PURSUE Record — FBI 62-HQ-83894 — Davidson-Brown B-25 crash mission report (1947): Federal Bureau of Investigation · Kelso, Washington (B-25 crash en route from

FBI file 62-HQ-83894 is a single-part declassified PDF from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, released under the PURSUE Release 01 program on May 8, 2026. It documents the Bureau's investigative record of the August 1, 1947 crash of a United States Army Air Forces B-25 near Kelso, Washington — a flight carrying Air Force Intelligence officers Captain William L. Davidson and Lt. Frank M. Brown back from Tacoma, where they had collected physical material related to the Maury Island incident from Kenneth Arnold and Fred Crisman.

What this record contains

This is a single PDF released by the FBI as part of the U.S. Department of War's PURSUE Release 01. The file covers the August 1, 1947 crash of a B-25 Mitchell bomber that went down near Kelso, Washington, while on a flight from McChord Field to Hamilton Field in California. According to the official description accompanying the release, Davidson and Brown had traveled to Tacoma to collect Maury Island incident material from Kenneth Arnold — the civilian pilot whose June 1947 sighting near Mt. Rainier is widely credited as a catalyst for the modern UFO era — and from Fred Crisman. Both officers were killed in the crash. The official description further notes that allegations arose claiming the slag-material samples they had collected were lost in the wreckage, a detail that became a persistent thread in early UAP documentation.

The document is catalogued as a single file part. The public release does not specify the internal page count or the precise categories of FBI correspondence included beyond what is stated in the official description blurb.

Historical & documentary context

The summer of 1947 was an extraordinary and compressed moment in American aerospace and intelligence history. Within a span of weeks, the U.S. experienced the Maury Island incident (June 21), Arnold's Mt. Rainier sighting (June 24), and the Roswell Army Air Field incident (early July) — all before Davidson and Brown's B-25 went down on August 1. The FBI was, at this time, being drawn into UAP-adjacent investigations at the direct request of military intelligence, even as the Army Air Forces moved toward establishing what would become Project Sign. Bureau files from this era typically mix administrative correspondence, field agent summaries, and witness interview records — the documentary grammar of a federal agency applying existing criminal and national-security frameworks to phenomena that did not fit cleanly into either category.

The Davidson-Brown crash sits at the intersection of two institutional anxieties of the period: the possibility that foreign adversaries had deployed exotic aircraft over American territory, and the concern that sensitive material collected by intelligence officers could be destroyed or go missing. The "sabotage" framing — the suggestion that the B-25 was brought down deliberately to destroy or conceal the Maury Island samples — was never formally proven, but it became one of the foundational contested narratives in the early history of UAP investigation, shaping how subsequent government denials were read by researchers for decades.

What this does and does not prove

What the record establishes — at minimum — is that the FBI opened and maintained a formal case file (number 62-HQ-83894) concerning the crash, that the Bureau was sufficiently engaged with the Maury Island matter to generate investigative paperwork, and that the deaths of Davidson and Brown were treated as warranting federal attention. What the record does not establish, on its own, is any determination about the cause of the crash, the nature or authenticity of the material the officers were transporting, or whether any samples survived, were destroyed, or were deliberately removed. The sabotage hypothesis referenced in the official description was an allegation documented in the investigative record — not a finding or conclusion. Readers should treat this file as evidence of institutional awareness and documented concern in the summer of 1947, not as confirmation of any particular theory about the Maury Island incident or the fate of the collected material.

How it fits PURSUE Release 01

Within the 162-document PURSUE Release 01 dataset — spanning 28 videos, 14 images, and 120 PDFs drawn from military sensor archives, NASA holdings, and historic FBI files — FBI 62-HQ-83894 belongs to the Bureau's historic archive series. These files represent the FBI's early formal engagement with UAP-adjacent investigations in the years immediately after World War II, and their inclusion reflects the Department of War's stated intent to surface foundational investigative records alongside contemporary sensor data. The Davidson-Brown crash file is among the earliest-dated materials in the release, anchoring the series at the precise historical moment when the modern UAP phenomenon first became a documented institutional concern. For the full release catalogue and additional context on FBI-origin records, visit the SkyLens UAP files page or browse other PURSUE Release 01 coverage on this site.

Editorial note: This analysis is independent commentary on a publicly released document. The original record, source links, and full release metadata are catalogued on the SkyLens UAP files page alongside every other case in the PURSUE Release 01 set.