1949 UAP Sighting — FBI Files (D7P75)
By December 1949, after investigating 375 reports over two years, the Air Force publicly concluded that the flying saucers were attributable to misidentified conventional objects, hoaxes, or mass hysteria. However, Project Saucer was not fully disbanded, and the Air Force maintai
Background
A UFO/UAP incident extracted from page 75 of 65_HS1-834228961_62-HQ-83894_Section_7, 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
By December 1949, after investigating 375 reports over two years, the Air Force publicly concluded that the flying saucers were attributable to misidentified conventional objects, hoaxes, or mass hysteria. However, Project Saucer was not fully disbanded, and the Air Force maintained that national security was not endangered.
Witnesses on file: Air Force.
Verbatim from the file
“The flying saucers were apparitions, it said, all attributable either to a failure to recognize conventional objects, to hoaxes, or to a mild form of mass hysteria.”
Status of the case
The page-level assessment recorded in the file is: identified as hoax. 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.