The first document in the FBI's complete Roswell file isn't Roswell. It's a Washington Post article from the morning before — and it says flying disc reports had already come in from 30 states
The first document in the FBI's complete Roswell file isn't Roswell. It's a Washington Post article from the morning before — and it says flying disc reports had already come in from 30 states
The first serial in FBI file 62-HQ-83894 — the bureau's complete flying disc investigation file, released in May 2026 under PURSUE — is not the Roswell teletype. It's a Washington Post article from 7 July 1947, the morning before the Roswell incident, about a Catholic priest in Wisconsin who'd handed an 18-inch metal disc to the FBI. The same article reports that flying disc sightings had been logged by persons in thirty states by that morning. The disc turned out to be a prankster's projectile made from a Dunlop circular saw blade — and the FBI filed the resolution too, three serials later, as part of the same case. By the time the Roswell teletype was typed in Dallas on the evening of 8 July, the file already had several documents ahead of it. The bureau wasn't responding to one anomalous event in New Mexico. It was logging a national pattern. The strongest single item in Section 1 isn't the Roswell teletype itself though. It's Serial 9 — a clipping from the Yoakum Herald-Times, a small Texas paper, July 1947. An editorial column titled "By the Way" reads: "So the mysterious disks are not messengers from Mars or some other star. Nor are they missiles which Red Russia is already showering upon us. They are our own secrets with which our armed forces are experimenting. What propels them? How far can they fly? What is their purpose? — That is a mighty secret." Filed by the FBI as part of the same case as Roswell. The Cold War framing — Russia, secret American weapons, French press coverage of new bomb programmes — is already present in the file, in 1947, written by a small-town Texas columnist. I'm working through the file page by page for a new channel called Threadlines. Episode 1 covers Section 1 — the Brasky priest, the Yoakum editorial, the press release / retraction asymmetry, and the Project Mogul explanation as it appears in the USAF's own 1997 report on Roswell. Episode 2 will pick up Section 2, including the Kenneth Arnold interview file (Serial 95) which contains his hand-drawn sketches of what he saw over Mt Rainier — and they don't look like saucers at all. The channel's contract is simple: every claim has a document, every document is shown, no speculation. If you've been reading the PURSUE release and noticing things, I'd be interested to hear what you've found in the other sections. Thank you! submitted by /u/dolbydb [link] [comments]