Hackensack, New Jersey UFO Sighting (August 13, 1947) — FBI Files
A first saucer wave case from Hackensack, New Jersey. Two individuals, TRUEX and CASELLA, observed an object approximately two to three feet in diameter moving rapidly about two hundred yards above the ground.
Background
On August 13, 1947, in Hackensack, New Jersey, U.S. government investigators recorded an unidentified-object incident later released to the public on May 8, 2026 as part of the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE). The incident 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. The case was filed with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, whose Knoxville, Albuquerque, Los Angeles, and other field offices routed UFO reports to headquarters under the Bureau’s standing protocols for the protection of vital installations.
What the document records
Two individuals, TRUEX and CASELLA, observed an object approximately two to three feet in diameter moving rapidly about two hundred yards above the ground. The object traveled in a straight, northward path without any visible means of propulsion. TRUEX initially thought it was a balloon, but dismissed that idea due to the lack of wind and strings.
The number of witnesses is not specified in the released document.
Verbatim from the file
""Maybe it’s a flying saucer"". “it looked more like a large, flat child’s cup than anything else he could think of”
Type of case
The witnesses described the object as disc- or saucer-shaped.
Status
All records released under the PURSUE program are designated unresolved by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) by default. The federal government has not concluded that the events were anomalous, has not concluded that 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 in the late 1940s), atmospheric optical phenomena such as sundogs and lenticular clouds, and astronomical objects including Venus, the Moon, and meteors near the horizon.