Marley Park, Maryland UFO Sighting (August 19, 1949) — FBI Files
FBI records detail a 1949 investigation into flying disks discovered in Marley Park, Maryland, involving a search for a key witness in California.
Background
On August 19, 1949, in Marley Park, Maryland, 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 event occurred during a period of intense public and governmental preoccupation with aerial phenomena. The incident is part 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 term “flying saucer” became a staple of the American lexicon, fueled by a combination of Cold War anxieties and the rapid advancement of aerospace technology.
The geographical context of Marley Park, situated within the Mid-Atlantic region, placed it near several critical infrastructure points of interest to the federal government. During the late 1940s, the United States was heavily invested in the expansion of radar networks and the monitoring of the upper atmosphere. Consequently, reports of anomalous aerial activity were often treated with high-level scrutiny. 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. This administrative routing suggests that the phenomenon was viewed through the lens of national security and the potential for unauthorized incursions into domestic airspace.
What the document records
The primary documentation regarding this event includes an article in the Los Angeles Times, which reported that flying disks were discovered in Marley Park, Maryland. The investigation described in the files indicates a specific focus on a civilian named Jonathan Caldwell. According to the records, the U.S. Air Force was reportedly searching for Caldwell, as he was believed to have information regarding the disks. The investigative trail for Caldwell extended significantly across the country, as he was eventually located in Manhattan Beach, California. The information gathered from his location was being furnished to the Office of Special Investigations (OSI).
While the reports detail the pursuit of a witness and the presence of the disks in Maryland, the released document does not specify the number of witnesses present during the initial discovery in Marley Park. The nature of the reporting suggests a fragmented investigative process, where information was collected by various field offices and consolidated at the federal level.
Type of case
The case is categorized by reports that include descriptions of figures or beings associated with the object. Such accounts, involving biological or humanoid elements alongside mechanical or aerial phenomena, are a recurring theme in mid-century unidentified aerial phenomena literature. These details often complicated the distinction between purely atmospheric or technological anomalies and more complex, potentially biological encounters.
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 case reflects the broader scientific and intelligence-community challenges of the era, where distinguishing between secret military hardware and unknown phenomena was often impossible with the technology available.
Conventional candidates for sightings of this period include experimental aircraft, weather balloons, specifically the Project Mogul series deployed in the late 1940s to detect Soviet nuclear tests, and atmospheric optical phenomena such as sundogs and lenticular clouds. Additionally, astronomical objects including Venus, the Moon, and meteors near the horizon were frequently identified as the source of such sightings. The Marley Park incident remains a documented part of this historical period of aerial uncertainty.