65_HS1-834228961_62-HQ-83894_Section_3

Short overview

Section 3 of the FBI’s 62-HQ-83894 file covers July to early October 1947: field-office memos, teletypes, Fourth Air Force intelligence reports, affidavits and press clippings from the weeks in which the FBI helped the Army Air Forces look into flying disc reports, ending with J. Edgar Hoover’s order to stop.

Why this is interesting

The dominant case is the Tacoma affair: two men from a Tacoma harbor patrol claimed that disc fragments had struck their boat and offered “rock formations” from Maury Island, and two Army Air Forces intelligence officers, Captain Davidson and Lieutenant Brown, died when their B-25 crashed near Kelso, Washington, on August 1, 1947, after interviewing them; FBI agents later obtained a signed statement in which the two men admitted their claim was false, and the section contains the crash rescue report and long Seattle field reports. Also included are a private pilot’s own typed account of the objects he saw over the Cascade Mountains on June 24, 1947, Fourth Air Force incident reports and California affidavits, laboratory checks on supposed disc fragments from New Hampshire and an instrument found in Illinois that turned out to resemble an old radio loudspeaker. The section ends with Hoover’s letter of September 27, 1947, to Major General George C. McDonald, objecting that the FBI was expected to chase objects found on the ground, and the bulletin of October 1, 1947, telling agents to refer all future disc reports to the Air Forces.

Selected passages

• “Captain Davidson and Lieutenant Brown left Tacoma, Washington in a B-25 to return to Hamilton Field California about 2:30 A.M. August 1, 1947 and were killed when their plane crashed at Kelso, Washington,”
• “it appeared to him to be a part or portions of an old-type radio loud speaker.”
• “My attention has been called to instructions disseminated by the Air Forces relative to this matter.”