In 1968, a Miami aircraft mechanic went to the FBI with a story: in 1944, he had seen a disk-shaped German aircraft in the Black Forest. Investigators could not confirm it, but they did not dismiss it either.
The Aliens editors
This story was put together by our editors from the original documents. Every quote, date and figure comes from the source files listed further down the page.
In the summer of 1968, Paul Pirl walked into the FBI’s Miami office. He was an aircraft mechanic for Eastern Air Lines, an American citizen with a steady job and a family. The story he brought with him was far removed from that routine life. He claimed to have seen and photographed a disk-shaped German aircraft near the end of World War II.
According to the interview in the file, Pirl said that in November 1944 he was serving as a young pilot in the Luftwaffe, the German air force. During a flight over the Black Forest, he claimed, he saw a round craft about 21 feet in diameter, with engines arranged around its outer edge.
He said he photographed the craft on 8 mm Kodachrome film and brought the film to the United States after the war, but lost it years later in a fire or during a move. That was where the problems began.
Stories about “Nazi flying saucers” did not begin with Pirl. In the late 1940s and 1950s, they spread through newspapers, pamphlets, and UFO enthusiast circles. Each version added engineers’ names, secret bases, and technical details.
The FBI investigated the story not because it believed it, but because it involved a man with a German military past, a claim about military technology, and the remote possibility of an intelligence connection.
Agent Bo Roden tried to verify the details. He searched for the people Pirl named, the institutions where he said the project had taken place, and traces of the project in Allied archives. He found no convincing match.
The story about the film also failed to hold together. At one point, it had burned. At another, it had been lost in transit. The address where the fire supposedly occurred yielded no matching record. The more the FBI asked, the less solid the details became.
It is tempting to reach a quick verdict: either he told the truth or he made it up. The file suggests a less comfortable possibility. Pirl may have seen something entirely different, remembered it for 24 years, and later connected it to stories already circulating around him. He may also have adopted a story he had read or heard until it became, in his memory, a personal experience.
Memory is not an archive. It is rewritten each time we tell it.
Why does a file like this matter if it contains no proof? Because it shows the practical work of an investigation: who said what, which details were checked, what investigators failed to find, and where the story begins to unravel.
Not every open file is a gateway to a discovery. Sometimes it is a lesson in careful reading. In Pirl’s case, the FBI proved neither a Nazi conspiracy nor a deliberate hoax. It left us with a man, a statement, and plenty of reasons to be cautious.
Source: FBI file number 62-83894, Part 10, pp. 62–65, published on May 8, 2026.
