Oak Ridge, Tennessee UFO Sighting (December 14, 1951) — FBI Files

Background

On December 14, 1951, in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, 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

Radar operators at McGhee Tyson Airport detected a group of unidentified targets over the Oak Ridge Atomic Energy Commission projects. The objects appeared as a blanket on the radar scopes and could not be identified through visual confirmation. A fighter interception attempt yielded no results.

The number of witnesses is not specified in the released document.

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.

Sources

• Original release on war.gov
• Department of War UFO Disclosure Portal
• AARO (All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office)