Waco, Texas UFO Sighting (March 9, 1973) — FBI Files
FBI files detail a 1973 encounter in Waco, Texas, involving an Air Force Captain presenting sensitive photographs of military installations.
Background
On March 9, 1973, in Waco, Texas, 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 sighting from the modern era of post-Blue-Book civilian and military reports. During this period, the United States was navigating the aftermath of Project Blue Book, which had officially closed in 1969. While the formal Air Force investigation into unidentified flying objects had concluded, the reporting of such phenomena continued through various intelligence and law enforcement channels. 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. This bureaucratic structure ensured that any reports potentially involving surveillance of sensitive sites were centralized for national security assessment.
What the document records
The documentation recovered from the FBI archives provides a specific account of an inquiry made during the spring of 1973. On March 9, 1973, Sergeant Stigliano was contacted about a man named Dave T. Ozanne who inquired about UFO sightings in the Waco area. Ozanne identified himself as a Captain in the Air Force and possessed photos of military installations in a folder marked ‘Top Secret’. Despite the sensitive nature of the materials in his possession, the report notes that he did not exhibit strange behavior and only sought information from the Waco Tribune Newspaper. The number of witnesses to the original unidentified object is not specified in the released document.
The presence of high-level military identification and classified-labeled materials within a civilian inquiry suggests a complex intersection of personal interest and official duty. Such encounters often required investigators to determine if the individual was conducting unauthorized reconnaissance or if the inquiry was part of a legitimate, albeit unannounced, military investigation. In this instance, the focus of the FBI’s interest appeared to be the intersection of the individual’s identity, his possession of sensitive imagery, and his active search for local sighting data.
Type of case
The case is classified as a visual sighting reported by ground or air observers. This category of report involves the direct observation of an object by a person on the surface or within an aircraft, rather than purely radar-based detections. Visual sightings are historically the most common form of UAP documentation but are also the most difficult to verify due to the subjective nature of human perception and the lack of secondary sensor data in many historical files.
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. The ambiguity of the Waco report reflects the broader challenge faced by investigators when dealing with sightings that lack corroborating physical evidence or multi-sensor confirmation.
Conventional candidates for sightings of this period include experimental aircraft, weather balloons, atmospheric optical phenomena such as sundogs and lenticular clouds, and astronomical objects including Venus, the Moon, and meteors near the horizon. In the context of the 1970s, the proliferation of advanced aerospace technology and the remnants of Cold War-era surveillance programs provided numerous plausible explanations for unidentified aerial phenomena. The Waco incident remains a subject of study primarily due to the specific details regarding the individual’s military credentials and the sensitive nature of the photographs mentioned in the FBI’s internal reporting.