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.
“University of Colorado”1 page
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
# CONFIDENTIAL It does not make my eyesight any sharper except again as to the incidental demands upon the eyes of a pilot. At the time of the experience related above, I had flown fourteen and one-half hours on an assignment to find a disc and if possible, to photograph it. In all frankness, I was tired. I may have been suffering, although slightly, from want of oxygen. Prior to sighting the object, I had concluded there was no point in pressing the search, that I probably would never see the disc-like objects referred to by Arnold and by Captain Smith of United Air Lines. At all times during the search, both on that day and the two preceding days (particularly when I was with Arnold) I had literally talked to myself to keep beating into my head that I would not fall victim to the power of suggestion or self-hypnosis arising from a naturally very intent desire to find a disc and bring success to the assignment given me. I therefore do not believe that I was the victim of suggestion or hypnosis. I am familiar with the optical illusion of a fixed object begin ning to move after it is watched a sufficient length of time. I know what tricks the eyes will play as to moving bodies, and have learned of this particularly during night formation flying. I saw the object appear suddenly. If it had moved in a jerky fashion (as it did at first) for the full length of time I observed it, I would not be so strong in saying that I saw something not an aircraft, not a balloon, and not a corpuscle moving across the retina of either eye. The maneuver described by the object when its edge was presented to me convinces me that I saw an object actually performing in an erratic flight path. The question remains; of course, whether I saw it. The motion picture film, developed and processed by R. R. Stohr in the Eastman laboratories at me 95
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.