1956 UAP Sighting — FBI Files
A letter was received from the Director of National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena requesting information about the FBI's involvement with unidentified flying objects. The committee is a privately funded civilian group. The FBI has been aware of Donald Keyhoe, the c
Background
A UFO/UAP incident extracted from page 45 of 65_HS1-834228961_62-HQ-83894_Section_9, 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 September 26, 1956 and located in Unknown location.
What the file records
A letter was received from the Director of National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena requesting information about the FBI’s involvement with unidentified flying objects. The committee is a privately funded civilian group. The FBI has been aware of Donald Keyhoe, the committee’s director, since 1935 and considers his material to be potentially irresponsible.
Witnesses on file: Mr. A. H. Belmont.
Status of the case
The page-level assessment recorded in the file is: no agency assessment. 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.