Roswell UFO Crash, March 22, 1950 — FBI File
A first saucer wave case from New Mexico. An informant for the Air Force claimed three circular flying saucers were recovered in New Mexico.
Background
On March 22, 1950, in New Mexico, 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 was filed with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, whose Knoxville, Albuquerque, Los Angeles, and other field offices routed UFO reports to headquarters under the Bureau’s standing protocols for the protection of vital installations.
What the document records
An informant for the Air Force claimed three circular flying saucers were recovered in New Mexico. These saucers were approximately 50 feet in diameter and contained three small, bandaged humanoid bodies each. The informant believed government radar interfered with the saucers’ control mechanisms.
The number of witnesses is not specified in the released document.
Verbatim from the file
““three so-called flying saucers had been recovered in New Mexico.””. ““circular in shape with raised centers, approximately 50 feet in diameter.””. ““Each one was occupied by three bodies of human shape but only 3 feet tall, dressed in metallic cloth”“
Type of case
The case is principally a radar track, with the unidentified object being detected on military or civilian radar equipment.
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.