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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# Those Flying Discs Are at It Again. Virginians Report Zounds! Here we go again! Interplanetary space-ship? Visitor from Mars? A new Russian rocket ship? Airgoing submarine? Just take your choice, your guess is every bit as good as the next one according to reports from various sections of Virginia and Tennessee on last night's strange phenomenon. What it was, where it came from and where it was going, no one knows, but even Civil Aeronautics Administration officials were puzzled and had no answer. Whatever the thing was, it resembled a long cigar, with a bright red nose and trailing smoke. Reports coinciding with that description came from localities along an almost direct line through Tennessee and Virginia and seemed sufficient to convince even the most skeptical that what the callers said they had seen was no figment of imagination. The descriptions generally indicated the object came over the southwest horizon and resembled a streak of fire. There seemed to be red lights or a powerful red glow in the nose of the object. Far back at the tail there was fire and smoke. The first report came from Roanoke about 8 o'clock when J. S. Mays and W. F. Mullins, both of that city, said they noticed the object. "It looked like a streak of fire." said Mays, "and appeared to be going almost straight up and was stepping on it." Suddenly, he said, it appeared to level off and head eastward, resembling "a snake wiggling on water." Other reports followed from Kingsport, Tenn., Bristol, Pulaski, Christiansburg and points west of Roanoke. William C. Flanik, chief aircraft communicator, CAA, at Preston Gleng airport, said none of the Lynchburg tower men had sighted any unusual objects in the sky. FBI - RICHMOND MAY 1 41949 62 - x = 874 - 178
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.