CaseCylinder1944

North Tampa, FL, USA

A witness reported a black, cylindrical object appearing above P-38 fighter planes during a training exercise near North Tampa, Florida, observed for three to four minutes in July 1944.

Report quality: Moderate49/100

This score reflects report-quality signals on file — how complete, corroborated, and precisely located the report is — not a claim about whether the sighting was a real craft.

  • Duration parsed: 240s, a plausible sighting length
  • Detailed witness text (185 characters)
  • Location could not be geocoded
  • No other reports from this city within 3 days
When
1944-07-15
Where
North Tampa, FL, USA
Shape
Cylinder
Duration
3 or 4 minutes
Geo
Slug
cylinder-over-north-tampa-fl-1944-b2d91c
Wave

Part of a wave

  • Historical wave1944–1945

    The Foo Fighters

    European and Pacific theaters of WWII

    Allied (and, files later showed, Axis) aircrews reported glowing balls of light pacing their aircraft through evasive maneuvers. Each side suspected the other's secret weapon. The name came from the Smokey Stover comic…

In context

  • North Tampa, FL shows up 1 times across the archive.
  • 1 reports came from Florida in 1944.
  • In the 1940s, 3.9% of reports described a cylinder — the all-time rate is 1.6%.

Report

Full narrative lands with dossier import for famous cases, or the NUFORC free-text summary above for standard reports. This shell is SSR-ready: one D1 row (including connections_json) per page.