62-HQ-83894

On July 9, 1947, Raymond Edward Lane, a Dow Chemical Company employee, and his wife Laura reported hearing a puff noise and seeing a ball of white about the size of a bushel basket burning a foot off the ground in a Dow-owned field in Midland, Michigan. Lane brought recovered material to the Dow Physics Laboratory the next day; laboratory examination found ordinary sand, a small silver nugget, melted sand droplets giving off ammonia odor, and a grayish radioactive material. The FBI Detroit Division reported the incident to the Director on August 5, 1947, and recommended forwarding the material to the War Department.

On 4 August 1947 at 1600 EDT, Pan American Airways Captain Alpheus O. Powell and navigator Walter I. White separately sighted flying objects near Boston while piloting a Constellation from Gander, Newfoundland to La Guardia Field. Powell described his object as cylindrical, blunt at both ends, roughly the length of a P-40 fuselage, and bright orange; White described his as elliptical, deep gold, and approximately 15 feet long. Air Defense Command at Mitchel Field, New York interviewed both men and issued summaries of information on 12 and 15 September 1947.

In July 1947, W.R. Presley of 218 Illinois Avenue, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, photographed what the Knoxville News-Sentinel called a flying saucer. Presley had been photographing his family and house and used his last frame on a shot of a nearby mountain; when the roll was developed, a bright circular object appeared in that final image. The newspaper reported it as the first time a flying saucer had ever been photographed over Oak Ridge and noted that the picture had "all of Oak Ridge talking." The FBI Knoxville Field Office forwarded two prints and a photostatic copy of the newspaper clipping to FBI Headquarters under an Internal Security file.

On February 15, 1949, the U.S. Air Force Directorate of Intelligence in Washington, D.C. issued Air Intelligence Requirements Memorandum Number 4, titled "Unconventional Aircraft." The memorandum established reporting procedures for sightings of unconventional aircraft, unidentified flying objects, and "Flying Discs," directing reports to Air Materiel Command at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio, attention MCIAXO-3, with copies to the Director of Intelligence.

Section 10 of FBI case file 62-HQ-83894 contains the program for the AFSCA 3rd National Flying Saucer Convention, held July 8-10, 1966, at the Centennial Coliseum in Reno, Nevada, along with a citizen letter and the Bureau's reply. On August 31, 1966, Florence C. Dow of Goffstown, New Hampshire, wrote to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover stating that her first issue of the AFSCA journal "Flying Saucers International" struck her as Communist-backed.

On March 19, 1950, Miguel Angel Garcia Macias, a pianist, composer, and self-described ideographic inventor from Veracruz, Mexico, wrote to the President of the Commission of Scientific Investigation of the United States of North America in New York, describing his concept of stratospheric aerostats and attributing flying saucers to U.S. atomic technology. The letter, translated by Mrs. Sophia Saliba, was received by the FBI New York Field Office by April 7, 1950, and filed under case 62-HQ-83894, Serial 220.

On November 20, 1957, the FBI Legal Attache in Havana reported that Jose Maria Nieto and Carmelo Guzman had told the Havana newspaper Diario de la Marina they saw a flying disc in the shape of a man's hat hovering silently over Matahambre, Pinar del Rio Province, Cuba, before it disappeared at high speed toward the sea. An FBI memo dated November 12, 1957, from R. R. Roach to A. H. Belmont noted a surge in flying saucer and UFO reports across the United States following the Soviet release of Sputnik, which Air Force Intelligence told the Bureau were all resolved as nonauthentic.

Serial 403 of FBI case 62-HQ-83894 consists of the dust jacket and promotional text from Gray Barker's 1956 book "They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers," published by University Books, Inc. of New York. The jacket text states that flying saucer researchers who challenged government denial were silenced after visits from "three men in dark suits," and that Barker began his research in 1952 after a flying saucer allegedly landed near his home in Clarksburg, West Virginia. Barker is identified as a Clarksburg businessman who also published a flying saucer periodical called The Saucerian.

FBI Special Agent D. Arthur Byrnes, Jr. documented a report from Officer Lonnie Zamora of the Socorro Police Department concerning an unknown object that "landed and has taken off" about one mile southwest of Socorro, New Mexico, on April 24, 1964. Zamora described an aluminum-white, egg-shaped object on or near the ground, two persons in white coveralls nearby, a blue-orange flame and loud roar during ascent, and a red insignia resembling the letter "A" on the object's surface.

On October 3, 1966, the FBI Los Angeles Division sent a memo to the FBI Director transmitting Issue No. 24 of Flying Saucers International, the official journal of the Amalgamated Flying Saucer Clubs of America, Inc., edited by Gabriel Green at 2004 N. Hoover St., Los Angeles. The magazine had been delivered to the FBI Philadelphia Division on September 19, 1966, by Jarvis H. Cooper, an IRS employee in Philadelphia, who said pages 2 and 3 contained an article he believed expounded the Communist Party line.

On August 25, 1947, Lt. Col. Donald L. Springer of Headquarters Fourth Air Force, A-2 Intelligence, Hamilton Field, forwarded to the FBI SAC in San Francisco a letter from F. M. Johnson, a prospector who wrote from Portland, Oregon on August 20, 1947, reporting that he had observed flying discs in the Ft. Adams district on June 24, 1947, the same date as the Kenneth Arnold sighting. Johnson described the objects as round, about 30 feet in diameter, tapering to a point at the head end, with a bright top surface, no engine noise, and a tail object shifting side to side like a big magnet.

FBI headquarters file 62-HQ-83894, Section 5, contains 1949 investigative records on flying saucers, including a letter Walter Winchell received from Peter Camerlon Jones of Los Angeles, who claimed to have seen a large silver object shaped like a child's top in the mountains near Los Angeles in August 1947. D. M. Ladd directed the Los Angeles field office to discreetly check Jones's background and interview him, but efforts to locate Jones were negative. The FBI wrote to Ernest Cuneo on July 21, 1949, suggesting the original letter may have been a prank.

FBI headquarters case file 62-HQ-83894 collects press clippings, public letters, and internal memos concerning "flying disc" and "flying saucer" reports across the United States in July 1947. Reports include Rev. Joseph Brasky of Grafton, Wisconsin, who told the United Press he found an 18-inch metal disc with "gadgets and some wires" in his churchyard and was holding it for the FBI. Civilian Fred R. Reibold wrote to the Bureau describing a flaming circular object that fell in the street in Cornola, Nebraska on July 1, 1947; Director Hoover forwarded that letter to the War Department's Director of Intelligence on August 5, 1947.

On September 11, 1947, Portland Police Department officers in Districts 18 and 14, including Chief of Police Leon V. Jenkins, reported sighting a round silver object over Portland, Oregon between 5:21 and 5:27 PM. In July 1947, pilot Jack Peck and co-pilot Vince Daly of the Al Jones Flying Company observed a flying wing object near Bethel Airport, Alaska, describing it as approximately the size of a C-54 without any fuselage, flying at 1,000 feet at an estimated 300 miles per hour with no propeller, jet exhaust, or vapor trails.

FBI internal memos from 1950 document OSI concern over green fireballs and discs appearing near sensitive installations in New Mexico. Dr. Lincoln La Paz of the University of New Mexico concluded that roughly half the recorded phenomena were meteoric; the remainder he attributed to possible U.S. guided missiles or, if that interpretation was wrong, to guided missiles launched from the Ural region of the USSR.

On August 9, 1952, the FBI Savannah field office sent an urgent teletype to Director Hoover reporting that two employees of E. I. Du Pont Company saw a blue light with an orange fringe shaped like a saucer fly over the Four Hundred Area of the Savannah River Plant AEC facility at approximately 9:30 PM on August 8. Between August 11 and August 20, 1952, Hoover forwarded letters from multiple citizens about flying saucers and flying disks to the Director of Special Investigations, The Inspector General, Department of the Air Force.

In July and August 1954, the FBI Cincinnati Field Office and Washington Field Office documented reports from civilian informant Thomas Eickhoff concerning flying saucer lecturers Truman Bethurum and George Hunt Williamson, and from Navy Security Officer John Hutson concerning Frances Swan's claimed thought transmission contact with beings designated "AFFA" and "PONNAR," commanders of ships M-4 and L-11. Eickhoff reported attending a luncheon at the Terrace Plaza Hotel in Cincinnati on June 7, 1954, where Bethurum and Williamson stated their story was factual and consented to government scrutiny.

FBI headquarters file 62-HQ-83894 compiles sighting reports, media clippings, and investigative memos covering incidents from 1947 through 1968. Reported incidents include American Airlines pilot Capt. Peter Killian's account of three shining saucer-like objects trailing his DC6 for 45 minutes in February 1958, the Coast Guard cutter Sebago tracking an object on radar for 27 minutes in the Gulf of Mexico at an estimated 1,000 miles per hour, and grain buyer R. O. Schmidt's claim of encountering a cigar-shaped craft near Kearney, Nebraska, in November 1957.