Kelso, Washington UFO Sighting (August 1, 1947) — FBI Files (D3P40)
A first saucer wave case from Kelso, Washington. Morrello received an anonymous phone call claiming a B-25 crash at Kelso, Washington, carried disc fragments and involved Army Intelligence officers.
Background
On August 1, 1947, in Kelso, Washington, 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
Morrello received an anonymous phone call claiming a B-25 crash at Kelso, Washington, carried disc fragments and involved Army Intelligence officers. The caller asserted the crash was not accidental and that the Sheriff’s Office had restricted access to the site. Subsequent calls alleged a connection to Kenneth Arnold and a shooting down of an aircraft near Mount Rainier.
The number of witnesses is not specified in the released document.
Verbatim from the file
“the B-25 which crashed at Kelso, Washington was carrying disc fragments”. “the B=25 was definitely shot down”. “the Sheriff’s Office had been kept away from the crash and that’ no civilians had been allowed near the plane.”
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.