Documents — full-text search
search the raw released textEvery released PDF, run through OCR — searchable here, and you can expand any result to read the document’s full OCR text. The government’s own words, not our normalized analysis: find a name, place, base, or phrase, read the source, or check a structured record against it. OCR quality varies a lot, so what you get is what the machine could read — garbled or empty for handwriting, clippings and heavy redaction (see the note below).
This is raw OCR: mid-century scans contain transcription errors, so some terms are mangled or missed. Redactions appear as gaps — a blacked-out word simply isn’t in the text, so its absence is not evidence it wasn’t said. Documents tagged “near-empty / redacted” are heavily redacted or image-only and yield little to search.
Twenty documents (~2,500 pages, the largest single block of the corpus) are sections, serials and sub-files of one FBI Headquarters case file — 62-HQ-83894, the Bureau’s central “flying disc / flying saucer” file, running from the 1947 wave into the late 1960s. A direct page review shows it is a monitoring and administrative file, not a body of investigated sightings: public correspondence reporting saucers, newspaper clippings, internal routing memos, Air-Force-to-FBI correspondence (incl. a 1966 confidential memo to J. Edgar Hoover), UFO-subculture ephemera (a 1966 convention flyer, a magazine cover), handwritten notes, and cross-referenced domestic-security (100-classification) field files on individuals connected to saucer reports (e.g. a 1955 Denver interview file). It is in this release because it is the FBI’s own paper trail on how the government treated the flying-disc phenomenon as a public-order and security matter in its first two decades. The heavy cursive, clippings and faint scans are why automated OCR under-reads it, so the structured records undercount its contents.