The Navy Asked Its Stations to Report Flying Saucers

A U.S. Navy district commander asked Navy stations to report incidents involving flying saucers. The request appears in a 1948 memo, not an account of an encounter in the sky.

The intriguing detail is not what anyone saw, but what the stations were told to do if an incident occurred. They were to send reports to two offices: the Air Force and a Navy intelligence office. The memo shows where the Navy wanted such information to go.

A Request With Two Destinations

The commander asked the stations to send a report to the nearest Air Force command. They were also to forward it to the naval district’s intelligence office.

The instruction was straightforward: reports were not to stay at the stations where they were received. They were supposed to reach both an Air Force office and a Navy office. The memo does not say what either was expected to do with the information, so there is no reason to guess.

A Navy District

The memo was written by the commander of the Fifth Naval District. A naval district is an administrative area of the Navy, not a place where a particular incident took place. The request, then, does not describe an event in the district; it is addressed to Navy stations.

The memo also refers to an earlier document about flying saucers by a senior Navy official. That is all the source tells us about the earlier document: it gives no details about its contents or why the reports were requested. The memo itself is identified as U.S. Department of War material.

What We Still Don’t Know

The memo does not explain why reports were requested at that particular time, whether the stations sent any, or what followed. It also gives no details about any incidents or what those involved saw.

What remains is a brief directive sending reports to two offices. What information was supposed to reach them? The memo doesn’t say.