The Wildwood woman who mailed the Air Force flying-saucer film (1947–48)

Letters inside somebody else’s case file

The Air Force’s early UFO files group a set of records under “Incident 88,” a case that began as a report of a flying disc seen at Hackensack, New Jersey, on August 3, 1947. According to a 2022 review of the file by The Debrief, only the first few records concern Hackensack. Most of the rest are letters between the Air Force and a woman in Wildwood who was reporting flying saucers over that stretch of coast. Her name is blacked out in nearly every document. In one place it survives as “Mrs. Evans.”

Researchers working with the Center for UFO Studies found unredacted copies. The correspondent was Ethel Rodman, who wrote under the name Ethel Evans as the author of several knitting and crochet books. Her brother, E. Ray Goetz, was a film producer married to the stage star Irene Bordoni, and the composer Irving Berlin was her brother-in-law. She died at Atlantic City Hospital on July 28, 1950. The Debrief also found that obituaries calling her the granddaughter of a Buffalo mayor were wrong: she was the great-niece of Mayor Philip Becker.

Film rolls and a year of replies

Rodman wrote that she had seen saucers from her own yard, that her son had seen them too, and that others in the area had reported the same thing and could be identified. She sent the Air Force rolls of film she said documented what she saw. Wright-Patterson wrote back repeatedly, thanking her for her patriotism, assuring her the reports were taken seriously, and asking her to send anything further. This exchange ran until nearly the end of 1948. She also mentioned being visited by military officials and keeping an appointment at the FBI’s Philadelphia office in April 1948. The file stops without saying what the film showed or reaching any conclusion.

A claim the local press does not seem to have covered

What makes the Wildwood letters unusual is their absence everywhere else. The Debrief reports that a search of southern New Jersey and Philadelphia newspapers from the period turned up no articles about saucer sightings around Wildwood, and that Freedom of Information requests to the Air Force and the FBI produced nothing further. This was during the months after Kenneth Arnold’s 1947 sighting, when saucer reports were filling papers nationally. The claim survives inside a federal file and in later research, not in a dated news report. It is recorded here as a report, with that limit stated.