MacDill Field History, July 1947: A Lakeland Man's 'Flying Disc' Model
A 970-page base history gives one short entry to the saucer craze: on July 10, 1947, a Lakeland man walked into MacDill Field's intelligence office carrying a homemade model of a 'flying disc.'
What this record is
This is the official monthly history of MacDill Field, Tampa, Florida, for July 1947, covering the 326th AAF Base Unit, the 307th Bombardment Group (Very Heavy) and the 330th Air Service Group. The base historian, M/Sgt. R. N. Hayton, compiled it. With its supporting documents it runs to 970 pages. It was classified SECRET until the classification was canceled in 1950, and the Air Force Declassification Office cleared it again in 2025. Nearly all of it deals with running a bomber base in the summer of 1947: a trial of the Hobson Plan reorganization, personnel and supply problems, housing at Gadsden Park, telephones, maintenance, and the 307th Bomb Group’s deployment to Europe. It is in the UAP transfer because of a single entry titled “‘Flying Disc’ Seen at MacDill Field.”
What it says about UFOs
Two pages out of 970 mention a flying disc, and they are really one item. Page 17 of the PDF is the table of contents, which lists “‘Flying Disc’ Seen at MacDill Field” at page 163 of the history, under the chapter on special projects. Page 329 of the PDF is the entry itself, a paragraph and a half.
Despite its heading, the entry does not describe a sighting. On July 10, 1947, a local man, Hiram William Griffin of 602 North Tennessee Avenue, Lakeland, Florida, came to MacDill Field’s intelligence office with what the historian calls a “so-called model” of the then highly publicized “Flying Disc.” An inquiry into his background concluded that he was “of the easily excitable type” with a vivid imagination. On the other hand, he had served a combat tour in the African theater on a Navy troop transport and knew current aircraft types well. The historian adds that the model was “quite elaborately constructed.” The footnote cites a photograph of Griffin with his “Flying Disc” as the source. Whether that photograph survives in the scanned appendices is not clear from the OCR. The entry records no further action.
The entry just before it on the same page has a faint echo. It summarizes Major Edward M. Jones’s report on the Institute of Navigation meeting in Washington in June 1947, where, the historian writes, “several far-reaching theories were advanced concerning travel to the various planets.” Jones’s report, reproduced at pages 927 to 931, shows that this was a talk on rocket navigation by Dr. Samuel Herrick of the University of California’s astronomy department (the OCR spells the name “Herricks”). Herrick thought interplanetary travel would one day be possible and gave rough travel times to Venus and the Moon. It has nothing to do with flying saucers, but it shows what was in the air at MacDill the same month.
Context
Griffin walked in two days after Roswell Army Air Field’s July 8 press release about a recovered “flying disc,” at the peak of the national craze that followed Kenneth Arnold’s sighting of June 24. Bases across the country fielded walk-ins, phone calls and theories that week, and most of it never went further than a line in a local log. See the Kenneth Arnold sighting and, for the Air Force study that began the following year, the Project Sign progress report.
Status
The entry is honest about what it is: a civilian with a model, assessed as excitable but knowledgeable, and recorded as a curiosity. No object was seen at MacDill, whatever the heading says. The record adds a small, well-documented example of how the 1947 craze reached an ordinary bomber base, and nothing more.