Merlin, Oregon UFO Sighting (December 13, 1965) — FBI Files (D1P13)
A cold war / blue book era case from Merlin, Oregon. Project Blue Book, established in 1948, reported receiving more UFO reports in the current year than in any year since 1957, when they received over a thousand reports.
Background
On December 13, 1965, in Merlin, Oregon, 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 a Cold War-era case investigated under the Air Force’s Project Blue Book or its predecessors. 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
Project Blue Book, established in 1948, reported receiving more UFO reports in the current year than in any year since 1957, when they received over a thousand reports. The program’s purpose was to evaluate these reports, but the nature of the phenomena remains unknown.
The number of witnesses is not specified in the released document.
Verbatim from the file
“We’ve had more reports this year-than in any year since 1957, when we had more than a thousand”
Type of case
The case is a visual sighting reported by ground or air observers.
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.