1947 UAP Sighting — FBI Files (D16P19)
On New Year's Eve and New Year's morning, a red light was repeatedly observed by multiple witnesses, including a tank park sentry, guard tower personnel, and Pfc. Viets. The light hovered and moved in different directions, remaining at an elevation of approximately 3500 feet. One
Background
A UFO/UAP incident extracted from page 19 of 65_HS1-834228961_62-HQ-83894_SUB_A, a declassified FBI vault file released by the Department of War on May 8, 2026 as part of the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE). The incident is dated New Year’s Eve and located in Unknown location.
What the file records
On New Year’s Eve and New Year’s morning, a red light was repeatedly observed by multiple witnesses, including a tank park sentry, guard tower personnel, and Pfc. Viets. The light hovered and moved in different directions, remaining at an elevation of approximately 3500 feet. One soldier, Pfc. Bennett, even grabbed a butcher knife, believing it was landing in a tank shed.
Witnesses on file: tank park sentry, guard tower, sergeant of the guard, Pfc. Bennett, Pfc. Viets.
Verbatim from the file
“It’s landing in the tank shed!”. “when they saw it come up there and lay under the moon until morning.”
Status of the case
The page-level assessment recorded in the file is: no agency assessment. All records released under the PURSUE program are designated unresolved by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office unless otherwise stated, meaning the federal government has not concluded the events were anomalous, has not concluded 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), atmospheric optical phenomena, and astronomical objects.