1942 UAP Sighting — FBI Files (D5P99)
The US built an early model of a flying saucer in 1942, designed by Charles H. Zimmerman of NACA. It was elliptical, powered by piston engines and propellers, and capable of reaching 400-500 mph. The project was later taken over by the Navy.
Background
A UFO/UAP incident extracted from page 99 of 65_HS1-834228961_62-HQ-83894_Section_5, a declassified FBI vault file released by the Department of War on May 8, 2026 as part of the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE). The incident is dated 1942 and located in Unknown location.
What the file records
The US built an early model of a flying saucer in 1942, designed by Charles H. Zimmerman of NACA. It was elliptical, powered by piston engines and propellers, and capable of reaching 400-500 mph. The project was later taken over by the Navy.
Witnesses on file: U.S. Government engineers.
Verbatim from the file
“An early model of these saucers was built by U.S. engineers in 1942, achieved more than 100 successful test flights.”. “The first U.S. model, designed by Charles H. Zimmerman, of NACA, was elliptical in shape, powered by two piston engines and driven by twin propellers.”. “Idea behind those original flying-saucer projects, both in U.S. and abroad in Germany and Italy, was to overcome basic drawbacks of conventional aircraft by new techniques.”
Status of the case
The page-level assessment recorded in the file is: no agency assessment. All records released under the PURSUE program are designated unresolved by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office unless otherwise stated, meaning the federal government has not concluded the events were anomalous, has not concluded they were conventional, and has not ruled out either possibility. Conventional candidates for sightings of this period include experimental aircraft, weather balloons (especially the Project Mogul series), atmospheric optical phenomena, and astronomical objects.