Every Federal Bureau of Investigation document on unidentified flying objects and anomalous phenomena that has reached the public record, from the 1950 Hottel memo to file 62-HQ-83894 and the FBI tranche of PURSUE Release 01.
The FBI's UAP/UFO file is one of the oldest in the U.S. government's holdings. The Bureau began collecting reports in the summer of 1947, after the Kenneth Arnold sighting and the Roswell Army Air Field press releases triggered a national wave of incidents that civilians began reporting directly to FBI field offices.
The canonical FBI file is 62-HQ-83894 — the Headquarters file that aggregates field office reports, citizen letters, newspaper clippings, and inter-agency correspondence on UFOs from the late 1940s through the 1970s. The file runs to several thousand pages across multiple sections and serials. The single most famous item inside it is the March 22, 1950 memo from Guy Hottel, SAC of the Washington Field Office, summarizing a third-hand account of "three so-called flying saucers" recovered in New Mexico — the document popularly known as the Hottel memo.
Most FBI UAP records are available through two channels: the FBI Vault reading room (vault.fbi.gov), which has hosted the redacted PDFs since 2011, and the FBI tranche of PURSUE Release 01 (war.gov/UAP), which republished the same material with cleaner OCR and a unified case-file taxonomy in May 2026.
Why this matters. The FBI file is the closest thing the U.S. government has to a contemporaneous, multi-decade citizen-report archive. It captures what people actually reported, in their own words, before AARO's structured reporting forms existed. It's also a useful corrective to the modern narrative — the Bureau's interest waxed and waned, and the file shows the U.S. government taking civilian UFO reports seriously in periods when official policy claimed otherwise.
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Eighteen sections and serials of the FBI Headquarters master investigative case file on 'flying discs,' covering the Roswell era through the late 1960s. Includes Oak Ridge nuclear-facility overflight reports. The largest single PDF in PURSUE is 101 megabytes.
The Trump administration launches PURSUE — the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters — and the Department of War publishes 160 declassified UAP-related files in the first tranche: 117 PDFs, 29 sensor videos, and 14 photographs spanning 1944 to 2026. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth says the goal is 'maximum transparency.'
Newly released FBI 302 interviews and an FBI Lab composite sketch describe an ellipsoid bronze metallic object, 130-195 feet in length, that materialized out of a bright light, was observed by multiple credentialed witnesses at a U.S. test site, and disappeared instantaneously.
FBI Detroit field office investigative files 100-DE-26505 and 100-DE-18221, covering early-Cold-War flying disc and UFO reports across Michigan and the Great Lakes region. Released by the Department of War in PURSUE Release 01.
Non-fiction titles by named witnesses, Pentagon insiders, and investigative journalists referenced in this archive.
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U.S. material is the single largest body in the public UAP record, but it isn't the only one. France's GEIPAN has run a transparent case database since 1977; the UK MoD released ~60,000 pages between 2008 and 2017; Japan's evolving track is the program currently moving fastest in 2026. Every state-run UAP-investigation body with a public archive — fifteen countries to date — is catalogued in one place.
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