UAP Case Archive

Shapes / Cylinders

Cylinders

Tubes, cans and barrels with blunt ends and no windows. They are kept apart from cigars, which taper like airships. Aircrew and ship crews report most of them, and the shape is the one most often compared to a weapon.

    Lake Michigan, 1994: chrome cylinders with colored lights over the water. Drawing for reference only.
    Each cylinder is one case, colored by status. Select one to open it below.

    Start with Lake Michigan.

    A night of 911 calls, a police officer on the radio and a weather radar operator tracking echoes over the lake, all caught on recordings.

    On the evening of March 8, 1994, Ottawa County dispatch in western Michigan took a flood of calls about colored lights over Lake Michigan, from Grand Haven and Holland south toward South Haven and Benton Harbor. Some callers described chrome-like cylinders. Others described circles.

    Holland police officer Jeff Velthouse relayed reports of five or six objects, some cylindrical, with blue, red, white and green lights. A dispatcher asked Jack Bushong, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service office in Muskegon, to check his radar. Switching to manual mode, he tracked several echoes over the lake while Velthouse described movements from the ground, a moment preserved on the recorded calls.

    Holly Graves, who watched with her family, later described a chrome cylinder in an interview used by Unsolved Mysteries.

    What the recordings do and do not show

    • On recordThe 911 calls and the radar operator's running commentary were recorded that night.
    • DisputedWeather Service managers later said the radar echoes were unrelated to what people saw.
    • ProposedChaff or other reflective material dropped by military aircraft.
    • OpenNo explanation has been accepted.

    What the record shows.

    Thirteen cases from 1950 to 2021. These patterns run through them.

    Aircrew and ship crews dominate.

    A B-29 navigator over Korea, two F-94 crews over Pennsylvania, the master and mates of a merchant ship, and an American Airlines crew account for four of the strongest cases.

    Low and slow over water keeps recurring.

    The Marcala cylinder churned along 50 to 100 feet above the Atlantic. The Sandy Point barrel hung a pole into the water at walking speed. The Lake Erie cylinder skimmed the surface.

    It is the shape most often compared to a weapon.

    "Cruise missile type of thing" in 2021. Tail fins at Portsmouth in 1951. A cylinder with twin tails at McClellan the same year. The comparison reflects what witnesses had seen before, not proof of a weapon.

    Size estimates swing wildly.

    From about two feet in Iceland in 1954 to 200 feet at McClellan in 1951. A tube with no wings or windows gives the eye nothing to judge distance by.

    The Air Force files hold most of them.

    Eleven of the thirteen are short Project Blue Book summaries of cases the Air Force could not explain.

    Often told wrong.

    Two famous cylinder cases are often told differently from the record.

    The story you may have heardWhat the record shows
    An American Airlines pilot reported a UFO in 2021.
    He asked controllers whether they had any traffic near him and compared the object to a cruise missile. The FAA said its radar showed nothing.
    A single cylinder hovered over Lake Michigan in 1994.
    Officer Velthouse relayed reports of five or six objects, some cylindrical and some circular, and the radar operator tracked separate echoes.
    The National Weather Service confirmed UFOs over Lake Michigan.
    Its meteorologist tracked unexplained echoes. The service's managers later said they did not match what people saw.

    All cylinder cases.

    Listed oldest first. Each card notes what kind of evidence the case rests on.

      Cylinder or cigar?

      A cigar tapers or rounds off at the ends, like an airship. A cylinder has blunt or flat ends, no taper, and usually no windows: a tube, a can or a barrel.

      That one line explains why Chiles-Whitted, with its lit windows and pointed body, is on the Cigars page while the stacked cylinders over Altoona are here. Where a witness's words could go either way, the case says so.

      cigar: tapered endscylinder: blunt ends Same length, different ends, different page.

      Left off this page.

      These are often called cylinders, but are filed elsewhere.

      • Chiles-Whitted, Coyne and ValentichCigars, on that page.
      • Los Alamos, 1950A "cylinder with tapered ends," which makes it a cigar by this page's rule.
      • Gemini 4's "beer can" and Voskhod 2Astronaut accounts, filed on the Cigars page.
      • Colares, Brazil, 1977Box-like and cylindrical lights, not yet checked against the sources.