St. Maries, Idaho UFO Sighting (July 1947) — FBI Files
In July 194
Background
In July 1947, in St. Maries, Idaho, 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 occurred during a period of intense public and governmental preoccupation with aerial anomalies. This specific timeframe is significant as it represents one of the first wave of “flying saucer” reports that swept the United States following the Kenneth Arnold sighting in June 1947 and the Roswell incident in July 1947. During this era, the term “flying saucer” had entered the common lexicon, and the sudden appearance of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) prompted a surge in civilian reports across the American West.
The geography of St. Maries, situated in the rugged, forested terrain of North Idaho, provided a backdrop common to many mid-century sightings, where mountainous landscapes and dense timber could obscure or complicate the observation of low-altitude objects. 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. At the time, the FBI maintained a systematic approach to monitoring such reports, viewing them through the lens of national security and the potential for unauthorized surveillance of sensitive domestic or military sites.
What the document records
The released documentation details an event in which a group of people witnessed eight disc-shaped objects land on a mountainside near St. Maries, Idaho. The movement of these objects was described as highly irregular. The objects descended at high speed, slowed down, and then “fluttered like leaves” to the ground. This specific aerodynamic behavior—moving from high-velocity descent to a fluttering, unstable motion—is a recurring element in many anomalous aerial reports from the late 1940s.
After the objects completed their descent and landed, they could no longer be seen despite subsequent searches of the area. While the visual evidence of the landing was recorded, the number of witnesses is not specified in the released document. The investigation focused on the physical movement of the objects and the inability of observers to track them once they reached the surface of the mountainside.
Verbatim from the file
The official FBI file contains direct observations from the participants. The documentation states that “she and others in her party had seen the saucers land on a mountainside near St. Maries, Idaho.” The description of the descent is particularly notable, noting that “they [appeared] in view at extreme speed, suddenly slowed, and then ‘fluttered like leaves to the ground.’” The report further captures the confusion of the observers regarding the objects’ interaction with the environment, stating, “We could see them flutter down into the timber yet we couldn’t see that they did anything to the trees.”
Type of case
The witnesses described the objects as disc- or saucer-shaped. This morphology was consistent with the prevailing descriptions of unidentified objects during the summer of 1947, following the influential reports of much larger, crescent-shaped or disc-like craft.
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. The lack of a definitive conclusion reflects the difficulty in verifying sightings that occur over inaccessible terrain or involve transient phenomena.
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. The fluttering motion described in the St. Maries case is often analyzed by researchers to determine if it aligns with the behavior of known atmospheric phenomena or the aerodynamic properties of high-altitude balloons.