Twin Falls, Idaho UFO Sighting (August 19, 1947) — FBI Files (D2P57 var 2)
A first saucer wave case from Twin Falls, Idaho. On the evening of August 19th, three witnesses observed a rapidly moving object resembling a flying saucer traveling from southwest to northeast.
Background
On August 19, 1947, in Twin Falls, 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 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
On the evening of August 19th, three witnesses observed a rapidly moving object resembling a flying saucer traveling from southwest to northeast. Approximately ten minutes later, they saw ten similar objects flying in the same direction in a triangular formation. Three of these objects broke off and headed north, while the remaining ones maintained their formation.
The number of witnesses is not specified in the released document.
Type of case
The witnesses described the object as disc- or saucer-shaped.
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.