Documents / Official release

box Incident Summaries 173-233

U.S. Department of War · 144 pages · text by OCR

This Air Materiel Command file, released by the U.S. Department of War, holds Incident Summary Sheets 173 through 233, sent under a 1949 transmittal. Most of the sheets record sightings of unidentified aerial objects in 1948 and early 1949. They cover Santa Fe, New Mexico, San Pablo, California, Honolulu, Kentwood, Louisiana, and Jackson, Mississippi. Each sheet gives the observer's details and the object's size, speed and shape, and often an investigator's note on how reliable the witness seemed. The file ends with a blank guide for investigating reports, including radar sightings.

From the source:Release of 2026-05-08 Incident: N/A, N/A. NARA Record Group 38, catalogue id 143685. Each of these incident summaries includes a "Check-List - Unidentified Flying Objects" that contains details about the incident. Many summaries also include witness lists or statements and other narrative reports or descriptions.

  • p. 23 …At sea - aboard the S/S Gulfport (i.e. ground, air, control tower, etc.) 5. Name…
  • p. 65 …N/S - disappeared at sea 23. Weather Conditions at Time of Sighting: CAVU 24. Peculiarities Noted…
  • p. 66 …right then resumed its course, disappearing to sea. No smoke or noise was heard from the…
  • p. 120 …13.500 above sea level. 7.000 ft above earth (estimated) (approximately 2.000 ft higher…
  • p. 121 …At 1833 while flying at an indicated altitude of 11,500 feet, mean sea level, approximately…
  • p. 133 …5.500 ft elevation above sea level (estimated) 15. Estimated Distance of object from Observer: N…
  • p. 134 …northwest to southeast at an elevation above sea level of 5500' (absolute direction and elevation argumentative…
Taken from Minneapolis Morning Tribune 21 October 1948

"DUCK! IT'S THOSE SAUCERS AGAIN"

... At Winona, Minn., Paul Zenk and Dr. F. T. Benoit said they saw a slowly traveling object which broke up into numerous bright particles over the town at 6 A.M. 20 Oct 48.

They said it was about 25 feet long and eight feet wide and appeared to be a bunch of sparks with a tail."

NOTE: The above witnesses were not contacted from Wold Chamberlain Fld. Minneapolis, Minn. See Incident 185 for report of L. A. Dannen and Harold Oliver.

Not linked to a story yet.

About this file

Official release, from the pursue 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. 144 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.