Tempe, Arizona UFO Sighting (August 1947) — FBI Files
FBI records from August 194
Background
In August 1947, in Tempe, 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). This specific sighting occurred during a period of intense national preoccupation with aerial anomalies. The incident is one of the first wave of “flying saucer” reports that swept the United States following the Kenneth Arnold sighting of June 1947 and the Roswell incident of July 1947. During this era, the sudden influx of reports regarding disc-shaped objects led to a cultural and scientific phenomenon often referred to as the “flying saucer” craze, which forced military and intelligence agencies to develop standardized methods for tracking and documenting aerial phenomena.
The geographic location of the event, Tempe, sits within the Salt River Valley, an area that has historically been subject to significant aerial activity due to its proximity to major military installations and burgeoning aerospace developments in the Southwest. 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’s involvement was primarily focused on ensuring that unidentified objects did not represent a threat to national security or the integrity of sensitive military infrastructure. The bureaucratic process of routing these reports through various regional offices highlights the organized, albeit reactive, nature of government surveillance regarding unidentified aerial phenomena during the early Cold War period.
What the document records
The released documentation details a specific encounter involving a man in Tempe, Arizona, who claimed to see a saucer two feet in diameter disappear behind trees. According to the report, the individual pursued the object and stated that it took off at high speed toward Phoenix. The movement of the object, characterized by its sudden acceleration and directional change, aligns with many contemporary reports of the era that described “maneuverability” inconsistent with known aeronautical technology of the late 1940s.
The number of witnesses is not specified in the released document. While the primary account focuses on the actions of a single individual, the lack of a definitive witness count is common in archival FBI files from this period, as field offices often prioritized the recording of the physical description and trajectory of the object over a complete census of observers.
Type of case
The witnesses described the object as disc- or saucer-shaped. This terminology was standard during the 1947 period, following the linguistic shift caused by the Kenneth Arnold report, which popularized the concept of metallic, disc-like craft moving through the atmosphere.
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 ambiguity of the status reflects the difficulty in verifying mid-century sightings where physical evidence was rarely recovered and eyewitness testimony was often the only available data point.
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 proximity of the object’s trajectory to Phoenix also allows for the consideration of high-altitude surveillance or testing, though the specific dimensions and low-altitude behavior described in the Tempe report remain unverified by contemporary physical data.