New Haven, Connecticut: Small fireball rips a foot-wide hole through a metal billboard

At 9:00 p.m., a small, fast-moving, ricocheting fireball ripped a foot-wide hole through a metal billboard at Middlestone Avenue and Front Street in East New Haven, Connecticut. During an investigation by Naval Ordnance personnel, IFSB investigator August C. Roberts and Joseph Barbieri took a piece of the sign. IFSB sent the sample to Col. Robert B. Emerson, an Army physicist at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, who asked friends at Oak Ridge Laboratory to analyze it, but nothing more was heard of this sample. APRO arranged a separate analysis of deposits on the sign by Anderson Laboratories in Milwaukee and the Chicago Spectrographic Service Laboratory, which found that the fragments consisted of copper and copper oxide and were not meteoritic. Michael D. Swords suggests that Roberts's retrieval of the fragments would have attracted the attention of federal officials. The account follows the entry in George M. Eberhart's chronology UFOs and Intelligence (CUFOS) and the sources cited there; it is not an independent determination by From Beyond Space.