Documents / FOIA release
This Federal Bureau of Investigation file section collects 1947 records on flying disc reports, including field office memoranda from Butte, Seattle, Salt Lake City and San Francisco on sightings in Washington, Montana, Utah and Idaho. Several were attributed to burnt paper or weather balloons, and Wright Field judged debris from a Danford, Illinois farm a hoax unconnected to Project Mogul. After the Army Air Forces described FBI work as chasing "ash can covers, toilet seats and whatnot," the Bureau discontinued its flying disc investigations and referred reports to the Air Forces.
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afternoon there were several pieces of burnt paper which flew over the field, and he did recall a large piece of burnt paper which the wind had blown across the runway and down the south end of the field. estimated that the paper was approximately three feet in length. stated that undoubtedly this was the object in question, and inasmuch as the control tower has a complete view of the area in which the engineers had sighted this object if anything further was noted it would have appeared in the log. was then interviewed regarding his report of a flying object. He stated that about 4 p.m. on August 12 he had sighted an object which he estimated to be about 35,000 feet in the air, which was flying over his home in a southwest direction. A neighbor, also saw the object and examined the same with a pair of binoculars. According to him the object looked like a white dock moving, cylindrical in shape, and reflected the light of the sun with a sort of purplish tinge. Other witnesses who had seen the object at this time were a Seattle, and their version of the object corresponded with that of Contact with the Seattle Weather Bureau Office at Doeing Field, revealed that weather balloons are released every six hours from his field commencing at 1:30 a.m. The balloons, according to Mr. are of a white gum color and reflect the light of the sun at a high altitude. Although Mr. could not understand why a balloon could have been sighted at 4 p.m., he nevertheless was certain that, from the description of the object seen by these people, it must have been either one of his balloons or one released from some other area in the vicinity. No further investigation is being conducted in this matter by this office.
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. 77 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.