Documents / Official release
This Federal Bureau of Investigation file section (62-HQ-83894, Section 4) collects 1947 to 1949 correspondence on flying discs. It includes Portland police officers' accounts of a silvery object over the city on September 11, 1947, an Alaska pilot's July 1947 sighting near Bethel, citizen letters answered by J. Edgar Hoover, and a 1948 Air Defense Command directive on disc investigations. The FBI replied that it was conducting no flying disc investigations. Later items concern William Albert Rhodes's disc photographs and a Los Angeles letter judged a probable prank.
From the source:Release of 2026-05-08 Incident: N/A, N/A. The FBI's 62-HQ-83894 case file includes investigative records, eyewitness testimonies, and public reports concerning Unidentified Flying Objects and flying discs documented between June 1947 and July 1968. The records include high-profile incident accounts, photographic evidence from sites like Oak Ridge, TN, and technical proposals regarding potential propulsion systems. Additional topics include convention programs, researcher accounts, and extensive media coverage from the period. This file is partially posted on FBI vault with more redactions and some pages missing. Included here is the complete case file with several newly declassified pages and only minor redactions.
“Charles Fort”1 page
'LIKE BIG F~O'?R LAMP FLYING ALONG' ~ Everybody's Seeing 'Things' I Whizzing Through Night Sky By CHARLES POU . burst in mid-air. of a floor lamp, and it was the ls that Thing no more than a 5. A flash of cherry red fire. prettiest thing I ever saw. It came wayward floor lamp? 6. A meteor. and passed so quick-I guen it Mrs. .Noah Atkinson, of Brook- . Mrs. Atltinson kept her Fly- mu.st have been 500 miles an hour llaven, saw it. And what did that mg Floorlamp secret three weeks. or faster." Thing look like? B~t she knew she wasn't seeing And how about the two air- "A great big floor lamp, all lit things when she saw the Thing. line pilots, C. S. Chiles and John up. Oh, il was beautiful!'' . She.and her husband, who also B. Whitted, of Atlanta? And C. M. Bowles, an Expos1- saw 1t, kept mum. The story Well they took off today, tion Mills painter who lives near really sou~ded a little silly unt_il armed'with a camera And th the Municipal airport, Sunday th~ two air line p1lots saw their hope to bring back a· p·ct1 e~0 nicht saw a "huge, brilliantly Thmg gamboling and fire-breath- that Thing ure :U,hted object" streakjng over At- ing through air-line skies early • lanta skies at maybe 30,000 feet. Saturday morning. Be h Th CMr. Bowles thinks the Thing was After that, she decided hef tale OC rongs ranl straight from Moscow. could be told: At 'Silver Cylinder' Two air line pilots :Cirst were "My husb..,;l'.i 11uu I were sit- atartled by the newest astronomi- ting on our front porch the night ASBURY PARK, N. J., J4ly 26. cal "what-is-it" near Montgomery of J uly 5, and at a quarter to 9 (A")-Boa_rdwalk throngs_ at this early Saturday. To them it was "a o'clock we saw this Thing. Our resort city craned their necks wingless craft, spurting flame like front porch doesn't have a screen, Monday at a "s_ilver . cylinder" a Buck Rogers rocket ship." Else- and we were sitting near the they reported flymg !ugh over whcre, all over the country that edge where we could see good. head. Thing was variously identifi~d as: "I saw it first. It was not high They described it as "wll.y up 1. An aluminum covered bal- '!,IP-about _200 .feet, I guess, but in the air," and like a blimp "only loon. it looked hke 1t was right above blunt at both ends." 2, A ball of fire. the treetops. 'Looka there', I Officials, recalling "flying sau- Ai h R -..usually bright light. yelle~ to my husband, and he cers," asked Fort Monmouth per- 4. A red and blue flame that saw it too. onnel to see if they could identify "It looked like the top part it. • ,.. ATLANTA JOURNAL, 7/26/48
Official release, from the pursue collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 214 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.