In July 1949, the FBI was tracking flying saucers. Not chasing them, not investigating crash sites. Tracking paperwork.
A newly declassified memo shows the Bureau’s interest in a convention for people who had seen the things. The document, part of a larger case file spanning June 1947 to July 1968, was released May 8, 2026, through the PURSUE archive.
It covers a narrow slice of that long history: one internal memo, dated July 26, 1949, from the FBI Director to the Special Agent in Charge in San Antonio, Texas. What triggered it? Military intelligence.
Specifically, the Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff, G-2, Fourth Army. On July 15, 1949, they told the FBI about a small article in the Galveston News, published five days earlier.
The article advertised that the Young Men’s Business Club of Alexandria, Louisiana, was planning a convention. The purpose: gather “persons from all over the nation who have seen flying saucers.” The FBI memo says the convention would let these witnesses “compare notes.” The memo adds a detail that gives the report its edge: “flying disks were reported twice in the week preceding the article in Alexandria, Louisiana.” Two sightings, right there, in the same town where witnesses were about to gather.
The memo is marked “FLYING DISKS — INTERNAL SECURITY — R.” That “R” likely stands for “Restricted.” The Bureau sent a carbon copy to the New Orleans field office, referencing file number 100-7545. This was 1949. The modern UFO era was barely two years old.
Kenneth Arnold’s Mount Rainier sighting happened in June 1947. Roswell followed weeks later.
By 1949, the Air Force was already running Project Sign, later Project Grudge. The public was seeing things, or saying they were. The FBI was watching the watchers.
The memo’s tone is dry. Informational.
It says the convention information was “furnished as a matter of information.” No alarm. No orders to infiltrate the meeting or shut it down. Just a note: here is what the Army told us, here is what the paper printed, here is a file number.
File and forget. But the document matters now because the government is still releasing these records. The PURSUE archive is the latest push to declassify Cold War-era UFO files.
This memo is one piece of a larger puzzle — 62-HQ-83894 — that runs from 1947 to 1968. Twenty-one years of sightings, memos, conventions, reports.
The memo reveals no secret. No crashed disk, no alien body, no government cover-up. What it shows is the machinery of bureaucracy meeting the unexplained.
The FBI got a tip from the Army about a newspaper ad. The Army thought it worth passing along.
The Bureau thought it worth recording. Then, apparently, nothing more. That is the pattern.
The government collected information. Filed it. Sometimes acted, sometimes didn’t.
The convention itself? No record in this document says whether it happened, who attended, what they discussed.
The trail goes cold in the memo’s final line: “furnished as a matter of information.” Sixty-five years passed before the public could read that line. The PURSUE archive released it in 2026, alongside hundreds of other pages. The Department of War — long since absorbed into the Department of Defense — signed off on the release.
The original PDF runs 34.6 MB. What the memo says is simple: the FBI knew that in the summer of 1949, people in Louisiana were organizing around flying saucers.
The Bureau tracked it. Filed it. Moved on.
The document is a snapshot of a moment when the government treated UFO witnesses not as threats, not as crackpots, but as a matter of record.
