Astoria, Oregon UFO Sighting (Monday) — FBI Files
An FBI-documented report details the sighting of two disc-shaped objects flying southwest over Astoria, Oregon, during the mid-twentieth century.
Background
On a Monday in Astoria, Oregon, U.S. government investigators recorded an unidentified-object incident that was later released to the public on May 8, 2026, as part of the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE). Astoria, situated at the mouth of the Columbia River where it meets the Pacific Ocean, has historically been a significant maritime and industrial hub. Its geography, characterized by dense coastal forests and rolling hills, provides a landscape where atmospheric anomalies or low-flying aircraft can easily be obscured from view.
This specific incident belongs to the first wave of “flying saucer” reports that swept the United States following the Kenneth Arnold sighting of June 1947 and the Roswell incident of July 1947. During this era, the sudden influx of reports regarding unidentified aerial phenomena created a period of heightened public and military scrutiny. The case was officially filed with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Under the Bureau’s standing protocols for the protection of vital installations, various field offices, including those in Knoxville, Albuquerque, and Los Angeles, were responsible for routing UFO reports to headquarters for centralized processing.
What the document records
The primary account within the released documentation originates from Jack Hayes, who was a patient at St. Mary’s Hospital at the time of the observation. Hayes reported seeing two disc-shaped objects flying southwest at a rapid speed. The trajectory of these objects concluded when they disappeared behind the hills of the local landscape.
While the documentation provides a specific eyewitness account, the total number of witnesses to the event is not specified in the released file. This lack of a definitive witness count is common in archival reports from this period, where individual observations were often processed as isolated incidents unless a secondary, corroborating report was filed simultaneously.
Type of case
The physical description provided by the witness characterizes the objects as being disc- or saucer-shaped. This terminology aligns with the prevailing linguistic trends of the late 1940s, as the public and media began using “saucer” to describe objects that exhibited non-ballistic flight patterns or unusual structural silhouettes.
Status
All records released under the PURSUE program are designated as unresolved by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) by default. The federal government has not concluded that the events recorded in the Astoria file were anomalous, nor has it concluded that they were conventional, and the possibility of either remains open.
When analyzing sightings from this historical period, investigators often consider several conventional candidates. These include experimental aircraft being tested in the post-war era, weather balloons—specifically those associated with the Project Mogul series in the late 1940s—and various atmospheric optical phenomena such as sundogs or lenticular clouds. Additionally, astronomical objects such as Venus, the Moon, or meteors appearing near the horizon are frequently evaluated as potential explanations for unidentified lights or shapes. The Astoria case remains part of this broader, unclassified corpus of mid-century aerial observations.