Documents / Official release
This Federal Bureau of Investigation file section, 62-HQ-83894 Section 6 (serials 246 to 301), collects FBI memoranda and correspondence from 1950 to 1952 on flying saucers. It covers green fireballs and discs seen near sensitive installations in New Mexico, Dr. Lincoln LaPaz's analysis, and the Air Force's Land-Air study known as Project Twinkle. It also holds an OSI summary, a USAF directive on reporting unconventional aircraft, a dissolving object reported by Philadelphia police, and letters from members of the public.
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.
“Headquarters”18 pages
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
# THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO ALBUQUERQUE INSTITUTE OF METEORITICS May 23, 1950 To: Lt. Colonel Doyle Rees, Commanding Officer 17th District, O. S. I. From: Lincoln LaPaz, Director Institute of Meteoritics Subject: Anomalous Luminous Phenomena (Seventh Report) 1. In the second report of this series, dated 1948, December 20, the writer listed ten significant differences between the bright green horizontally-moving fireballs observed in the interval 1948, December 5-20, and typical meteors. These differences were the following: (1) The horizontal nature of the paths of most of the December fireballs is most unusual. Genuine meteors are rarely observed to move in horizontal paths. (2) Again the very low height of the December fireball discussed in section 2 above sets it off in sharp contrast from the genuine meteors for which heights of the order of 40 or more miles are normally observed. (3) The velocity determined for the fireball of December 12 is much less than the velocities determined from typical meteors (and yet is considerably greater than the speeds of the V-2 Rockets or jet planes or of conventional flares). (4) In the case of meteorites that penetrate to as low levels as that determined for the fireball of December 12, the observed luminous phenomena are always accompanied by very violent noises. No noises whatever have been observed in connection with the various December fireballs so far investigated. (Note added on 1950, May 23: Possible exceptions to the noiselessness of green fireballs are the incidents of 1949, January 30, and 1949, December 4.) (5) Genuine meteors normally show remarkable variations in brightness, beginning as fine thin hair lines, which are scarcely visible to the observer, and then brightening up to flash out near the end of their paths. In the case of the December fireballs most of the observers have reported that the green balls appeared almost instantly at their full brightness.
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. 271 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.