The UFO Files

On April 7, 1950, the FBI New York office processed a multi-page translation Document, cataloged under Class and Case Number 0062 83894, Sub 1, Serial 220. The file, marked with the administrative instruction DO NOT DESTROY, contained a letter from a Veracruz, Mexico resident named Miguel Angel García Macías, who claimed the United States possessed atomic-powered stratospheric aerostats. This epis...

On a century-old night in the French town of Laigle, stones fell from the sky, transitioning from dismissed myth to scientific object. One hundred years later, this shift serves as the opening argument for the COMETA report, a translated analysis titled "UFOs and Defense: What Should We Prepare For?" that reached U.S. records in the spring of two thousand and one. This episode examines h...

On the night of January 6, 1950, two spherical objects appeared over Olathe, Kansas, remaining motionless for ten to fifteen minutes before accelerating silently toward the southwest. Within seventy-two hours, this observation was transformed into a restricted military intelligence report, formally cataloged and routed to the Commanding General of the Air Materiel Command at Wright-Patterson Air F...

On September 2, 1966, a letter arrived at the FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., from a widow in Goffstown, New Hampshire. Florence C. Dow, a manager at the New Hampshire Insurance Company, wrote to J. Edgar Hoover to express her fear that a three-dollar subscription to the Amalgamated Flying Saucer Clubs of America had unintentionally linked her name to the communist party. This episode examin...

At exactly 16:00 P.M. on August 4, 1947, a Pan American Airways Constellation cruising at 8,000 feet near the Bedford Radio Beacon encountered an unexpected aerial event. A navigator in the co-pilot seat sighted a deep gold, elliptical object flying five miles away, while the aircraft commander, banking to investigate, simultaneously reported a bright orange, cylindrical object on the opposite sid...

On April 24, 1964, in a barren arroyo southwest of Socorro, New Mexico, Officer Lonnie Zamora discovered a series of physical markings pressed into the desert floor. These included four distinct, rectangular depressions, each measuring sixteen by six inches, paired with four scorched patches of grass and three shallow, four-inch diameter circular indentations resembling the impression of a jar lid...

On May 24, 1950, personnel from the private contractor Land-Air, Incorporated, stationed near Vaughn, New Mexico, logged the sighting of eight to ten unexplained aerial objects. This was not a civilian report, but a coordinated observation by a scientific team operating under a United States Air Force contract as part of Project Twinkle, a twenty-four-hour watch established to monitor mysterious p...

On the first page of the February 6, 1954, issue of the publication Valor, a handwritten inscription by Redondo Beach truck driver Truman Bethurum declared his alleged encounters with a female commandant and her crew of space explorers as a true story. This handwritten claim, preserved within federal records, signals a pivotal moment when the government’s interest in aerial phenomena collided with...

If the object came sufficiently near other aircraft or known objects, check surfaces with Geiger counters for possible radioactivity. This instruction, written for field officers, was not the work of a laboratory team but was issued by the Headquarters of the United States Air Force Directorate of Intelligence on February 16, 1949. This directive, officially titled Air Intelligence Requirements Me...

On February 18, 1948, Leland Sammons stood six feet from a four-foot funnel-shaped object hovering above his home near Stockton, Kansas. The device wobbled, belched fire, and protruded a pipe toward his midsection before departing in a shower of sparks, leaving behind a wet yard that remained unburned despite the intense heat radiating from the object. This account, labeled Exhibit B in an investi...

On July 31, 1969, inside a secure briefing room at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins reviewed the Apollo 11 Technical Crew Debriefing. The conversation turned to a sighting of an object of sizeable dimension, described by Armstrong as an open suitcase, observed through a monocular while the crew traveled toward the Moon. This investigation ex...

On October 27, 2020, at 01:12:21 Zulu time, an aircrew member of the 77th Expeditionary Fighter Squadron encountered two infrared-significant contacts that circled one another before vanishing from sensors in one-thirtieth of a second. This encounter, recorded under document identifier DOW-UAP-D58, featured noise jamming and two red blinking strobes, marking a high-stakes moment in an otherwise ro...

Over Iraq in May 2022, an American surveillance crew tracked a Russian-built Sukhoi fighter landing near Al Asad airfield and identified it on sight — down to the variant. The same crew, the same sensors, the same night, logged one more object they could only call a possible UAP. That contrast — professionals who can name everything in the airspace, hitting the one entry where their skill ran out...

In June 1947, a government office logged a sighting on a standardized form that was already printed with fields for altitude, speed, color, shape, and sound.  The witness was an agent of a science fiction magazine, and the government filed the report anyway. That single checklist is one of 111 files the Department of War released in 2026, more than 3,800 pages spanning from 1947 to the present day...