Pendleton, Oregon UFO Sighting, 1947 — FBI Files
A first saucer wave case from Pendleton, Oregon. After landing in Pendleton, the agent described the objects to pilot friends, who suggested they might be guided missiles.
Background
In 1947, in Pendleton, Oregon, 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
After landing in Pendleton, the agent described the objects to pilot friends, who suggested they might be guided missiles. Several former Army pilots informed him they had been briefed about similar objects before combat, assuring him he wasn’t hallucinating. A former Army Air Forces pilot believed the objects were jet or rocket propelled ships being tested by the US government or a foreign power.
The number of witnesses is not specified in the released document.
Verbatim from the file
“Wheat you observed, I am convinced, is some type of jet or rocket propelled ship that iS am the process of being tested by our government or even it could possibly Be by, sone for.eagiaie: government”
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.