Los Alamos Project

On July 9, 1947, Raymond Edward Lane, a Dow Chemical Company employee, and his wife Laura reported hearing a puff noise and seeing a ball of white about the size of a bushel basket burning a foot off the ground in a Dow-owned field in Midland, Michigan. Lane brought recovered material to the Dow Physics Laboratory the next day; laboratory examination found ordinary sand, a small silver nugget, melted sand droplets giving off ammonia odor, and a grayish radioactive material. The FBI Detroit Division reported the incident to the Director on August 5, 1947, and recommended forwarding the material to the War Department.