Documents / Official release

65 HS1-834228961 62-HQ-83894 Serial 130

Federal Bureau of Investigation · 126 pages · text by GLM-OCR

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.

  • p. 12 …She said the flash lights, which appeared as beacon lights coming over a hill, came from…
  • p. 23 …We were coming back from a fishing trip, and coming over the hill between here and…
  • p. 25 …The car was going up hill and we could see the sky through the windshield. Mr…
  • p. 42 …He said he could only see it for a moment before it disappeared behind a hill…
  • p. 45 …it rode up and down over the hills and hollows at a speed indicating some type…
  • p. 64 …This was reasonably correct, as I was on Cox's hill, and looked over towards Backwood…

Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.

AGENTS NOTES: Mr. A. O. Powell is a graduate of the Aviation Cadet Flying Training Program, having graduated from Maxwell Field, Alabama, with the Class of 41-C. Since graduation, Mr. Powell has flown for Pan American Airways and, at this date, has over 4,000 command pilot hours to his credit. Mr. Powell appears to be a calm, intelligent individual, not given to flights of fancy, or easily swayed by what he has previously read in the newspapers as regards reports of this type. Mr. Powell has a fear of publicity and seemed hesitant to even tell his story last he become the object of ridicule. Mr Powell was questioned as to the possibility that what he sighted might have been a tow target, a pilot balloon, or a radiosonic device used for meteorological purposes. Mr Powell stated that he has seen numerous pilot balloons, radiosonic devices and tow targets, while on flights; the object observed on this flight definitely was not one of them.

	Evaluation
Previous Distribution:
- None	of source	of information
	0	3
Distribution
- AAF(3 copies)
- ADC(2 copies)

Cases discussed

About this file

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.