Documents / FOIA release
This FBI file section collects Bureau correspondence on flying discs from 1947 to 1950. It includes a Portland field office memo on police officers who saw a silvery object over the city on September 11, 1947, and letters from citizens with sightings, theories and questions, along with Hoover's form replies. There is also a Chicago memo about a letter describing a secret saucer bomber, and a Louisville report on Al Hixenbaugh's June 1950 film of a disk. Other items include a Yuba City informant's drawings of a supposed Russian saucer and a note on Donald Keyhoe's book.
“Coast to Coast AM”1 page
theory of Soviet missiles. By 1947 the thing had snowballed to such an extent that the Swedish Government finally issued a report identifying most of the incidents with natural phenomena and denying that any foreign power was involved. During this period sightings were reported from the remaining Scandanavian countries and most of Western Europe. Incidents were first reported over the US in 1947 and are still continuing. Much space in the press has been given to these reports and various semi-official opinions have been quoted. For example, on 18 May, Captain Eddie Rickenbacker was quoted as saying "There must be something to then, for too many reliable persons have made reports on them. I am duty bound not to say what I know about them - or what I don't know about them. However, if they do exist, you can rest assured that they are ours." The USAF for a long time conducted a thorough investigation of each of the hundreds of incidents involved. It found that approximately 75% of the reports could definitely be related to known causes such as meteorological balloons, aircraft, meteors and other common phenomena. A public statement was issued debunking the entire existence of flying disks or saucers. This did little to cut down the flood of reports. It only resulted in convincing a large number of people that the National Military Establishment was trying to cover up our own experiments with new weapons. Many theories have been advanced to explain these reports of aerial 5. Mass hysteria, or other psychological causes.
Not linked to a story yet.
FOIA release, from the fbi-vault collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. The text was read from the page images by an OCR model; expect the odd misread word. 84 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.