Documents / FOIA release
This Federal Bureau of Investigation file section collects 1947 to 1949 correspondence, memoranda and newspaper clippings about flying disc reports. It includes Hoover's replies to citizens, a Maine woman's account of a drifting object judged probably a weather balloon, a Richmond memo on a cigar-shaped object seen over Radford, Virginia on May 12, 1949, clippings on the Chiles and Whitted sighting near Montgomery, a Flyin' Saucer toy promotion, and agent interviews with witnesses in Vermont and a pilot near Bethel, Alaska.
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# Remember Flying Saucers? Well Looks Like Flying Seegars Now Flying saucers are passe. Now people in Bristol are seeing "long, cigar-shaped object" flashing across the sky. But Bristolians were not the only spectators of the strange craft yesterday evening. The flaming object was reported sighted at Kingsport, Christiansburg and Roanoke and three at Pulaski. Rex Rainey, 1805 State Street, reported that he saw a "whitish, glistening mass, long and cylindrical like a big cigar," flying from east to west about 7:15 yesterday. He said he sighted the "cigar" flying very rapidly over Virginia Heights and got out his binoculars to look at it. An unidentified caller informed the Herald Courier last night that she had sighted something that "looked like white smoke with a blue flame that traveled to the north and east" about the same time. "It didn't look like an airplane," she said, "only like white smoke. It was just a streak and almost out of sight it was so high." Another local woman reported that she had seen a "silver streak that looked like it was about 100 feet long" flash across the sky shortly after seven o'clock. She estimated the speed at about 200 miles per hour. A traffic controlman at Tri Cities Airport, who asked that his name be withheld, said that the strange craft had not been seen at the airport although they had had inquires on the "cigar-streak." He said he had checked with the Atlanta Air Route traffic control center after receiving inquiries but they reported no knowledge of any jet aircraft in this vicinity. He speculated that the streaks may have been caused by a jet-propelled plane or planes. "The objects were reported flying at an altitude of 30,000 feet," he said. "If a jet plane were flying that high, it would be moving so fast the vapor trail would be about all a person on the ground could see." The controlman said that the BRISTOL . HERARD COURIER BRISTOL , VA 5714149 . Pulaski radio reported two seen there. One about 4 p.m. and the other an hour later. He said that Pulaski also had a pilot's report of the "streak" traveling northeast at an altitude of about 30,000 feet. Reports on the "flaming object" were received at Christiansburg and Roanoke but airports in those vicinities reported no information on the strange craft.
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. 129 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.