Phoenix, Arizona UFO Sighting (July 7, 1947) — FBI Files (D6P184)
A first saucer wave case from Phoenix, Arizona. In July 1947, William Albert Rhodes photographed objects he believed to be flying discs in the Phoenix area.
Background
On July 7, 1947, in Phoenix, Arizona, 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
In July 1947, William Albert Rhodes photographed objects he believed to be flying discs in the Phoenix area. He later claimed the FBI borrowed his negatives but refused to return them when requested. Drew Pearson, a journalist, was interested in obtaining the photographs for his television program.
The number of witnesses is not specified in the released document.
Verbatim from the file
“photographs which the above captioned took of flying discs in the Phoeniz area in July of 1947.”. “the FBI borrowed his negatives of the flying discs and when asked for their return the FBI told Rhodes the negatives were not available.”
Type of case
The case includes photographic or video evidence of the unidentified object.
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.