War Department's Flying Disc Intake Protocol, 1948
18_6369445_General_1948_Vol_1
A 1948 Department of War file containing memorandums, correspondence, and forms related to the reporting and investigation of flying disc sightings.
Brief
This volume is a general administrative file from June 1948 — one year into the first wave of post-Arnold disc reports — compiled by the Department of War and comprising internal memorandums, correspondence, and standardized forms used to document and route flying disc sighting information. The document's structure suggests an established bureaucratic intake process for UAP reports rather than a single incident record. No OCR text is available; the source is a scanned image and all content below is derived from the catalog description.
Metadata
- Agency
- Department of War
- Release
- 5/8/26
- Incident
- 6/15/48
- Type
- PDF • .pdf
- Length
- 28 pages
- Tags
- flying disc, 1948, administrative collection, Department of War, Project Sign era
Key points
- The file is a multi-document volume (memorandums, correspondence, and forms), indicating an administrative collection rather than a single-incident report.
- The subject matter is the reporting of information on flying discs — the period's official term for UAP — and the investigations triggered by those reports.
- The incident date of June 15, 1948 places this file during the active tenure of Project Sign (formally established January 1948), the Air Force's first official UAP investigation program.
- Originating agency is the Department of War, which was reorganized into the Department of Defense in September 1947 — making this one of the last years such letterhead would appear.
Most interesting
- June 1948 falls exactly one year after the Kenneth Arnold sighting (June 24, 1947) that introduced the term 'flying saucer' to the public — bureaucratic machinery for logging such reports was still being formalized at this date.
- The Department of War ceased to exist as a standalone entity when the National Security Act of 1947 took effect; documents bearing its header from mid-1948 straddle the transition to the new unified defense structure.
- The use of standardized forms, noted in the description, suggests the military had already moved beyond ad-hoc memo-writing toward systematic data collection for UAP reports within roughly twelve months of the first public wave.