1949 UAP Sighting — FBI Files (D5P75)
The Air Force publicly announced in December 1949 that it had discontinued its intelligence project investigating flying saucers. This decision followed two years of investigation, during which the majority of reported incidents were attributed to misidentified conventional objec
Background
A UFO/UAP incident extracted from page 75 of 65_HS1-834228961_62-HQ-83894_Section_5, 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 December 1949 and located in Unknown location.
What the file records
The Air Force publicly announced in December 1949 that it had discontinued its intelligence project investigating flying saucers. This decision followed two years of investigation, during which the majority of reported incidents were attributed to misidentified conventional objects like weather balloons. The Army and Navy concurred with the Air Force’s decision.
Witnesses on file: Air Force Intelligence.
Status of the case
The page-level assessment recorded in the file is: identified as conventional items. 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.