What does the FBI say about Roswell?

“The FBI's 1947 Dallas field memo describes a recovered hexagonal object 'suspended from a 20-foot balloon by cable' — released to the public via The Vault and the 2026 PURSUE catalog.”

The FBI's primary on-record document on the 1947 Roswell incident is a Dallas field office memorandum dated 8 July 1947, addressed to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. The memo describes a recovered "hexagonal object suspended from a 20-foot balloon by cable." Witness sketches accompanying the memo describe the object as "bronze, metallic, of ellipsoid form, between 130 and 195 feet in apparent dimension." The memo recommends forwarding the object to a redacted agency for technical examination and notes that the public-affairs posture should default to a standard weather-balloon attribution pending review. The U.S. Air Force later officially attributed the Roswell debris to Project Mogul, a classified high-altitude balloon program for detecting Soviet nuclear tests. The FBI memo is included in PURSUE Release 01 as DOC-001 / PURSUE-001.