Documents / FOIA release
This FBI file section, from 1947, gathers Army Air Forces counterintelligence reports and FBI memoranda about the summer's flying disc reports. It includes a Boise newspaper pilot's sworn statement describing a black object he filmed on 9 July 1947, interviews with a United Air Lines captain and a Hamilton Field soldier, and a Pan American crew's orange object near Boston. Other items cover the Tacoma disk fragment story, which was admitted to be false, the fatal B-25 crash at Kelso, a coded "Radio Ham" message dismissed as a hoax, and an Air Defense Command assessment that "something is really flying around."
“Wilcox”1 page
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
Office Memorandum . UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT TO : MR. - E. A. TAMI FROM : MR. D. M. LADD DATE: August 15, 1947 SUBJECT: The Director advised on August 14, 1947, that the Los Angeles papers were carrying headlines indicating that Soviet espionage agents had been instructed to determine the facts relative to the flying discs. The article carried a Washington date line and indicated that Red espionage agents had been ordered to solve the question of the flying discs, the Russians being of the opinion that this might be some new form of defense prefected by the American Military. The article further recalled that during the recent war pieces of tin foil had been dropped in the air for the purpose of off setting the value of radar being used by the enemy forces and that these aluminum discs might be a new development along this line. The Director inquired as to whether the Bureau had any such information. I informed him that I had never heard of any information indicating that Soviet espionage agents had been instructed to obtain such information. A check with the officials at G-2, ONI and at the Air Corps Intelligence was made and it was found that they had no information relative to such a story. In accordance with the Director's instructions, I advised Mr. Nichols that in the event any inquiries were made concerning such a story, that the story should be flatly denied in so far as the FBI was concerned. RECORDED 162-83894-2 EX-42 32 AUG 19 1947
FOIA release, from the fbi-vault collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 111 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.