12° 25'N and 140° 20'E UFO Sighting (June 5, 1949) — USAF Files
A first saucer wave case from 12° 25'N and 140° 20'E. While on a routine weather reconnaissance mission, an RB-29 crew sighted a white, billowing substance at an altitude of 30,000 to 35,000 feet.
Background
On June 5, 1949, in 12° 25’N and 140° 20’E, 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 appears in U.S. Department of Defense documents.
What the document records
While on a routine weather reconnaissance mission, an RB-29 crew sighted a white, billowing substance at an altitude of 30,000 to 35,000 feet. The object appeared as a traveling contrail and was observed by two members of the crew.
The number of witnesses is not specified in the released document.
Verbatim from the file
“a white billowing substance was sighted at an altitude of 30000 to 35000 ft”. “What appeared to be a traveling contrail”
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.