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
advisers ... in the presence of visitors from elsewhere, the sky continuously, but they a reported no saucers. The General was reminded that many of the people who had told of seeing the most spectacular things were considered the most reliable. He replied that he had no intention of discrediting them, but the fact remained that none of them had offered data of the kind a scientist would find useful. An Air Force officer whom General Samford personally knew to be a competent witness had told him of seeing a saucer in the Middle East. This man, too, had been unable to obtain accurate measurements. "We have many reports from credible observers of incredible things," the General remarked. Like General Moore, his predecessor in Project Saucer days, General Samford denied that the Air Force was attempting to cover up secret experiments. When he was asked if the saucers might be the guided missiles of a foreign country, he replied that he didn't see how, on the basis of their weird performances, they could be unless "someone" had achieved a means of developing unlimited power—"power of such fantastic higher limits that it is a theoretical unlimited; it's not anything that we can understand"—and utilizing it under conditions in which no mass is involved. As for the latter, the General told the press, drawing a laugh, "You know, what 'no mass' means is that there's nothing there." WHILE General Samford's interview probably reassured the public as evidence that the Air Force was still on the job, it did nothing to lessen the nation's saucer-consciousness. The reporters had hardly thanked the General for his comments when, on August 1st, a Coast Guard photographer produced a picture showing four bizarre lights burning brilliantly in a daylight sky. He said he had taken it over Salem, Massachusetts. The next day, a Harvard astrophysicist called the photograph worthless because it was accompanied by no scientific data, such as temperature distribution and altitude. On August 6th, an Army physicist at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, created the equivalent of flying saucers in his laboratory by introducing molecules of ionized air into a partial vacuum in a bell jar, and three days later an internationally known authority on atmospheric conditions said of the physicist's experiment, "I know of no conditions of the earth's atmosphere, high or low, which would duplicate
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.