FBI Vault: the Bureau’s UFO files
🏛️ Federal Bureau of Investigation
The FBI’s public collection of its records on “flying discs” and unidentified flying objects, released under the Freedom of Information Act and posted in the FBI Vault reading room.
Key points
- In the summer of 1947 the FBI briefly agreed to help the Army Air Forces check out disc reports, then pulled back.
- Most later pages are letters, newspaper clippings and tips the Bureau received and passed on to the military.
- The collection is split into many parts; it is scanned, so text search inside the PDFs can be patchy.
Why it matters
It shows how a law-enforcement agency dealt with the first wave of sightings, and it is the source of several famous documents, including the Hottel memo.
Read it yourself
The summary above is ours, written in plain English. Always check the original: the official files on this page go straight to the source, and each one has a backup copy saved by the Internet Archive in case the government page moves.
Federal Bureau of Investigation. (1947). FBI Vault: the Bureau’s UFO files. https://vault.fbi.gov/UFORelated records
CIA UFO records collection
Central Intelligence Agency
The CIA’s online reading-room collection of declassified UFO material: memos, panel papers and reports from the late 1940s onward. Roughly 900 pages first came out in 1978 after a Freedom of Information lawsuit.
65 HS1-101634279 100-DE-18221 Serial 844
FBI
An FBI memo from 1958 reporting a UFO sighting by a Detroit man who described a "circular object with a crystal-type dome," and recommending that the information be forwarded to "proper air force authorities."
65 HS1-101634279 100-DE-26505
FBI
An FBI report from 1957 detailing the interview with Wladyslaw Krasuski, who recounted seeing a large, circular, vertically-rising vehicle in 1944 Germany near a German military compound.
Washington State ‘UFO’ Investigation, 1952-1960
FBI
This file details an investigation of various sightings of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) in Washington state between July 1952 and August 1960. This file includes memoranda and correspondence between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Air Force regarding UFO sightings.