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.
The next search, begun within half an hour after landing from the first one, consumed another two hours, but was negative. I explored thoroughly the region where I saw the object. Immediately after sighting the object, I asked if there were other aircraft in the area. There was a P-51 of the 190th squadron practicing maneuvers in the vicinity of Kuna, but that was behind me. A C-82 passed over Boise, but I saw that aircraft go beneath me by some 2,000 feet. The P-51 in the vicinity of Kuna proceeded to the area where I saw the object, at my request, and conducted a search. It was negative. During the afternoon, flights of P-51s were sent out to cover the area, and some of them flew high altitude missions on oxygen. These searches were negative. I was subsequently informed that personnel on both the United Air Lines side of Cowen field, and on the national guard side, observed a black object maneuvering in front of the same cloud formation, which by now had grown so that the clouds reached a probable height of 19,000 or 20,000 feet from a mean base of 13,500 or 14,000 feet, mean sea level. Three of these men were national guard personnel and I talked to them, asking them to describe what they saw, before telling them my story, in order to avoid suggestion or inference of a leading nature. They saw the object (from the ground) while I was on my second search. They believed the time to have been 14:00 hours. The object performed in the same erratic manner, they said, as I observed. The above is the extent of the story, and information concerning myself is now in order. I have approximately 2800 hours of flying time in equipment ranging from primary trainers to 8-29s. Of course, that does not increase my powers of observation except as to those practiced daily by an airman.
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.