Seattle, Washington UFO Sighting (August 1949) — USAF Files
A first saucer wave case from Seattle, Washington. In August 1949, controllers at the 143rd National Guard Aircraft Control and Warning Squadron in Seattle, Washington observed an unidentified flying object over the city.
Background
In 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
In August 1949, controllers at the 143rd National Guard Aircraft Control and Warning Squadron in Seattle, Washington observed an unidentified flying object over the city. The weather was clear with unrestricted visibility. No photographs or sketches of the object were available.
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.