Phoenix, Arizona UFO Sighting (April 30, 1947) — FBI Files
A first saucer wave case from Phoenix, Arizona. In April 1947, William Rhodes reported to the Phoenix FBI office that he had photographs of flying discs.
Background
On April 30, 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 April 1947, William Rhodes reported to the Phoenix FBI office that he had photographs of flying discs. He brought the negatives to the office on August 30, 1947, and was informed they would be passed to Air Force intelligence with no guarantee of return. Rhodes agreed to this arrangement.
The number of witnesses is not specified in the released document.
Type of case
The case is a visual sighting reported by ground or air observers.
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.