200 yards away, it would seem that witnesses could have furnished much more detailed information'⁠[4]. The index places 88 under 'Non-astronomical, with no explanation evident: a. Lack of evidence precludes explanation'⁠[5].

The FBI record is fuller than the Air Force's. The Newark teletype of 4 August, recorded as serial 62-83894-49, and the Newark letter of 13 August with the four interviews are in the Bureau's flying-disc file, released through the National Archives and again in PURSUE Release 01⁠[2]⁠[1]. The Air Force check-list repeats the teletype almost word for word and contains nothing from the interviews: no direction, duration, size, colour or shape, all of which the interviews give⁠[3]⁠[1]. Nothing in the Blue Book folder shows that the Air Force received the 13 August letter.

The weather is on record. Teterboro airport, three kilometres south, reported a clear sky with no ceiling, visibility of 14 km, and a light wind from the south-west, 225 degrees at 2.6 m/s, at 7 pm and 8 pm that evening; the Sun set at 8:15 pm⁠[9].

The other fourteen pages of the folder belong to two other cases, described below. Unredacted copies of the check-lists, naming the witnesses, were published by the Department of War on 8 May 2026⁠[3].

For the object, three readings have been offered or are open.

A small balloon is the reading Truex himself reached first and then rejected because he felt no wind and saw no string⁠[1]. The weather record allows it: at 7 and 8 pm Teterboro had a light, steady south-westerly, and an object carried on it would cross the sky at a steady rate in a straight line, silently and with no exhaust, as all three witnesses described⁠[9]⁠[1]. The witnesses' estimates of size and distance cannot both be checked; an object of 0.8 m at 200 yards and a toy balloon of 0.3 m at 60 m look the same size, about a quarter of a degree, and the nearer balloon, drifting with the wind, would cross the sky three times faster, enough to make people turn their heads. A balloon lit by a sun only a few degrees above the west-north-west horizon could look silver from one side and dark from another, and turning on its string or neck could look like revolving. Against it, the reported course runs almost due north, 41 degrees left of the downwind direction, and two witnesses, who had first thought of a balloon, judged it too fast for one; neither objection is strong, since the course was reconstructed from street landmarks days later and the wind at 200 yards can differ from the wind at the airport. Session 1 sets out the calculation.

A bird, catching the low sun, is the reading Casella attributed to Truex's girlfriend, who did not recall saying it⁠[1]. A bird usually shows wingbeats and changes of course, which no witness described.

An unidentified craft is the reading the 1947 teletype implies and the one Hynek left open: on the Air Force's information there was nothing to explain it with⁠[2]⁠[5]. No physical trace, photograph or second sighting exists, and the police received no other report⁠[1].

For the folder, the evidence points to misfiling rather than a hidden link. Each of the intruding cases has its own folder with the originals; the Wildwood letters in 88 run from April to November 1948, after her own case was closed, and the Danforth letter is a copy of one in the Danforth folder⁠[7]⁠[11]⁠[4]. Nothing in any of the three files mentions the others. Shaw's suggestion that they were filed together because two are from New Jersey is possible; so is a simple clerical slip when Project Sign's papers were sorted into numbered incidents, or when the files were re-carded in 1952⁠[6]⁠[4].

The literature on Incident 88 is thin. Hynek's 1949 evaluation is the only official judgement of the sighting⁠[5]. The case is not on Blue Book's list of unidentified cases and is not among the 1947 reports usually discussed. Jazz Shaw's article of May 2022 in The Debrief is the only study of the folder: it describes the three groups of papers, identifies the Wildwood correspondent from unredacted copies obtained through the Center for UFO Studies, reports that newspapers of southern New Jersey and Philadelphia carry no Wildwood saucer reports for 1947 and 1948, and records FOIA requests to the Air Force and the FBI that had produced nothing⁠[6]. Shaw discussed the case on the Somewhere in the Skies podcast in February 2023, including his search for one of the witnesses; the episode was re-released in November 2026⁠[12]. Neither the article nor the podcast uses the FBI's 13 August interviews or the Incident 50 folder, which answer two of the questions they raise⁠[1]⁠[7].

For the sighting: an upper-air wind observation for the New York area on the evening of 3 August 1947 (a pilot-balloon run from Newark or LaGuardia at about 0000 UTC on 4 August) would show which way a balloon at 200 yards would have drifted, and so whether the 41-degree gap between the reported course and the surface wind is real. The Hackensack newspaper, The Bergen Evening Record, for 4 and 5 August 1947 may carry the police report and any other calls. Short of a photograph that does not exist, nothing will identify the object beyond 'probably a small balloon' or 'unknown'.

For the file: the Air Force's own copy of the FBI's 13 August letter, if one exists in the Project Sign records at the National Archives, would show whether the interviews ever reached Wright Field. The outcome of Shaw's FOIA requests, and the unsanitized originals of the Incident 50 folder, would complete the Wildwood story.