27th Fighter-Escort Wing History, 1950: Saucer Calls at Bergstrom
A 258-page wing history from Bergstrom AFB mentions flying saucers twice: in late March 1950 the wing intelligence office fielded numerous calls about alleged sightings. No sighting is described.
In the last week of March 1950, the intelligence office of a Strategic Air Command fighter wing in Texas found its phone ringing with questions about flying saucers. That is the whole of the UFO content in this 258-page record. It is still a small, dated trace of how the public saucer excitement of spring 1950 reached an ordinary Air Force base.
What this record is
This is the monthly history of the 27th Fighter-Escort Wing at Bergstrom Air Force Base, Austin, Texas, for March 1950. The wing was a fighter unit under Eighth Air Force and Strategic Air Command, and this month’s entries show it taking delivery of and modifying F-84 aircraft. The history was prepared by First Lieutenant Sherwood T. Avery (page 3 of the PDF), and its short chapters on personnel, supply, base facilities and operations are followed by a long run of weekly activity reports from the wing’s staff offices. It was classified SECRET, and the Air Force Declassification Office declassified it in full on 2 May 2025 as case 342UAP00001. Most of it is routine: runway resealing, F-84 modifications, gunnery at Matagorda Island, court-martial dockets, softball diamonds. It was almost certainly included in the UAP transfer because of the two lines below.
What it says about UFOs
Two pages mention flying saucers, and neither describes a sighting.
The first is the monthly chronology on page 9 of the PDF. Its entry for 31 March 1950 reads: “Wing A-2 Officer received numerous calls concerning alleged flying saucer observations.” (The typed original spells it “alledged.”) A-2 was the wing’s intelligence staff.
The second is the weekly activities report for 25 to 31 March 1950, on page 200 of the PDF. Under “Office of the Wing A-2,” alongside routine entries about a departure report, maps drawn for an Eighth Air Force project and thirteen intelligence documents processed, one line says the office “received several calls and made personal contacts in connection with alleged flying saucer observations.”
That is all. The history gives no dates or places for the reported sightings, no descriptions and no names of callers. It does not say what the office did beyond answering calls and making “personal contacts,” and it does not say whether any report went to Project Grudge, the Air Force’s UFO project at the time. A search of the full OCR text for other terms turns up nothing further.
Context
March 1950 was a lively month for flying saucers in the press. The best-known episode was the mass sighting reported at Farmington, New Mexico, on 17 March, and national magazines were running saucer stories that spring. The Air Force’s own program was at a low point. Project Grudge, the successor to Project Sign, had issued its final report in late 1949 and was investigating very little. In that climate a base intelligence office was a natural place for local people to call. The larger history of Air Force investigation is covered in the Project Blue Book overview, and the collection this record comes from is described in the Record Group 615 overview.
Status
This record shows that people around Austin were reporting, or asking about, flying saucers in late March 1950, and that the wing intelligence office took the calls. It does not show what anyone saw, and “alleged” is the historian’s word, not an evaluation. For researchers it is a dated marker that could be matched against Texas newspaper coverage or Air Force case files from the same week. On its own it is a footnote.