A recently declassified FBI memorandum offers a minute-by-minute account of a September 11, 1947, incident in which Portland police officers reported observing unidentified objects in the sky. The document, dated October 9, 1947, was sent by the Special Agent in Charge in Portland to the FBI Director and is part of case file 62-HQ-83894. The case file, which contains investigative records, eyewitness testimonies, and public reports on UFOs and flying discs, spans from June 1947 to July 1968. The newly released memo draws on records from the Radio Dispatcher of the Portland Police Department.
According to the memorandum, the first call was logged at 5:21 P.M. on September 11, 1947, after officers in District 18 reported seeing something in the sky. Two minutes later, at 5:23 P.M., the dispatcher asked District 14, located further south, to attempt to locate the objects.
At 5:24 P.M., the car carrying Chief Jenkins radioed that they had observed some objects. At 5:27 P.M., District 14 responded, stating they saw nothing unusual. Officer Robert D.
Adair, who lived at 4325 S.E. Madison Ave. in Portland, provided a detailed statement.
He was one of two officers on duty in District 18 that day. Their patrol car was near N.E. 25th Avenue and Saratoga Court. Adair and his partner noticed a number of people looking upward and pointing.
They looked up and observed the vehicles in the sky. The sighting occurred during a wave of reported flying discs across the United States that summer.
The most famous of those, the Kenneth Arnold sighting near Mount Rainier, took place on June 24, 1947, and sparked a national craze. By September, reports were still coming in, and the Portland sighting landed in the middle of that wave. The document, released under the U.S. Department of War’s PURSUE archive, is a granular, minute-by-minute account based on police dispatch logs and officer testimony.
The file is labeled “65_HS1-834228961_62-HQ-83894_Section_4” and is a 36.2 MB PDF. The release of these records feeds a broader shift in government transparency on the topic.
For decades, the official stance was to dismiss or ignore such reports. The U.S. Department of War’s PURSUE archive changes that by putting raw data into public hands. It offers logs, memos, and statements, but does not offer conclusions.
The timestamps tell a story of confusion. Police radio traffic shows a search, with District 14 asked to look but finding nothing.
Meanwhile, the Chief of Police himself confirmed the sighting, and two officers on the ground saw people pointing and observed the objects themselves. The discrepancy between what District 14 saw and what District 18 and the Chief saw is not explained in the memo. The FBI memorandum is a single document, a communication from one agent to the Director summarizing what the police told them. It does not offer an explanation, debunk, or confirm.
It simply records what happened at 5:21, 5:23, 5:24, and 5:27 P.M. on a September evening in Portland. The release of this file adds weight to the argument that the government took these reports seriously at the time.
The FBI opened case file 62-HQ-83894 and kept it open for 21 years, collecting reports from June 1947 to July 1968. The Portland sighting of September 11, 1947, is now part of the public record, with dispatch logs, the officer’s statement, the Chief’s sighting, and the blank report from District 14 all available for anyone to download.
