Kenneth Arnold UFO Sighting, Kelso, Washington / Tacoma (Washington, August 1, 1947)
A first saucer wave case from Kelso, Washington / Tacoma, Washington. On August 1st, the reporter received another anonymous call stating a meeting was in progress in Arnold's hotel room regarding the crashed B-25 and its alleged flying disc fragments.
Background
On August 1, 1947, in Kelso, Washington / Tacoma, 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
On August 1st, the reporter received another anonymous call stating a meeting was in progress in Arnold’s hotel room regarding the crashed B-25 and its alleged flying disc fragments. The caller claimed the plane was sabotaged and identified themselves as a switchboard operator. The reporter found Arnold with a United Airlines pilot, Emil J. Smith, who emphasized the need for confidentiality.
The number of witnesses is not specified in the released document.
Verbatim from the file
“the information must be very strictly confidential.”. “the B-25 which crashed that morning in Kelso was carrying flying disc fragments from California”. “ARNOLD told him he could make no statement”
Type of case
The case is a pilot or aircrew sighting, observed from the cockpit during flight.
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.