UNCLASSIFIED // PUBLIC RELEASERELEASE 04 · JULY 10, 2026
PENTAGON UFO FILE · DOCUMENT · CIA-UAP-D020Memorandum on Unconventional Aircraft Sightings, 1955
This Top Secret memorandum, prepared in the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence and dated 31 October 1955 in its file line, records the debriefing of four Americans who said they had seen a “flying saucer” in the Soviet Union. The group included Senator Richard Russell, an influential figure on military affairs, a U.S. service member, and two government officials. The sighting happened from a train between Baku and Tiflis (Tbilisi), in what is now Azerbaijan.
What was reported and concluded
The witnesses described a luminous, greenish-yellow object. Much of the scanned text is hard to read, but the memo’s conclusion is clear and restrained: the sighting could “probably be explained” as steeply climbing aircraft or missiles, and the evidence was not firm enough to show the Soviets had built a radically new aircraft.
The memo is signed by H. Scoville Jr. of the Office of Scientific Intelligence, and the attached Top Secret cover sheet records who read it, a reminder of how tightly it was held.
The other accounts
Several records describe the same night. One of the travelers gave the CIA a vivid account of a triangular craft with three lights spiraling upward (CIA-UAP-006), and a follow-up memo weighs the testimony further (CIA-UAP-D021). Read together, they show how one sighting by prominent witnesses was handled as a question about Soviet weapons rather than visitors.
The official description
From war.gov/UFO, released July 10, 2026, quoted in full
This memorandum summarizes a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) debriefing of a group of four individuals who reported observing a “flying saucer” or “unconventional aircraft” in 1955. The group, which included U.S. Senator Richard Russell, a U.S. military service member, and two U.S. Government officials, reported observing a luminescent “greenish-yellow” phenomenon, as seen from aboard a train while traveling within the Soviet Union, in present-day Azerbaijan, between Baku and Tiflis (Tbilisi, Georgia). The document concludes by stating that the observation can “probably be explained as steep climbing aircraft or missiles,” and that “the evidence does not appear sufficiently firm to warrant the conclusion that the Soviets have developed […] a radically new type of aircraft.” The document “CIA-UAP-D021” contains a contemporary analysis of the incident.