A newly released FBI document details a 1958 UFO report from a 23-year-old Detroit man whose father served as a city police officer. The file, made public under the PURSUE transparency initiative, describes the witness’s failed attempt to contact the Air Force before he turned to the FBI. According to the memo dated April 17, 1958, the man initially tried to report his sighting to Selfridge Field, an Air Force base in Macomb County responsible for regional air defense.
Unable to get through, he called the FBI’s Detroit field office instead. The bureau did not investigate the claim.
Instead, an agent advised him to contact the military and recommended forwarding the information to “proper air force authorities.” The document ends there, with no record of whether the Air Force ever received or acted on the report. The witness described a circular object with a crystal-type dome that reflected light as it moved north from the southwest across the city. He placed the craft three blocks south of Six Mile Road at Lamphere Street.
The memo does not mention sound, exhaust, or a trail—only light moving at dusk. The witness had some Civil Air Patrol background but lacked formal aircraft identification training, a detail the FBI noted.
In 1958, the U.S. Air Force operated Project Blue Book, a formal UFO investigation program based at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. Blue Book collected thousands of reports, most of which were explained as weather balloons, aircraft, or astronomical phenomena. A small fraction remained unidentified.
The Detroit sighting does not appear in publicly available Blue Book summaries from 1958, though this does not confirm whether it was investigated. The paper trail simply goes cold after the FBI memo.
The sparse document identifies the witness only by age and family tie—his father was a Detroit policeman—without naming him. The bureau’s role, as described in the file, was to collect and pass along information without follow-up. No contemporaneous news stories, Air Force press releases, or retractions have surfaced regarding the incident. The release of this file under PURSUE provides historians and researchers with a new data point while highlighting gaps in the official record.
The FBI collected the report; the Air Force was supposed to act. But no mechanism existed to verify whether the handoff succeeded.
For Detroit, the sighting remains a footnote—a moment when a young man saw something unexplained, tried to notify the military, and ended up in federal archives instead. The memo recommends forwarding. That is the last word.
What the Air Force did—or did not do—with that information remains untold.
