FBI UAP records: the Bureau's declassified UFO and anomalous phenomena file
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, the FBI tranche of PURSUE Release 01, and the FBI USPER witness statement in PURSUE Release 02.
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.
The seventh tranche of the Trump administration's PURSUE program: 28 documents and, for the first time, no video, bringing the public corpus to 478 files per the portal's database. The lead files are an AARO memorandum and an FBI interview, with nine forensic sketches, on a 2026 triangle two Federal Special Agents saw at a national security site — a case AARO says warrants further investigation. Also: nine records from AAWSAP's contractor, BAASS, including its April 2010 Utah ranch investigation report; ten early-Cold-War Air Force intelligence reports; four Catalina Island reports; and a 1962-1964 Executive Branch file on recovering fallen space hardware.
The fifth tranche of the Trump administration's PURSUE program: 41 files — 22 documents, 16 videos, 3 images — published 28 days after Release 04 and bringing the public corpus to 375 files. The organizing theme is triangles: four FBI interviews, each paired with a 2026 digital rendering, spanning a 2002 sighting over Bagram Air Force Base to two independent October 2023 reports from Colorado Springs. The release also contains the first FBI-captured video in the program's history and the first-ever State Department and Executive Office of the President files, tracking a 1963 Brazilian crashed-sphere claim to a fabrication within eleven days.
The third tranche of the Trump administration's PURSUE program: 72 files — 53 documents, 10 images, 6 videos, 3 audio files — bringing the public corpus to 294 files. The FBI dominates with 29 files, anchored by two modern American case clusters: a four-year series of orb sightings in the northeastern U.S. that the Bureau's own agents witnessed first-hand, and the first-person record of the October 2023 Western US Event. Also included: the CIA's 1953 Robertson Panel report in less-redacted form, NASA's Gemini-era crew debriefings, and the 1962 Cronkite–Cooper interview audio.
At a sensitive national security site in the western United States in 2026, two Federal Special Agents watched what they described as 'a substantial, nonreflective, dark black triangular object most resembling a delta wing drone' climb over a ridge, then bank and descend into a canyon — hotter than ambient, no visible exhaust, no sound. A third official corroborated from a separate post; a second sighting followed the next evening. The FBI had nine forensic sketches drawn from the agents' account, and AARO says the case warrants further investigation.
Exactly 14 days after PURSUE Release 01, the U.S. Department of War publishes a second tranche of declassified UAP records through war.gov/UFO: 51 sensor videos (the DOW-UAP-PR050–PR099 series), 7 NASA crew audio files, and 6 documents. The centerpiece is a first-person USPER narrative from a currently-serving senior U.S. intelligence officer describing a one-hour, multi-witness UAP encounter from a U.S. military helicopter in late 2025.
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.'
FBI-UAP-PR007 is hand-held thermal footage a U.S. Government Special Agent shot himself during a 2026 incident in the western United States — two slow-moving 'black-hot' areas of contrast — making it the first video in the PURSUE program captured by the Bureau rather than submitted to it. A second agent separately reported a thermally elevated aerial object the same year, and two more witnesses to a third sequence of incidents within five hours were interviewed and rendered independently.
Beginning in mid-November 2024, residents across northern New Jersey report waves of large, slow, often car-sized 'drones' at night, with early clusters near Picatinny Arsenal. The FBI logs thousands of tips, the FAA restricts airspace, and a December 12 joint DHS/FBI statement finds no threat and attributes many sightings to misidentified manned aircraft. A January 2025 White House statement calling the flights 'authorized' closes the news cycle without reconciling the record.
PURSUE Release 03 declassifies the FBI's investigation of recurring orb phenomena in one sparsely populated area of the northeastern United States: four authenticated eyewitness videos spanning November 2021 to July 2025 — 'Triangle Orbs,' 'Red Orb Rotation,' 'Orbs Over the Pond,' and the 'Northeastern Orb Sighting' — plus seven investigative records. The standout: an FD-1057 documenting two FBI special agents' own first-hand UAP observation during a November 2024 site survey. The Bureau assesses the civilian witnesses as 'highly credible.'
Two separate people independently reported triangular objects with red lights near Colorado Springs, Colorado in October 2023 — a former Department of War employee describing a 'dark translucent triangle,' and a separate U.S. Person describing a 'large triangle with red lights.' The FBI interviewed each witness months apart and commissioned an independent digital rendering from each account. It is a different object, and a different year, from the 'bean-shaped' unresolved case PURSUE Release 03 documented near the same city in 2022.
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.
Over two days in 2023, seven separate U.S. federal government employees reported close-range encounters with multiple unidentified phenomena at a site in the western United States — including orbs launching other orbs, a large stationary glowing orb at close range, and a large semi-transparent object described as a 'translucent kite.' AARO calls it 'among the most compelling within AARO's current holdings.'
U.S. military service members near Colorado Springs reported a motionless, silent, matte-white 'bean-shaped' object whose surface was covered in intersecting ridges forming an abstract polygon pattern. PURSUE Release 03 declassifies the FBI's witness interviews, a digital rendering, and an Intelligence Community partner's analysis assessing — with low confidence — that the phenomenon may have been sunlight backscattering from snow-covered mountains. The case remains unresolved as of June 2026.
A former U.S. military pilot, interviewed by the FBI in March 2024, described an enormous dark triangle passing directly overhead while he was deployed as a reservist at Bagram Air Force Base, Afghanistan, in June 2002. The Bureau commissioned a digital rendering from his account in 2026: a solid black delta large enough to blot out the stars, now the iconic image of PURSUE Release 05. The same interview also covers incidents the witness reported in 2023 and 2024.
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.
The FBI's online FOIA reading room at vault.fbi.gov, launched in 2011. It hosts redacted PDFs of FBI files that have been released under the Freedom of Information Act, organized by subject. The UFO category contains the Bureau's main UAP-related files including 62-HQ-83894.
What is FBI file 62-HQ-83894?
The Headquarters case file aggregating FBI Unidentified Flying Object material from approximately 1947 through 1977. It contains field office reports, citizen letters, newspaper clippings, and inter-agency correspondence. The file runs to several thousand pages across multiple sections and serials, all of which are now declassified.
What is the Hottel memo?
A March 22, 1950 memorandum from Guy Hottel, Special Agent in Charge of the Washington Field Office, to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. The memo summarizes a third-hand account from an Air Force investigator of "three so-called flying saucers" recovered in New Mexico, each containing three small humanoid bodies. The memo is genuine (it sits in 62-HQ-83894), but its claims were never corroborated by the Bureau and the memo itself notes its information came secondhand.
Did the FBI ever investigate UFOs as a primary mission?
No. The FBI's UFO file accumulated incidentally — citizens wrote to the Bureau because they didn't know which agency to contact, and FBI field offices logged reports for inter-agency coordination. The actual primary U.S. government investigator was Project Sign / Project Grudge / Project Blue Book at the Air Force, and later the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO).
Why does PURSUE include FBI records?
PURSUE (Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters) is a cross-agency consolidation of declassified UAP-related material. Release 01 (May 8, 2026) included the master FBI 'flying disc' case file 62-HQ-83894 and the FBI composite sketch + 302 interviews from the September 2023 bronze-ellipsoid case. Release 02 (May 22, 2026) added a USPER witness statement filed in late 2025. Most of the underlying documents were already public via the FBI Vault; the PURSUE releases package them alongside DoW, NASA, ODNI, CIA, and State Department material so researchers can search across all agencies at once.
Canonical reading on this topic
Non-fiction titles by named witnesses, Pentagon insiders, and investigative journalists referenced in this archive.
UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record
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.