Street, Washington UFO Sighting (September 25, 1961) — FBI Files
Mr. Stringfield received an anonymous phone call with details that seemed to align with a later article about a potential Soviet space explosion. The content of the call is not detailed in the document, but it prompted Stringfield to investigate furt
Background
On September 25, 1961, in Street, Washington, 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
Mr. Stringfield received an anonymous phone call with details that seemed to align with a later article about a potential Soviet space explosion. The content of the call is not detailed in the document, but it prompted Stringfield to investigate further when the article appeared. The article described a potential Soviet nuclear detonation visible from many countries.
The number of witnesses is not specified in the released document.
Type of case
The case is associated with a military installation or nuclear facility.
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.