Documents / Official release
This FBI file serial collects 1947 Army Air Forces reports on flying disc sightings. It includes Air Defense Command interviews from September 1947 with Pan American pilot Alpheus Powell and navigator Walter White about orange objects seen near Boston on 4 August 1947. It also holds a Birmingham, Alabama report with a photograph, newspaper clippings and a sergeant's sworn statement, Newfoundland and Alaska sighting reports, notes on an instrument found in Illinois, and a Weather Bureau memo on a metallic disk.
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.
“The Pentagon”1 page
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see nothing, so the objects could have been beyond Ontario, since we had told them that they were between our plane and Ontario. It should also be noted that the personnel at Ontario would be looking at a dark sky and may not be likely to be able to see them anyway. "I can't say whether they are man-made disks or not, whether they are radio controlled or not, or anything about them. They did not maneuver much at all, except when the first group merged. All I can say is that they were going our direction and were climbing. I don't think they were clouds, as there hadn't been a cloud in the sky, and it would have been quite a phenomenon as it was like nothing I had ever seen before. There was a big difference in the size of the objects. The smaller ones were hard to distinguish as to shape; they were not shiny, nor did the "flip". I couldn't swear on a stand that they were not clouds, but I think it impossible. Had they been clouds, they wouldn't have appeared and disappeared so suddenly, and we would have approached them. "As we were taxiing out to take off from Boise, the tower called us and asked us if we had seen any disks lately. As a consequence, we were and had been talking about the flying disks when we sighted them. I don't believe, however, that it was a figment of the imagination, as SMITH and I were seeing the same things, even the object far off to the right in the second group. We also called the stewardess, who had not been in on the conversation, and without mentioning "disks" aksed her what she saw. She stated that she saw the same things we did, which seemed to prove to us that it was not our imagination." In addition to the above, STEVENS stated, off the record, that he was rather disappointed in SMITH and all the publicity he was getting. He thought that SMITH was probably "grand-standing" some, and that as far as he, STEVENS, was concerned, he was not going to be interviewed by any reporters, or go on the radio, etc. He stated that he was glad to talk to a Navy representative about it, or to any other government official, and help in any way he could, but he certainly didn't want to be bothered with a lot of interviews with newspapers and radio stations. STEVENS seemed to the writer to be a very level headed, sensible man, and not in favor of a lot of publicity, whereas SMITH, although a sensible man and all, seemed to be more in favor of all the publicity he was getting.
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. 126 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.