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.
“Headquarters”18 pages
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
2636 Magnolia Ave. Los Angeles 7, Calif. August 1 1947 Director of Military Intelligence, War Department, Washington 25, D.C. Dear Sir: On Sunday afternoon, July the Sixth, I observed something very strange ; it is related --- at least in my own mind--- with the phenomena of the "Fabulous Flying Saucers" and I cannot report on this second phenomena , without speaking of the first. As I do not wish to be considered the victim of mass psychology, a crack-pot or visionary, it is rather hard for me to make this report. I am doing it because I consider it my duty. A newspaper article spoke of the Bureau of Standards as "Having a finger in the pie " in many experiments so not knowing where to write or who to write to wrote to the Bureau, and Mr. Hugh L. Dryden has suggested that you were the one to report to. I had been amused at accounts of the " flying saucers ". Everyone was talking , laughing and joking about themand I did not believe in them . The Hollywood Tarzana Bus was parked at the Tarzana end of the line and the driver was busy making out his reports preparatory to making the return trip./ I was the only one in the bus and I sat in the middle of the side next to Ventura so the bus was parked north and south As I looked to my right, a "Saucer appeared out of nowhere; apparently out of nowhere and it was followed by several others; they were of uniform size and spaced at regular intervals and it seemed as if they turned a corner from the West and they rolled along at great speed to the Northward and parallel to Ventura Boulevard. As soon as I became convinced that what I saw was not an illusion but what every one was talking about I began to study them and it was right then that my eyes seemed to be drawn to this other phenoma in the air between me and the "Saucers". What I saw was milky white rays in the sunlight that seemed to cris cross like the search lights do at night ; it was nothing like the sun shining on some bright object for the rays were not spaced and they were not so close together and they cris crossed. However, they did seem to converge toward a center but they did not meet there. In this center --- a radious of about eighteen inches it seemed from I sat, there were spinning objects of some red substance
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.