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.
I could not see the object because of minuteness of scope introduced by the optical view finder with which the camera, an f.1.9 Eastman, was equipped. Taking the camera away and once again centering my gaze on the object, I observed it to roll so that its edge was presented to me. At this time it flashed once in the sunlight. It then appeared as a thin black line. It then performed a maneuver which looked as if it had begun a slow roll, or a barrel roll, which instead of being completed, was broken off at about the 180-degree point. The object rolled out of the top of the maneuver at this point, and I lost sight of it. This entire performance was observed against the background of clouds previously forming over the Camas Prairie. The object appeared to me, relatively, as the size of a twenty-five cent piece. I do not know how far away it was. I do not know, nor can I truthfully estimate, its speed. I can only say it was not an airplane, and if it was at a very great distance from me, its speed was great, taking into consideration that apparent speed is reduced to the viewer if an object is a very great distance away. I forgot to look at my clock to determine the exact time I saw the object. The CAA's log of radio contacts shows my first contact to have been made at 12:17 hours. But a few seconds elapsed between the time I first saw the object, and the time I called the CAA's station. I subsequently related over the radio a description of what I saw, and communicator Albertson may remember it. The control tower may have a recording of the conversation. I have not checked to determine that. The purpose of my relating over the air what I saw was to enable rapid transmission of the report to the newspaper, for at that time I was on assignment and my energies thenceforth were devoted to (1) transmitting the information and (2) conducting a further search, which I did after landing for fuel and to make some telephone calls.
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.