When the FBI Investigated Flying Saucers: What the Declassified Files Actually Say

In the summer of 1947, something strange swept across America. Hundreds of ordinary people, police officers, military pilots, and airline crews reported seeing disc-shaped objects moving at extraordinary speeds across the sky. The FBI, the U.S. Air Force, and local law enforcement scrambled to determine what was happening. The documents you can now read in declassified government files tell a story that is messy, bureaucratic, and far more interesting than most people expect.

The Wave Begins

The chain of events kicks off in late June and early July 1947, centered heavily around the Pacific Northwest. Newspaper clippings preserved in the FBI files show reports flooding in from Portland, Oregon, where patrol officers, harbor pilots, and private citizens all described flat, round objects traveling at terrific speed with no sound, no vapor trail, no visible propulsion. One United Airlines crew reported tracking five objects for approximately 45 miles before they disappeared. A Portland police officer described them traveling in a loose formation, the last disc fluttering in a side-to-side arc before vanishing.

An experienced pilot named Dick Rankin, brother of the late stunt pilot Tex Rankin and a man with over 7,000 hours of flying time, told the Portland Oregonian he had watched the objects from his lawn in Bakersfield on June 23. He counted ten of them flying north in formation, watched them reverse course about two hours later, heading south, and noted there were only seven on the return pass. His initial theory was that they were the Navy's experimental XFSU-1 "flying flapjack" aircraft, a thin, round craft with twin propellers, but the Navy and manufacturer had already publicly stated only one such prototype was ever built and it never left Connecticut.

The Army Wants the FBI's Help

What makes these documents genuinely remarkable is the picture they paint of the U.S. government's internal response. The Army Air Forces were taking the reports seriously enough to mobilize, but they were also deeply uncertain and, at times, clearly embarrassed.

Brigadier General George Schulgen, chief of the Requirements Intelligence Branch of Army Air Corps Intelligence, contacted the FBI directly in July 1947. According to an internal memo dated July 10, 1947, Schulgen told the Bureau the Air Corps had taken the position that every effort must be made to run down the flying discs and determine whether they were real, and if so, to learn everything possible about them. He said Air Corps scientists were working to determine whether the phenomenon was celestial in origin or represented a foreign body mechanically devised and controlled.

Schulgen also raised a darker possibility. He told the FBI he believed the first sightings might have been made by individuals with Communist sympathies, intended to create hysteria and fear of a secret Russian weapon. He asked the FBI for help tracking down the original witnesses and determining whether their reports were sincere or prompted by a desire for publicity or political motives.

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was interested, but he had conditions. A handwritten note in his hand on one of the memos reads: "I would do it, but before agreeing to it, we must insist upon full access to discs recovered. For instance, in the Ia. case, the Army grabbed it and would not let us have it for cursory examination."

This is not a small detail. The director of the FBI, in his own handwriting, is confirming that physical discs had been recovered, that the Army had possession of at least one, and that he was annoyed about being cut out of the loop.

What They Were Recovering

The files contain multiple reports of physical objects being collected. An FBI agent in Los Angeles described retrieving a disc that had allegedly landed in North Hollywood on July 9, 1947, burning on impact in a woman's garden. The object was described as two convex steel discs fused together at the outer edge, approximately two feet in diameter, with a vertical iron fin, a short pipe running into the interior, and what appeared to be a radio tube mounted in the center. Military intelligence at Fort MacArthur examined it and concluded it was a hoax, possibly built by local teenagers. A nearby service station employee corroborated this, telling agents he had overheard high school students laughing about having spent two weeks building it.

A disc recovered in Seattle was more elaborate. FBI teletype traffic from July 16, 1947 described a circular piece roughly 28 inches in diameter, cup-shaped on both sides, light gray on the outside and red inside, with printed letters that appeared to read "U.S.S.R." and also what was described as a hammer and sickle. It had radio tubes wired inside and a quart-sized cylindrical oil can fitted with rubber tubing. Navy and electronics experts who examined it concluded the disc could not fly. No further investigation was conducted.

A disc found on a Wisconsin fairground by a city electrician was described as 19 inches in diameter, possibly cardboard covered in silver airplane dope material, with a small wooden rudder, an RCA photo-electric cell, and a tiny electric motor with a propeller. Investigators concluded a juvenile probably built it.

In Wisconsin and on a New Hampshire lawn, metallic fragments were recovered from scorched grass and turned over to MIT scientists, who treated them as classified and described them as machine-tooled pieces subjected to terrific heat. Their analysis was never made publicly available through the file, and the report notes that military authorities in Boston were not informed.

The Turf War

Running through all of these documents is a persistent argument about who was actually in charge of investigating these reports. The FBI's position, stated in one internal memo, was that the Bureau should not get drawn into the investigations because the bulk of the discs turned out to be pranks. An addendum on the same memo contradicts this, with someone noting that it was his opinion the Bureau should cooperate with General Schulgen's request.

Bureau Bulletin No. 42, issued July 30, 1947, represented the official compromise position. Field offices were instructed to investigate each instance reported to their attention to determine whether it was a genuine sighting, imaginary, or a prank. They were told to report all results by teletype immediately, and were reminded that the Army Air Forces had assured the Bureau of complete cooperation, including making any recovered discs available for FBI examination.

That promise apparently held for a time. A memo dated July 24, 1947 notes that General Schulgen recontacted the FBI and gave assurances that all cooperation would be furnished to Bureau agents and that all discs recovered would be made available for FBI examination. He also pledged to share the findings of Air Corps scientists on an ongoing basis. By August, however, individual field offices were being told to defer to Army intelligence and not take jurisdiction in specific cases.

Civilians Write In

Alongside the official reports, the files contain a remarkable collection of letters written directly to J. Edgar Hoover by ordinary Americans who were both frightened and fascinated by what they were seeing.

A scientist working in the Physics Division at American Cyanamid's Stamford, Connecticut facility, a former MIT researcher connected to the Manhattan Project, wrote to the FBI in July with his personal theory: the flying saucers could be radio-controlled germ bombs or atom bombs circling the earth's orbit, capable of being directed to any target on demand. He noted that saucer sightings had been reported in a pattern that, when traced on a globe, formed a rough orbital path circling the earth. He also mentioned that a colleague was building a large telescope specifically for searching the stratosphere for atomic weapons.

A woman from Chicago wrote directly to Hoover in a handwritten note urging the FBI to ask newspapers not to publish any further reports on the discs until their origin could be determined, arguing that with the enemies America had both abroad and within its borders, the discs could be something far more serious than the press was treating them. She signed her note hastily, explaining she had lost two sons in the recent war and a third who had given everything for America, and she wanted the country genuinely protected.

From San Diego came something labeled "The Round Robin, The Flying Roll," a mimeographed memorandum addressed to scientists, aeronautical authorities, and public officials. Its anonymous author claimed to have obtained information through what they described as supernormal means, and offered a list of claims about the saucers: some carried crews while others were remote-controlled, their mission was peaceful, the visitors contemplated settling on this planet, they were not from any planet as we use the word but from an etheric plane that interpenetrates our own, and their craft could disintegrate any attacking aircraft at will using radiant energy. The document was forwarded to the War Department by Hoover's office.

What Was Never Resolved

The files do not end with answers. By August 1947 the reporting in the Portland area had dropped off, and investigators attributed the decrease partly to the story having lost its publicity value. A Portland FBI teletype noted no recent substantive reports of flying discs in the area and recommended no further investigation.

The most honest summary of where things stood comes from an internal memo noting that General Schulgen believed it was necessary to follow the matter through to determine, as near as possible, whether discs were in fact seen and to determine their origin. After all the witness interviews, the recovered objects, the Air Corps pilot who was interrogated by scientists and a psychologist, and remained, as the memo notes, adamant in his claim that he saw a flying disk, and all of Hoover's conditions and negotiations, that question was left unanswered.

The Army Air Forces continued their own investigation under what would become Project Sign and later Project Blue Book. The FBI quietly withdrew from the active flying disc investigation within months. The memos went into the files, eventually were declassified, and now sit in a collection that is, depending on your perspective, either a thorough record of Cold War hysteria or a paper trail that raises more questions than it closes.

Access the file: Here