Muroc, California UFO Sighting (July 8, 1947) — FBI Files (D3P71)
A first saucer wave case from Muroc, California. On July 8, 1947, witnesses observed two silver, disc-like objects flying towards Mojave, California at high speed and an estimated altitude of 8000 feet.
Background
On July 8, 1947, in Muroc, California, 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 July 8, 1947, witnesses observed two silver, disc-like objects flying towards Mojave, California at high speed and an estimated altitude of 8000 feet. The objects were flying one behind the other and made no audible sound. Shortly after, a third silver disc-shaped object was sighted flying in a tight circle at the same altitude, leading witnesses to rule out weather balloons or conventional aircraft.
The number of witnesses is not specified in the released document.
Verbatim from the file
""There were two, silver colored disc like objects flying toward Mojave, California, one directly back of the other, at a speed of about 300 to 400 miles per hour, having an altitude of approximately 8000 feet."". ""I was convinced these objects were not weather balloons due to the horizontal position in which they were flying."". ""This object was flying in a tight circle, neither losing nor gaining altitude, at approximately eight thousand feet, therefore I was convinced it could not have been a weather balloon, and because of the tight circle it could not have been any type aircraft.""
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.