Documents / FOIA release
This FBI file section contains a 20 January 1953 letter from the Johnson County, Indiana civil defense office asking J. Edgar Hoover whether the International Flying Saucer Bureau was subversive, with an enclosed issue of its bulletin Space Review. It also holds 1956 FBI memoranda and letters to Air Force investigators on a Van Nuys landing claim, a bright light seen from Oxford, Pennsylvania, and a low spinning object seen near Henderson, North Carolina. In each case the FBI took no action.
“Office of Special Investigations”16 pages
Recd from our Albert Chap office of Public Info , OSD . - 10/6/52 The following information concerning Air Force investigations of unusual aerial phenomena is submitted in answer to your request. In the Fall of 1947 the United States Air Force took official notice of reports of so-called "flying saucers" because the reports from the public indicated that the problem might be related to the Air Force responsibility for the air defense of the United States. On December 30, 1947 the Air Force directed its Air Materiel Command, at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio, to set up a project to collect and evaluate all available facts concerning "flying saucer" sightings. To perform this task the Air Materiel Command obtained the services of civilian and military astronomers, psychologists, electronic specialists, meteorologists, aeronautical engineers, and physicists. On December 27, 1949, after 375 reported sightings had been investigated, the Air Force, with the concurrence of the Army and the Navy, announced the findings of the "flying saucer" project. The evidence at that time indicated that the majority of the reports of unidentified flying objects could be accounted for as misinterpretations of various conventional objects, a mild form of hysteria, meteorological phenomena, light aberrations, or boxes. There remained, however, a number of unexplained sightings, and the Air Force has continued its investigations innamuch as it is an Air Force responsibility to identify and analyze aerial phenomena that could possibly be a menace to the United States. Subsequent to December 1949, these investigations have been conducted as a normal intelligence function, rather than a special project, by the Air Technical Intelligence Center, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio.
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. 142 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.