FBI's 1947 Flying Disc Memo: Hackensack UFO Report

# The Summer America Looked Up: FBI's Hackensack Flying Disc Memo

In the summer of 1947, the United States was gripped by something it had never quite experienced before: a nationwide wave of unidentified flying object sightings that flooded newsrooms, military switchboards, and, notably, the offices of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. On August 13, 1947, a Special Agent in Charge from the FBI's Newark Division sent a tightly worded memo to Director J. Edgar Hoover describing what two ordinary New Jersey men had witnessed ten days earlier over the rooftops of Hackensack. That document, now declassified and preserved in the UAP archive, is a small but telling artifact of the moment America's government first began formally grappling with the flying disc phenomenon.

The memo's subject line is almost jarring in its bureaucratic plainness: "FLYING DISC REPORTED AT HACKENSACK, NEW JERSEY AUGUST 3, 1947 — MISCELLANEOUS." No alarm, no drama. Just standard government form number 64, routed from SAC Newark to the Director, the same paperwork channel used for bank robberies and espionage cases. That institutional normalcy is part of what makes the document so interesting. The FBI was treating flying disc reports as a legitimate investigative matter, worthy of field interviews by Special Agents and formal written reporting to headquarters.

The story itself began simply enough. On the evening of August 3, 1947, at approximately 7:45 p.m., a young man named Charles Caselia Jr., of 287 Euclid Avenue, Hackensack, was standing with William Truex, a soldier stationed at Fort Dix, on Simons Avenue. They were there for an unremarkable reason: waiting for Truex's girlfriend, Joyce McFarland, while admiring a ham radio setup mounted atop a nearby two-story house. What followed interrupted that ordinary evening in a way neither man apparently expected.

Truex spotted it first, assuming a child had lost a balloon. Caselia looked and immediately felt something was off. About a block or a half-block away, moving from south to north and east of where the two men stood, was a round, black object. It was traveling, Caselia told Special Agent Arthur F. Williams in a subsequent interview, at a speed clearly too fast for any ordinary balloon. He estimated the object at thirty to forty inches in diameter — roughly the size of a large beach ball, though at distance such estimates are inherently imprecise. It moved horizontally at a steady, consistent rate approximately two hundred yards above the crest of the hill at Summit Avenue and Simons Avenue, emitting no light, no rays, and making no sound that Caselia mentioned.

Caselia was careful in his account. He told the FBI agent he could not definitively determine whether the object was globular — that is, spherical — or a flat disc. That honest uncertainty is actually one of the more credible elements of the report. Witnesses who are too precise, too certain of details that distance and brief observation would make genuinely ambiguous, often raise skeptical flags. Caselia simply described what he saw and acknowledged the limits of his perception.

The sighting lasted long enough that the two men had to continuously turn their heads to track it. When McFarland came outside roughly fifteen seconds after the object first appeared, they pointed it out to her. By that point it had shrunk to a tiny point on the horizon — she described it as looking like a bird, a telling observation that speaks to how quickly the object was receding from view. It faded from sight shortly afterward. Caselia estimated its apparent flight path would have carried it from the vicinity of Bendix, New Jersey toward a point west of Westwood, New Jersey — a northeast-to-northwest trajectory that he thought through carefully enough to plot in geographic terms.

The memo also notes a corroborating detail: a man on a porch across the street apparently also noticed the object and pointed it out to women nearby. He was described as visibly excited. This unnamed individual never gave a formal statement, but his spontaneous reaction — independent of Caselia and Truex — adds a quiet layer of corroboration to the account.

Caselia was emphatic on one point: this was no optical illusion. He had not been looking into the sun. He saw the object clearly. And he told the FBI he would have dismissed the whole thing were it not for the speed at which the object was traveling. That detail — the speed — was the one element that lifted the sighting out of the mundane for Caselia himself.

To understand why the FBI was in the business of taking these reports at all, it helps to know the context. The modern UFO era had effectively begun just over a month earlier, on June 24, 1947, when civilian pilot Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine crescent-shaped objects flying in formation near Mount Rainier, Washington. His account, which produced the phrase "flying saucers," triggered a national sensation. By July and August, sightings were being reported across the country at a rate that alarmed both the military and the FBI, which had agreed — somewhat reluctantly — to assist the Army Air Forces in collecting and evaluating civilian reports. Hoover himself had signed off on the Bureau's participation, though internal communications suggest he grew increasingly frustrated with the arrangement and skeptical of the military's willingness to share what it actually knew.

The Hackensack memo is one of hundreds generated during this period, most of them similarly prosaic: two people, a summer evening, something in the sky that didn't behave like anything they recognized. Taken individually, each document is easy to explain away. Taken together, they form a picture of a government bureaucracy earnestly, if somewhat awkwardly, trying to make sense of a phenomenon it did not understand.

The stamp at the bottom of the memo carries its own quiet footnote to history: "COPIES DESTROYED, 270 NOV 18 1964." Someone, seventeen years later, decided most copies of this document no longer needed to exist. The one that survived asks a question that the Hackensack sighting itself never fully answered: what exactly were Charles Caselia and William Truex watching move steadily northward over the New Jersey rooftops on that August evening in 1947?

— DeClassX