UNCLASSIFIED // PUBLIC RELEASERELEASE 03 · JUNE 12, 2026
PENTAGON UFO FILE · DOCUMENT · FBI-UAP-D011D/FBI Correspondence Referral, 1949
This short file is an early example of a citizen taking a strange sight in the sky straight to the FBI. On January 31, 1949, the Rev. Charles C. Barnes, a Presbyterian pastor, wrote to Director J. Edgar Hoover about something he had seen the previous May. The file holds his letter and the Bureau’s reply, though parts of the scan are hard to read.
What the pastor saw
One afternoon, Barnes wrote, four narrow beams crossed the sky from northwest to southeast and converged in the Cascade Mountains. Small clouds formed along the beams, and where they met, against the mountains, there was what he called a great explosion effect, visible for at least ten minutes. In a note at the end of the letter he added that it seemed to rise to about ten thousand feet.
His own explanation was technological. He remembered a prewar magazine article, possibly in Science Digest, about European experiments using radio beams to bring rain, and he connected the sight to the Columbia River flood the previous summer and an unusually wet winter. With one son in the Air Corps and another working for the Atomic Energy Commission at Hanford, he said, he felt it should reach the right people for the sake of national security.
What the FBI did
Hoover thanked him and sent the letter on to the Atomic Energy Commission, the civilian agency then in charge of the nation’s nuclear work, noting that Barnes thought the event might be an experiment within its remit. The file records no answer from the commission and no finding about what Barnes saw.
The official description
From war.gov/UFO, released June 12, 2026, quoted in full
This collection of documents contains correspondence between the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), J. Edgar Hoover, and Rev. Charles Barnes concerning Barnes’ account of an incident potentially involving unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP). Rev. Barnes described observing four beams of light “converging in the Cascade Mountains,” at an altitude of approximately 10,000 feet, with a “great explosion” visible at the convergence point of those beams for at least ten minutes. Director Hoover replied to Rev. Barnes thanking him for his letter and informing him that he had forwarded it to the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). Director Hoover conveyed to the AEC that Rev. Barnes believed that the event may relate to a military or scientific experiment within the commission’s purview.