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.
“Hill”2 pages
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## RESTRICTE
An unusually loud roar attracted the observer and upon looking up he saw a group of very light-colored objects at an altitude of about 50 $ ^{\circ} $ bunched rather closely with no regular formation. The group could have covered 1-1/2 $ ^{\circ} $ angular diameter in the sky. There might have been 10 As a group they were proceeding as to cover 30 $ ^{\circ} $ of arc estimated of course in 10 to 15 seconds. If one of them subtended 1/10 $ ^{\circ} $ with a possible wing spread of 100 ft it would put it at a distance of over 10 miles, and quite invisible for a light object. With 30 $ ^{\circ} $ arc of travel at a 10 mi distance would be roughly 5 miles in 15 seconds or 20 mi per minute or 1200 mi per hour. Rather fast for a bomber. A 50 ft object at 5 miles dist. wo ld be about 600 mi. per hr - also fast going. The only concrete evidence of form appeared on the left tangent of the group - two dark shaped forms:
These could have been tail wings. But since they were in no regular formation, and seemed to be moving irregularly like a swerm of bees why shouldn't all of them have had wings? The loud roar suggests they may have been much closer and rather small. The sky background was hazy blue with the sun behind. One plane towing a lot of balloons, the witness thought, would have been easily recognized.
RESTRICTED 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.