Placerville, California UFO Sighting (August 14, 1947) — FBI Files (D3P80)
A first saucer wave case from Placerville, California. While driving near Placerville, California, Key Switzer observed a metallic, rectangular object approximately four to six feet long.
Background
On August 14, 1947, in Placerville, 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
While driving near Placerville, California, Key Switzer observed a metallic, rectangular object approximately four to six feet long. The object was traveling at high speed and appeared to be in a shallow dive. It was briefly engulfed in a puff of dark gray smoke before disappearing completely, with no debris falling from the smoke trail.
The number of witnesses is not specified in the released document.
Verbatim from the file
""…an object, four to six feet in length, ten to fourteen inches wide, and of a metal color, bright like highly polished chromium."". ""…it was engulfed in a puff of dark ; gray about ten feet in diameter."". ""the object disappeared completely and there were no seen to have fallen from the smoke.""
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.