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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# ew Data, Ideas About Flying Saucers And Death of Pilot Who Chased One DAYTON, Ohio, April 27. The only airman who ever got near a flying saucer crashed and died before he could describe it, the Dayton Journal-Herald said today. The newspaper printed a lengthy dispatch on the mysterious flying disca, based, it said, on hitherto unpublished reports assembled at the Wright-Patterson Air Force base. The Air Force investigation has proved that the flying saucers "are not a joke." Neither "are they a cause for alarm to the population," the newspaper said. The closest any airman came to the mystery discs was on Jan. 7, 1948, when one was sighted over Fort Knox, Ky., the dispatch said. Four fighter planes were sent aloft to intercept it, but only Capt. Thomas F. Mantell was able to get close. "I'm closing in to take a good look," the newspaper quoted him as reporting by radio. "It looks metallic and of tremendous size. It's going up now as fast as I am. That's 360 miles an hour. I'm going up after it. At 20,000 feet, if I'm no closer, I'll abandon chase." Mantell's plane crashed a few minutes later and he was killed. The reporter said a report now on Mantell's plane crashed a minutes later and he was killed. The paper said a report now on files at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base lists 240 domestic and 30 foreign accounts of flying discs as having been investigated. Of these 30 per cent seem to have been weather balloons and the like and 30 per cent more are perhaps explainable conventionally-leaving 40 per cent unexplained. The Air Force recently said there was no evidence that the discs were guided missiles fired from some other country, but that on the other hand it was not in possible that they were. Later the Air Force announced it was making any further comments to the discs. the discs. The Dayton paper says the report on which its story is based as "evaluation teams" stated: "We can't prove or disprove evaluation teams state We can't prove or disprove existence of some of the remain unidentified objects as real aircr of unconventional design. The possibility that the saus
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.