Crescent City, Calif UAP Encounter, 1947 — USAAF Box 7 #199
Incident #199 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 E
Background
Crescent City sits on California’s far northern coast, twenty miles south of the Oregon line — squarely inside the Pacific Northwest corridor where the 1947 saucer wave began. Kenneth Arnold’s June 24 sighting over Mount Rainier set off a cascade of reports down the coast through July, and the USAAF check-list preserves the wave’s geographic texture: clusters in Washington, Oregon, and northern California, filed by ordinary civilians whose names and occupations the Air Forces dutifully recorded. The witness in this entry appears in the file as “Rager W. Allen” — the OCR-era rendering of what was almost certainly Roger W. Allen — and the form’s surviving fragments show the check-list’s own anatomy: fields for the witness’s address, occupation “and/or hobbies,” and a standardized “Attention Attracted by” line, here answered with glint of light. The Air Forces were not just logging objects; they were profiling witness credibility, one of the earliest systematic attempts to separate observation from observer in the UFO record.
In 1947, the U.S. Army Air Forces recorded the incident as Incident #199 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 #199 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 Rager W. Allen, 3rd and Leuf Ave., : Crescent City, Calif, and/or hobbies: Berber Attention Attracted by: Glint of light reported a sighting near Crescent City, Calif.
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.