65_HS1-834228961_62-HQ-83894_Section_5
Section 5 of the FBI's 62-HQ-83894 file, July 1949 to September 1950, with Internal Security memoranda, a radar report of an unknown object circling over Oak Ridge, Tennessee, on March 1, 1950, and correspondence about privately submitted flying-saucer photographs.
Document Highlights
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Short overview
Section 5 of the FBI headquarters file 62-HQ-83894 on flying discs, covering serials 186 to 245 from July 1949 to September 1950: internal memoranda, teletypes, military intelligence reports, citizens’ letters with the Bureau’s replies, and press material.
Why this is interesting
The section opens in July 1949 with a planned convention for people who had seen flying saucers in Alexandria, Louisiana, and a letter, read aloud to D. M. Ladd, from a man who said he had been knocked to the ground by a departing saucer in the mountains near Los Angeles in 1947; in August the San Antonio office reported that reports on phenomena around Camp Hood, Texas, arrived in such numbers that it reviewed them and destroyed those of no FBI interest. Military reports include an OSI message of January 16, 1950, relaying a newspaper story about crashed saucers with three-foot-tall occupants, and on March 22, 1950, Washington SAC Guy Hottel forwarded a similar secondhand account of three saucers recovered in New Mexico. In early March 1950 FBI, Army, Air Force and AEC staff examined a radar contact over Oak Ridge, Tennessee, reported by a private radar operator, which was ultimately judged quite improbable. In a memo of March 28, 1950, answering J. Edgar Hoover’s question about the facts, D. M. Ladd reported that the Air Force had ended its project because most incidents were misidentifications and was conducting no active investigation. The section closes with photos from Louisville, a New Mexico summary of aerial phenomena from December 1948 to May 1950 and further citizens’ letters.
Selected passages
- “An investigator for the Air Forces stated that three so-called flying saucers had been recovered in New Mexico.”
- “after two years of investigation over three-fourths of the incidents regarding flying saucers proved to be misidentifications of a wide variety of conventional items such as lighted weather balloons and other air-borne objects.”
- “They reiterated that the Air Force is conducting no active investigation to determine whether flying saucers exist or what they might happen to be.”