Documents / FOIA release
This is part five of the FBI's UFO file, a set of Bureau memoranda and reports from 1947 to 1949. Most of it covers the FBI's inquiry into the Maury Island flying disc story in Tacoma, which concluded that the disc fragments were ordinary rock formations and that the story was a hoax. It also examines the fatal crash of a B-25 at Kelso and finds no sign of sabotage. The file includes other items: the Rhodes disc photographs, a proposed flying saucer convention in Alexandria, Louisiana, and ash from a fire near Scranton that someone suggested came from a flying saucer.
“Wilcox”1 page
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
## C ## 67c make the following foluntary statement of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. ## 67c In the early part of Jun. 1947 we picked up some strange rock formations from a gravel pit on Laury Island, Washington. We sent a box (cigar) of these fragments to of Venture Magazine at Evanston Illinois to have it analyzed. ## b7c Later wrote and asked for additional samples stating that he had failed to have them analyzed. ## bx Around the later part of June a few days after the first disc stories started contacted us by phone. He told us not to tell the newspapers out the fragments and he would pay for an exclusive story if the fragments could be from a flying disc. One of us told hi: the fragments could have been from a flying disc. Just after our phone conversation wrote a letter to setting out some notes etc. regarding the fragments and indicating they could have come from flying discs. 6.7c The next thing we heard was about the first of July when we got a Trans Ocean Press telegram from Chicago asking not about these flying disc fragments. We told them to forget the entire matter. The next we heard of these fragments was when we were called by to meet with him in the Winthrop Hotel on July 31,1947 We told him exactly how we had found the fragments and had forwarded them to to be analyzed. The above is the entire and true story as regards our connection with the flying disc stories etc. which originated over the cre samples which we sent to be analyzed.
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. 74 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.