Documents / Official release
This Federal Bureau of Investigation Seattle field office file (100-18945) gathers flying saucer material from 1952 to 1960. It holds newspaper clippings, citizen complaint forms and agent memoranda about sightings over Pasco, Kennewick, Seattle, Richland and the Hanford reservation, Spokane and other Washington locations. The file records 1952 agreements with military intelligence on passing reports to OSI and the Air Force. One Hanford sighting from 1953 was attributed to a meteorological balloon. The FBI itself carried out no investigations.
From the source:Release of 2026-06-12 Incident: July 1952-1960, Washington State, United States. This file details an investigation of various sightings of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) in Washington state between July 1952 and August 1960. This file includes memoranda and correspondence between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Air Force regarding UFO sightings.
“Spencer”11 pages
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1405 Haupt Ave. Richland, Washington 16 July 1953 Federal Bureau of Investigation Building 762 Handford Works Richland, Washington Gentlemen: On the afternoon of July 15th, 1953, I had taken off the afternoon to entertain guests from Portland and was engaged in small talk about the various target shooting equipment I have accumulated. My guest and I spotted an object in the sky which appeared to be a large kite. We turned my 30 power Bausch and Lomb observation telescope on the object and it turned out to be a large sheet of brown paper at about 10,000 feet elevation. Having been impressed with the tremendous resolving power of the instrument we scanned the skies with our naked eye for other objects such as birds at high altitude. Our reward for this observation was most remarkable. At about 14:30 hours we sighted a bright shimmering speck at very extreme altitude, perhaps 30,000 feet perhaps much lower. This speck hovered at a north azimuth to Richland of about 80 degrees. I tried to pick up the object in the telescope and while trying to locate it in the very small field, about 15 minutes angle, my friend located another similar speck a short distance away. At this time we were convinced that they were birds, but had not yet sighted one in the glass because of the small field. Suddenly one of the specks ceased hovering and darted off to the west and disappeared. Still not giving this much thought I continued to search for the original object. After about three minutes searching I was able to bring it under observation and held it continuously for a period of two minutes until 14:44 hours. At first I thought I had found a large bird, but closer examination proved to be an unusual object. The first glances gave an impression of a heliocopter with the rotor stationary, but I was soon convinced I had never seen anything like this before. No heliocopter has wings too, nor hovers with a stationary rotor. I shouted to my guests and all four held the bright speck under observation until it eventually disappeared. As I examined the object in the glass very carefully it seemed as though the white parts were surface features of the transparent ALL INFORMATION CONTAINED TIN IS UNCLASSIFIED KEEP WHERE SHOWN OTHERWISE
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Official release, from the pursue collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 55 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.