CAP Liaison Officer Report, Kirtland Field, 1947 — USAAF Box 7 #227
A Civil Air Patrol liaison officer at Kirtland Field, New Mexico filed Incident #227 of the USAAF flying-object check-list — a 1947 report from the airfield adjacent to the nation's nuclear weapons assembly complex.
Background
The observer field of this checklist entry reads “CAP Liaie Officer, Kirtlend” — microfilm-era typography for CAP Liaison Officer, Kirtland. The reporting witness was a Civil Air Patrol liaison officer stationed at Kirtland Field on the southern edge of Albuquerque, New Mexico, and the garbled rendering is preserved here because it is how the entry actually appears in the released government file. In 1947, Kirtland was not an ordinary airfield. It sat directly adjacent to Sandia Base, the Armed Forces Special Weapons Program’s nuclear weapons assembly site, making the surrounding airspace among the most sensitive in the United States. A report filed from Kirtland in 1947 lands at the very start of the documented pattern of UAP observations around the American nuclear weapons complex — a pattern that would intensify dramatically over the following three years as Sandia logged 209 sightings of green orbs, discs, and fireballs, and that the government’s own PURSUE disclosure files now trace across four decades.
That the witness was a CAP liaison officer matters for how the report was handled. Civil Air Patrol officers were aviation-literate observers embedded in the military reporting chain, which is precisely why their sightings made it onto the USAAF check-list rather than stopping at a local police blotter. In 1947, the U.S. Army Air Forces recorded the incident as Incident #227 in the “Check-List - Unidentified Flying Objects” series archived in Box 7 of file 38_143685. The records were released by the Department of War on May 8, 2026 as part of the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE). The case is one of the first wave of “flying saucer” reports that swept the United States after the Kenneth Arnold sighting of June 1947 and the Roswell incident of July 1947.
What the form records
Incident #227 of the U.S. Army Air Forces “Check-List - Unidentified Flying Objects” series, archived in Box 7 of file 38_143685 and released by the Department of War on May 8, 2026 as part of the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE). The summary records that an unspecified observer reported a sighting near CAP Liaie Officer, Kirtlend.
Type of case
The case is a visual sighting reported by ground or air observers.
Status
All records released under the PURSUE program are designated unresolved by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office. The federal government has not concluded these 1947-era incidents were anomalous, has not concluded they were conventional, and has not ruled out either possibility. Conventional candidates for the 1947 saucer wave include the Project Mogul balloon flights then active over the U.S. Southwest, experimental jet and rocket aircraft, atmospheric optical effects, and astronomical objects misidentified at unusual angles.