Documents / FOIA release

FBI file: UFO, UFO Part 13

Federal Bureau of Investigation · 148 pages · text by OCR

This Federal Bureau of Investigation file section collects 1954 to 1961 correspondence and memoranda about flying saucers. Most of it concerns the Detroit Flying Saucer Club, which the Detroit office reported on from informants and chose not to investigate, while Bureau headquarters said saucer matters belonged to the Air Force. It also includes public letters to J. Edgar Hoover, a 1955 North Carolina sighting report, Leonard Stringfield's 1961 anonymous warning call, and policy reviews that restate the practice of referring reports to the Air Force.

  • p. 1 …There is enclosed a letter to the Office of Special Investigations in this matter.
  • p. 10 …copies of a letter recently forwarded to this office by the Director of Special Investigations, Alaska…
  • p. 18 CEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE Transmit the following Teletype message to: FBI…
  • p. 22 …Director of Special Investigations The Inspector General Department of the Air Force The Pentagon Washington 25…
  • p. 32 …of incoming and enclosures sent by form to the Office of Special Investigations, Department of the…
  • p. 58 Dates August 9, 1954 Director of Special Investigations The Inspector General Department of the Air Force…
  • p. 61 …to the Office of Special Investigations, United States Air Force, for any investigation deemed appropriate, and…
  • p. 66 …is being made available to the Office of Special Invesitgations, United States Air Force, and no…
  • p. 67 …I have advised the local office of the Office of Special Investigations at Wright-Patterson Air…
  • p. 81 …These photographs were turned over to the Office of Special Investigations of the United States Air…
  • p. 95 …The individual interviewed was a police officer of the MAIL ROOM TELETYPE MUT
  • p. 97 …Special Agent of our Norfolk Office. States SA contacted him in response to a letter of…
they had been engaged in producing or testing a saucerlike craft during the 1952 sighting crisis. I never got an answer; instead the post G-2, Col. summoned me to his office and instructed me to explain the motives for my inquiry.

After assuring that I had not intended to undermine local security measures, but had merely posed an honest question, he recommended I be more prudent in the future. Here, we mustn't reproach Col. too severely, because his job was to abide by the military intelligence axiom of "never underestimate a potential enemy." This axiom no doubt inspired the following Eustis policy, a policy which was probably the basis for

"A great part of the information sought by people who do not have the best interests of the United States at heart is obtained from unclassified sources through apparently innocent requests. Any unusual request for information concerning the installation, our personnel, or other data, should be brought to the attention of the Assistant Chief of Staff, Q-2."

You may see now that the sources as well as the fruit of my UFO research are subject to scrutiny by all interest authorities. This fact became even clearer several months

Cases discussed

About this file

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. 148 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.