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.
“Nevers”16 pages
# Pilot Recalls Seeing Discs ## Dick Rankin Tells Of Odd Aircraft More reports of "flying flapjacks" turned up Wednesday, one from no less than Dick Rankin, brother of the late Tex Rankin, and himself an experienced pilot of more than 7000 hours' flying time. Rankin, who is recovering from an old back injury received in an automobile accident, came to Portland over the week end to spend the summer. He saw the "silver caucers" over Bakersfield, Cal. June 23, while lying on the lawn sun bathing, he told The Oregonian. "I hesitated to say much about them." Rankin said, "until I noticed all the hullabaloo in the papers. I puzzled over their strange shape for a while and finally concluded that they were the navy's new XF5U-1 flying flapjacks, which are thin and round, with twin propellers and stubby tail." ## Only One XF5U-1 Built (The navy and the manufacturer have announced officially that only one such machine was built and that it never left Connecticut. "These planes were flying high, maybe 9000 feet, and fairly fast, about 300 or 400 miles an hour. I first counted ten of them in formation, going north. About 2:15 P.M. they returned on the reverse course, headed south. But there were only seven in the formation. "They were not weaving or bobbing in formation I couldn't make out the number or location of their propellers and couldn't distinguish any wings or tail. They appeared almost round. They looked like pictures of the navy's flying flapjack." Rankin said. Rankin, who plans to spend the summer here at 834 N. E. Simpson street, is now able to resume a little flying for fun, but not commercially, he said. He now operates a string of auto courts, spending his winters at Palm Springs. "THE OREGONIAN" Portland, Oregon. 3 July 1947
Official release, from the pursue collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. The text was read from the page images by an OCR model; expect the odd misread word. 126 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.