Seattle, Washington UFO Sighting (25 August 1949) — USAF Files
A first saucer wave case from Seattle, Washington. Two air traffic controllers, Frieman and Watson, observed an object resembling a jet aircraft near the Olympic Mountains.
Background
On 25 August 1949, in Seattle, Washington, 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
Two air traffic controllers, Frieman and Watson, observed an object resembling a jet aircraft near the Olympic Mountains. They alerted McChord Flight Service Center, which confirmed no authorized jet or fighter aircraft were flying in the area. The controllers maintained the object displayed characteristics of a jet and moved at a high speed.
The number of witnesses is not specified in the released document.
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.