65 HS1-101634279 100-DE-18221 Serial 844

This single FBI memo from April 1958 shows what happened when a member of the public couldn’t reach the Air Force and phoned the FBI instead. An agent in the Detroit field office wrote up the call for the special agent in charge, and the case went no further than a recommendation to forward it to the proper Air Force authorities.

What the caller reported

The caller said he had just seen a circular object with a dome like crystal that reflected light, crossing the city from the southwest toward the north, three blocks south of Six Mile Road at Lamphere Street. He was on his way home from work. He told the FBI he had tried to call Selfridge Field, the Air Force base near Detroit, but could not get through.

The agent recorded some background that bears on how much weight to give the report. The caller was the son of a Detroit policeman and had experience with the Civil Air Patrol, but he admitted he was not very familiar with identifying aircraft.

Why the FBI held such reports

In this period the FBI routinely passed sightings it received to the Air Force, which ran Project Blue Book, rather than investigating them itself. The memo contains no follow-up or explanation. The file comes from the Detroit office’s records; compare the Detroit office’s 1957 interview with a wartime witness, 100-DE-26505.