FBI's 1947 Flying Disc Inquiry: Who Was Really in Charge?

# FBI's 1947 Flying Disc Inquiry: Who Was Really in Charge?

By DeClassX

In the summer of 1947, the United States government was quietly consuming itself with a question it could not answer out loud: what, exactly, were people seeing in the skies? A brief but revealing declassified memorandum addressed to a senior FBI official named Mr. Ladd pulls back the curtain on that frantic inter-agency scramble — and what it shows is less a coordinated investigation than a bureaucratic game of hot potato, with the flying disc question being passed from desk to desk and no one willing to own it.

The memo is page two of a longer document, and even in isolation it carries enormous weight. It records a chain of communications between the U.S. Army, Air Forces Intelligence, and the FBI at the very moment the modern UFO era was being born. Kenneth Arnold's famous sighting over Mount Rainier had occurred in late June 1947, and within weeks, reports of flying discs were flooding newsrooms and government offices alike. The pressure on federal agencies to produce an explanation — any explanation — was immense.

The document opens with a flat denial. According to the memo, both Chamberlin and General Todd confirmed to the FBI that the Army was conducting no experiments "with anything which could possibly be mistaken for a flying disc." That phrase, underlined in red ink by an unknown hand at the time of the memo's circulation, is doing a great deal of work. It is careful, lawyerly language. It does not say the Army was conducting no unusual experiments at all — only that none of those experiments could be mistaken for what witnesses were reporting. The distinction may seem subtle, but in the context of postwar military secrecy, it is a canyon.

What comes next deepens the intrigue. Colonel Garrett of Air Forces Intelligence reached out to an FBI official identified as Mr. Reynolds and disclosed that he had already spoken with General Schulgen of the Army Air Forces on the same subject. General Schulgen, for his part, offered his own carefully hedged assurance: to the best of his knowledge and information, no government experiments were underway that could be confused with flying discs. Notice that Schulgen's denial is epistemically qualified in a way that the Army's blanket statement was not. He is not saying it isn't happening — he is saying he doesn't know of it happening. In the world of compartmentalized military programs, that is a meaningful difference.

Colonel Garrett, reading between those same lines, apparently felt the same unease. The memo records that he explicitly raised the possibility of an "embarrassing situation" arising between Air Forces Intelligence and the FBI if the two agencies were found to be investigating phenomena that one branch of the military already knew the source of and simply hadn't disclosed. This is a remarkable moment of institutional candor. Garrett was essentially warning Schulgen: if you are sitting on information and the FBI finds out, this will become a problem for everyone.

Schulgen agreed. The solution they landed on was procedural rather than revelatory: a formal memorandum would be prepared, signed by General McDonald (identified as A2, meaning the chief intelligence officer), and addressed to General Curtis LeMay, who at the time was overseeing Research and Development for the Air Corps. The proposed memo would do two things. First, it would lay out the physical characteristics of the objects reported by what the document calls "reliable individuals" — meaning credible witnesses whose accounts had already been deemed worth taking seriously by military intelligence. Second, it would ask LeMay directly whether any Air Forces experiments could account for what those witnesses had seen.

General Curtis LeMay is a figure worth pausing on. By 1947, LeMay was already one of the most powerful and consequential military figures in American history. He had commanded the firebombing campaigns over Japan and would go on to build the Strategic Air Command into the spine of American nuclear deterrence. If anyone had both the authority and the access to know what was flying over American skies in 1947, it was LeMay. The fact that Garrett and Schulgen felt it necessary to formally query him — rather than simply pick up a phone — suggests either that the research programs in question were sufficiently compartmentalized that even senior Army Air Forces figures lacked visibility into them, or that a paper trail was being deliberately constructed to provide institutional cover.

The memo closes with a commitment from Mr. Reynolds to monitor the situation closely alongside both Garrett and Schulgen, with the explicit goal of ensuring that the FBI would be "promptly advised of all information regarding the flying discs" — particularly any information confirming that the objects were, in fact, a government experiment. That final clause lands with quiet significance. The FBI wasn't just curious. It was actively hedging against the possibility that it was being kept in the dark by a sister agency, and it wanted to be the first to know if the mystery had a mundane, classified origin.

What this memo ultimately reveals is the texture of institutional confusion at the very foundation of the modern UAP phenomenon. There was no unified government knowledge base in 1947. There was no single office that held all the answers. Instead, there were overlapping agencies, competing chains of command, carefully worded denials, and officials quietly maneuvering to protect themselves from embarrassment should the truth turn out to be something they should have already known.

Whether LeMay's eventual response — if one was ever sent — has been declassified remains an open question. Finding that reply, and whatever it contained about the characteristics of the objects Air Forces Research and Development was or was not testing, would go a long way toward answering the question this memo so carefully avoids: not who was responsible for the flying discs, but who, in the summer of 1947, actually knew.