Declassified FBI case files from November 1957, released under the Freedom of Information and Privacy Act and bearing case number 62-8894, show the Bureau was actively receiving and routing unidentified aerial phenomena reports during a period of heightened public interest in so-called flying discs. The documents, stamped with declassification authority derived from the FBI Automatic Declassification Guide issued May 24, 2007, reveal a bureaucratic handling process that prioritized referral over investigation.
Dallas Field Office Declines to Investigate, Defers to Air Force
A November 14, 1957, memorandum from the Special Agent in Charge of the Dallas field office to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover illustrates the Bureau's posture at the time. Written in response to a Kansas City letter dated November 8, 1957, the Dallas SAC reported that a flying disc matter was being referred to the Air Force Office of Special Investigations without any independent FBI investigation being opened.
"This matter is being referred to OSI without investigation and no other action is being taken in accordance with existing instructions."
The memo, filed under Dallas case number 62-1311, indicates this was not an ad hoc decision but reflected standing Bureau policy — the phrase "in accordance with existing instructions" suggests a formalized protocol for handling such referrals. Copies were routed to the Bureau and to the Kansas City field office. No further details about the underlying report that prompted the Kansas City letter are preserved in the released portion of this file section.
Havana Legal Attaché Logs Cuban Newspaper Account of Matambre Sighting
A separate memorandum dated November 20, 1957, from the FBI Legal Attaché in Havana to the Director, filed under the subject heading "Reports of Flying Discs — Foreign Miscellaneous," relays a secondhand account drawn from the Havana daily newspaper Diario de la Marina. The newspaper's November 12, 1957 dispatch, datelined Pinar del Rio and reporting on events of November 11, described two men — identified as José Maria Nieto and Carmelo Guzman — who claimed to have witnessed an aerial object near the Matambre copper mines in Pinar del Rio Province, approximately 90 miles west of Havana.
According to the Havana Legal Attaché's memorandum, the two witnesses, who had just arrived in Pinar del Rio from the Matambre mines, reported seeing a disc described as hat-shaped hovering over the area for several minutes. They characterized the object as larger than aircraft commonly seen in that region and noted it produced no sound. The memorandum states the object "disappeared at a very high speed towards the sea."
The Legal Attaché's office was candid about the limits of its reporting. The memo notes that no other accounts corroborating the witnesses' claims were received and that the Havana office conducted no independent inquiry. The submission was framed explicitly as information relayed in the event "reports of flying discs are still desired" by Bureau leadership — suggesting some ambiguity at the time about whether headquarters wanted such foreign reports continued.
Context and Caveats
The November 1957 timeframe is significant in the historical record of UAP reporting. The period followed the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik in October 1957 and coincided with a notable cluster of reported aerial sightings across the United States and internationally, including the widely documented Levelland, Texas, incidents of November 2-3, 1957, in which multiple witnesses reported a luminous egg-shaped object that allegedly caused vehicle engine failures.
The released documents do not indicate whether the Matambre or Dallas reports were connected to any broader investigative thread, nor do they contain any analytical assessment from Bureau personnel. The file section — Volume 9, Serial 365 of case 62-8894 — was copied for FOIPA review on at least two occasions, in May 1974 and February 1976, before its eventual release.
Reliability caveats apply. The source hosting these transcriptions carries a trust rating that warrants caution; readers seeking to verify the underlying records should consult the FBI's online FOIA vault or submit a direct FOIPA request referencing case number 62-8894. The transcriptions themselves are internally consistent with known FBI administrative formats of the period, but independent verification of specific quoted passages against original page images is advisable before treating individual quotations as confirmed primary-source text.
What the documents do confirm, at a minimum, is that the FBI maintained an active — if largely passive — record-keeping function around flying disc reports in 1957, and that its operational posture was to defer investigative jurisdiction to the Air Force rather than pursue such matters independently.