USS Franklin D. Roosevelt sighting (1958)

USS Franklin D. Roosevelt sighting (1958)

Date	October 1958
Topics	Nuclear & missile sites (topic), Military encounters (topic)
People	Chester Grusinski
Testimony	Shellenberger testimony, p. 62
Year	1958 in UFO history
Timeline	1958 on the UAP Timeline
Sources	7

The USS Franklin D. Roosevelt sighting is a report by Chester Grusinski, who served aboard the U.S. Navy aircraft carrier USS Franklin D. Roosevelt (CVA-42) from 1958 to 1960. He said that one night in the autumn of 1958, near Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, he and other crewmen watched a glowing, cigar-shaped object come close to the ship. He said he saw figures inside it that did not look human.^[1][2] Grusinski spent decades trying to prove what he had seen. He wrote to former shipmates, researchers and government agencies, collected accounts of other sightings linked to the carrier, and in 1995 gave his papers to East Carolina University.^[1] No Navy record of the event has been found. NICAP's case file notes that searches of the ship's logs turned up no UFO reports, and that Freedom of Information Act requests drew only negative replies.^[2]

The ship

The Wikipedia account of USS Franklin D. Roosevelt gives the following background on the carrier.^[6]

• Class and nicknames. She was the second of three Midway-class carriers. Commissioned on Navy Day, 27 October 1945, she was the first U.S. carrier named after a president. Crews called her "Swanky Franky", "Foo-De-Roo" or "Rosie".
• Nuclear weapons. In 1950 she became the first carrier to take nuclear weapons to sea.
• Operation Mainbrace. In September and October 1952 she took part in Operation Mainbrace, the first major NATO exercise in the North Atlantic. She was reclassified CVA-42 on 1 October 1952.
• Rebuilding. Between 1954 and 1956 she was rebuilt with an angled flight deck, steam catapults and an enclosed hurricane bow, and was recommissioned on 6 April 1956. Her new home port was Mayport, Florida. From July 1957 she made the first of three consecutive Sixth Fleet deployments to the Mediterranean.
• Late 1958. Her remaining 3-inch guns were removed during a mid-1958 overhaul. On 24 October 1958 she supported USS Kleinsmith in evacuating 56 U.S. citizens and three foreign nationals, as the Cuban Revolution reached its climax. The Wikipedia account says the evacuation was "from Nicaragua and Cuba". NICAP's file, quoting another ship history, gives the place as Nicaro, Cuba.^[2][6]
• End. She was decommissioned on 30 September 1977, towed to Kearny, New Jersey, and scrapped in 1978.

The sighting

Grusinski's account survives mainly through clippings and interview extracts collected by the researcher Carl Feindt and published in NICAP's case file. NICAP dates the event to about October 1958, in the Caribbean near Cuba.^[2] The sources give the following details.

• Where and when. In a Michigan MUFON newsletter interview, Grusinski placed it "around September or October", during a shakedown cruise near "Gitmo" (Guantánamo Bay). It was dark, and he was below decks.^[2] He was 18 at the time.^[2]
• Going topside. He told the Broad Top Bulletin of Saxton, Pennsylvania, that he was told to go up to see "something strange". In the MUFON interview he said one group of men came running up from the engine room, then a second group a few minutes later, and he followed them.^[2]
• The object. A small light had been following the ship. It then came straight at them, growing bigger and brighter. He first described it as "a bright white ball of light", spherical and about 75 to 100 feet long. On the copy he sent Feindt he wrote "cigar shape" in the margin. It turned red-orange, and he said he could feel the heat on his face.^[2] The Macomb Daily in 1997 quoted him as saying it looked "cigar-shaped" as it came closer, and that it floated in mid-air for several minutes.^[2]
• The watch. Meanwhile, the man on watch was shouting into the intercom for an officer to come up on deck.^[2]
• The figures. He said he could see the silhouettes of figures looking at them. They had no features, and "you could tell they weren't human".^[2]
• The end. In the Broad Top Bulletin account, the bottom of the object turned cherry red and it "vanished in a flash".^[2]
• Drawing. His papers at East Carolina University include his own drawing of the sighting.^[1] NICAP's file shows an illustrative sketch by William Scott, which Feindt received from Grusinski.^[2]

Michael Shellenberger's UFO timeline, submitted to the House Oversight Committee in 2024, summarises the account in similar terms. It describes an orange, cigar-shaped object, silhouettes seen through windows, and an object that turned red and "vanished".^[7]

Aftermath aboard ship

Grusinski described what he saw as a cover-up after the sighting.^[2][7]

• Transfers. Soon afterwards, he said, crew members who talked about the incident were transferred.
• A "gambling problem". The CIA then came aboard to investigate what was called a "gambling problem". "It was a massive coverup," he said. "There was no gambling."
• The logs. He said he obtained a copy of the ship's deck logs for 1958–59, and that much of it had been blacked out. He and other researchers had searched the logs and used Freedom of Information Act requests going back to 1980.

The evidence for the CIA visit and the transfers, as reproduced in the sources, is Grusinski's own statement.

Grusinski's research

The finding aid for Grusinski's papers says they document his "attempts to prove what he saw" and to verify other sightings.^[1] The Broad Top Bulletin profile and other clippings describe how the search unfolded.^[2]

• First contact. Around 1977–78 he read that a citizens' group in New York had hired a law firm to press the CIA and the government to release UFO records. He wrote to the group about his sighting, and it tried, with little success, to get information for him.
• The Mainbrace photographs. He learned that other researchers had found a sighting from the same carrier during Operation Mainbrace, in which three photographs were taken of a flying disc. His papers include colour copies of slides from that sighting.^[1][2]
• Finding shipmates. He visited libraries and placed advertisements in Naval Affairs and other military magazines. In 1988 he learned from DAV Magazine of a reunion of the carrier's crew. The reunion, he said, linked 8 to 10 separate UFO sightings to the ship, and he found several witnesses. (In the MUFON interview he first said "about six", and the copy was later amended to "8–10".)
• Correspondence. His papers include letters, dating from 1966 and 1978 to 1994, with former officers and crew of the carrier, other UFO researchers and government agencies. Some shipmates described their own experiences with UFOs and the carrier. Others denied any knowledge of such incidents.^[1]
• Public appearances. His story appeared in UFO Magazine, after which the television series Sightings contacted him. The programme also interviewed a gunnery officer who had witnessed the 1952 sightings, a man Grusinski had found through the reunion. Grusinski thought the broadcast was very good.^[2] The Macomb Daily said he appeared on Sightings in 1995 and had written a screenplay about his experience. The New York Post covered his story on 17 November 1996.^[2]
• His aim. According to the Broad Top Bulletin, he wanted the government to admit to a deliberate cover-up of UFO reports, and believed the public deserved an explanation. The writer noted that many had doubted his story, but that his determination showed through.^[2]

Other sightings linked to the carrier

Grusinski collected accounts of several other incidents. The sources give the following.

• Off Rio de Janeiro, 26 July 1956. Grusinski said two disc-shaped objects hung in the air, one above the other, each with two rows of counter-rotating lights. The upper disc released a fireball that dropped into the top of the lower one, and within seconds both left at tremendous speed. He named the witness as Leon Treadwell, Petty Officer Third Class. He said the witnesses were told to keep quiet, and that Treadwell had to sign papers promising to tell no one for 20 years.^[2]
• 25 or 27 July 1956. In the same period, he said, a cigar-shaped object was seen and tracked on radar. The combat information centre radars showed it leaving the scope within two or three sweeps. He named the witness as Chief Warrant Officer John C. Hau.^[2]
• A Guantánamo shakedown, early 1950s. John S. Lawrence served aboard from autumn 1950 until May 1953, maintaining the ship's two Mark 25 gunfire-control radars. In an undated letter to Grusinski, he described a night when the carrier was anchored in Guantánamo Bay on a shakedown cruise, straight after leaving the shipyard at Portsmouth. Shipmates called him out to see an object like a very bright star. It moved erratically, accelerating "VERY rapidly", stopping, and accelerating again, not in a straight line, until they lost it in the light of the rising moon. He was still not sure what they had seen. He thought they had mentioned it to their electronics officer, but to his knowledge no official report was filed. He did not remember the month or year.^[2]
• Off Sardinia, 1963. A 2000 Broad Top Bulletin article, summarised by the Real TV UFOs blog, covered the Grusinski case alongside a 1963 incident off Sardinia witnessed by Harry A. Jordan. From 1961 to December 1965 Jordan served in the operations intelligence division of the destroyer escort USS Laffey, the destroyer USS Loeser and the Franklin D. Roosevelt. There he displayed, analysed and recorded radar, radio and electronic-emission data, after training at the Naval Station in Newport, Rhode Island.^[4] The blog's summary does not describe what he saw.

The nuclear link. Grusinski had his own explanation for why so many sightings were linked to the ship. He said it was the first U.S. carrier to carry nuclear weapons and, at the time, the only one to carry the hydrogen bomb, and that UFO sightings were common around military sites storing nuclear weapons, especially NATO sites.^[2] Shellenberger's timeline repeats this point.^[7] The Wikipedia account confirms that the carrier was the first to take nuclear weapons to sea, in 1950. The claim about the hydrogen bomb is not covered in the sources read here beyond Grusinski's own statement.^[6]

The papers

On 13 December 1995 Grusinski, then of Clinton Township, Michigan, donated his papers to the U.S. Navy Memorial Foundation Collection at East Carolina University's Joyner Library. The finding aid describes the following.^[1]

• Size. 52 pages of material about UFO sightings by the carrier's crew.
• Contents. Correspondence, the MUFON newsletter interview, articles about his research and other interviews, and colour copies of slides from the Operation Mainbrace sighting. There is also a colour photocopy of the ship, various articles on UFO experiences, his drawing of the 1958 sighting, and biographies of Captain Ralph L. Shifley and Commander Charles L. Burbage, described as the carrier's commanding officers in 1958.
• Rights. Literary rights stay with the authors or their descendants. The finding aid itself is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 licence.

Assessment

The case rests almost entirely on Grusinski's testimony and on later accounts he collected. His own correspondence shows that shipmates' memories were mixed: some described UFO experiences, others denied knowing of any incident.^[1] NICAP's file records no entry in either of the UFOCAT catalogue lists, and summarises the search for records as negative. The ship's logs had been searched with no UFO reports found, and FOIA requests to various agencies all received negative answers.^[2] Grusinski, for his part, said the incidents had been removed from the logs, and that the 1958–59 deck logs he obtained were heavily redacted.^[2]

There are small inconsistencies in the dates. The Broad Top Bulletin profile, dated 1 December 1999, describes Grusinski as "now 56" while giving his age in 1958 as 18. That suggests the interview behind it was older than the article.^[2] The Real TV UFOs blog dates the Broad Top Bulletin article it summarises to 26 December 2000. That appears to be a separate article, since it also covers Jordan's 1963 report.^[4]

Notes on the earlier version

• Size of the collection. The earlier version said Grusinski donated "52 items". The East Carolina University finding aid describes the collection as 52 pages.^[1]
• How the object left. The earlier version said the object "then left at great speed". In the account quoted by NICAP, its bottom turned cherry red and it "vanished in a flash".^[2]
• Digitisation. The earlier version said the papers were "open to researchers and partly digitised". The finding aid read here does not say whether the papers are digitised. That point is not covered in the sources read here.^[1]
• Grusinski's death. The earlier version said Grusinski died in 2016, citing an obituary page. That page refused automated access, so the date is not covered in the sources read here.^[3] A second copy of the NICAP file at an older address returned "not found".^[5]
• Congress. The earlier version ended by saying the case was one of many reports of UAP near Navy ships, "a subject Congress later asked the Pentagon to investigate". That is not covered in the sources read here.

People and topics

• U.S. Navy — The U.S. naval service, whose pilots reported the UAP encounters revealed in 2017.
• Chester Grusinski — Navy veteran who described a cigar-shaped object near the USS Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1958.
• Unidentified anomalous phenomena — The U.S. government's current term for unidentified objects in the air, in space and underwater.

On the Timeline

• Hunter AFB "UFO crash" letter (1958) (30 October 1958) — An Air Force colonel writes about a 'UFO crash' near Hunter AFB, Georgia.
• Airline pilots and the "Big Brother" gag rules (1958) (21 December 1958) — About 50 airline pilots criticize the Air Force's UAP gag rules as 'Big Brother'.

See every 1958 event on the UAP Timeline →

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia articles “USS Franklin D. Roosevelt (CV-42)”, “USS Franklin D. Roosevelt (CV-42)”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.