Documents / FOIA release
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.
“Stringfield”15 pages
ago when I was finishing the groundwork for my recently published article, "A Hard Look at UFO News Management," which was cleared by the Defense Department on October 10, 1963. Here is how it began. On July 23, 1963, I wrote to the Va., requesting any UFO sighting data that he might possess. While on duty at Fort Dustis the afternoon of September 17, I received a 10-minute visit from local FBI agent. Not only did inquire about the Sussex letter, but also about a similar letter I sent on August 8, 1963, to the Commander of the Norfolk (Va.) Naval Base. Upon furnishing the information he desired on my Civil Service position and my UFO writings, I asked if it were customary for the FBI to interrogate anybody who expresses an interest in UFO's. He said no, that since his office was queried by the addresses of the two letters he was just seeking information on which he could write a "memorandum for the files." Volunteered the following: "If the FBI has any such data [on UFO sightings], it is probably of an intelligence nature and thus would be unavailable to the public and to private individuals." Again, the "authorities" have shown a serious, persuasive concern about the writings of a private citizen on objects
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.