Documents / Official release
This U.S. Department of War file, undated, holds checklist summaries of incidents 1 to 100 of unidentified flying objects reported in 1947 and early 1948. The first entries cover sightings of silver discs and spheres by officers and staff at Muroc Army Air Field on 7 and 8 July 1947. Next come the Portland, Oregon police reports of 4 July, a United Air Lines crew near Emmett, Idaho, and a set of 30 December flame and explosion reports from California and Nevada. The file ends with two Finnish 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.
“Anderson”4 pages
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## RESTRICTED On Oct 8th or 9th, 1947 while witness was driving on the NW outskirts of Las Vegas, Nevada, he observed what appeared to be a sky-writing pilot's trail. He stopped his car to observe it and noticed two things which troubled him. (1) Where the missile should have been at the head of the steadily appearing trail there was nothing visible or was too small to see (estimated to be a distance of about 5 miles or less) and (2) the speed appeared startling. Thought it was between 400 and 1,000 MPH but thought more precisely to be from 700 to 800 MPH - too fast for conventional aircraft. The trail he thought could have been smoke, vapor from intense speed or any unknown substance. The color was almost white - much like a cumulo-nembus cloud and of approximately the same density and it was 15-50 minutes before the trail disintegrated. The object took a radius of from 5 to 15 miles to complete a turn (he estimated closer to 10) in an attempt to judge its exact course over topographic features of the surrounding countryside. He stated that since the climate in this vicinity is extremely dry and it was almost a cloudless day that the speed would have to be exceedingly great to create such a trail.
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. 209 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.