- Read the folder. All nineteen pages of the Blue Book folder for Incident 88 were viewed from the archive.org scan of NARA T1206 [@usaf1947incident88]. Five pages concern Hackensack (card, two-page check-list, Hynek's note, Hynek's index extract); ten are Wildwood correspondence of April to November 1948; four are the AMC letter of 25 August 1947 on the Danforth specimens with its photograph.\n\n2. Find the witnesses' own words. The FBI teletype of 4 August 1947 and the Newark letter of 13 August are in file 62-HQ-83894 [@fbi1947teletype] [@fbi1947newark]. The interviews give times of 7:30, 7:45 and 8:00 pm, a northward course, 15 seconds to a minute in sight, sizes of 'six inches' at distance to three feet, and a neighbour who saw nothing.\n\n3. Compare with the Air Force check-list. The unredacted Sign check-list for 88, released in May 2026, names Casella and Truex and repeats the teletype; every field the interviews could have filled is N/S [@usaaf1948checklists]. The machine transcription in the public mirror labels the page 'Incident # 55'; its position between 87 and 89 and the Blue Book copy show it is 88.\n\n4. Trace the intruding pages. The Wildwood correspondent's own case is Incident 50, a 74-page folder with the Faulk and Loedding interview of February 1948, the film examination and the Coast Guard report of 7 April 1948 recommending closure, which AMC accepted [@usaf1948incident50]. The check-list names her as 'Mrs. Ethel Evans', 'authority on knitting', matching Shaw's identification and a 1948 Macmillan knitting book [@usaaf1948checklists] [@evans1948knitting] [@shaw2022incident88]. The Danforth folder holds the dated original of the AMC letter and a record card concluding 'Hoax' [@usaf1947danforth]. Personal details about the Wildwood family in the Coast Guard report were read but are not reproduced here.\n\n5. Test the balloon. Teterboro's hourly record gives a light south-westerly, 225 degrees at 2.6 m/s, and a clear sky at 7 and 8 pm; sunset was at 8:15 pm with the sun in the west-north-west [@noaa1947teterboro]. The landmark course bears 4 degrees, 41 degrees left of downwind. A 0.3 m balloon at 60 m has the angular size the witnesses' estimates imply and crosses the sky at about 3.8 degrees a second.\n\n::: figure 1\n\n::: figure 2\n\n6. Review the literature. Hynek's 1949 rating, Shaw's 2022 article and the 2023 podcast are the only treatments found [@grudge1949report] [@shaw2022incident88] [@sits2023incident88]. Neither of the latter uses the FBI interviews or the Incident 50 folder.
Figure 1
The wind settled into a light south-westerly before the sighting and held through it
Teterboro Airport hourly wind speed, 3 August 1947, local time (EDT); direction 180-225 degrees throughout
wind speed
Drawn by the site
Figure 2
A small balloon 60 m away looks the size the witnesses described and crosses the sky three times faster
Angular size (degrees) and drift rate (degrees per second) in a 3.9 m/s wind
angular sizedrift rate
Drawn by the site