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.
“Norfolk”1 page
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
These shiny objects may have various forms and there may be more than one, depending on the number of reflections. They may appear to be in the sky when the driver looks through the ventilation wing glass. Their position in the sky depends upon the angle at which the object is reflected in the ventilation wing and the position of the observer. They may have various forms but very frequently they are of a saucer shape or a flat shape when they appear to be in the sky. The ventilation wing during day-light is not of course a perfect mirror, therefore, it appears to the driver or observer that he is actually looking through the glass into the sky. As he moves along, the bright objects appear to be traveling at a high rate of speed in comparison with the stationary objects on the ground, or the distant horizon, that he sees through the window, or in comparison with the faintly silhouetted objects on the landscape which at times are reflected in the window. The flying saucer appears to be traveling in the same general direction as the automobile but sometimes a little to the right which makes it appear that it will eventually cross the drivers path. The apparent flight direction of the saucer is due to the angle of the ventilation wing glass in its relation to the direction in which the car is traveling. The number and position of the saucers reflected in the glass depend upon the number and contour of objects reflected therein by the sun. Bright objects on a car approaching from the rear may cast such reflections on your ventilation wing in the daytime.
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.