PURSUE Record — FBI 62-HQ-83894 — Hatfield Ellison Myrtle Creek 1947: Federal Bureau of Investigation · Myrtle Creek · 1947

Among the 120 PDF documents released by the U.S. Department of War on May 8, 2026 as part of PURSUE Release 01, FBI 62-HQ-83894 — Hatfield Ellison Myrtle Creek 1947 is a single-part declassified case file drawn from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's internal flying-discs dossier. The record dates to 1947 and is associated with an incident in Myrtle Creek, Oregon. It carries no verdict, no resolution status in the public inventory, and no accompanying imagery. What it does carry is a provenance that places it at the very origin point of institutional UAP recordkeeping in the United States.

What this record contains

The document is a single-part PDF released under the FBI's case file number 62-HQ-83894. The releasing agency is the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the record belongs to the agency's broader flying-discs case file series, which spans the years 1944 through 1973. The incident date is 1947, and the listed location is Myrtle Creek — a small city in Douglas County in southwestern Oregon. The public release inventory assigns the internal slug hatfield-ellison-myrtle-creek-1947, which suggests the file involves individuals identified as Hatfield and Ellison in connection with whatever was reported at that location that year.

Beyond those slug-derived identifiers and the geographic and temporal anchors, the public release does not include detailed metadata for this record. As the official description notes, "case-specific metadata is sparse in the public release inventory." There is no witness statement summary, no object description, and no resolution classification available in the open inventory. Any analysis beyond what the slug and case number convey would be speculation, and this piece declines to offer any.

Historical & documentary context

The year 1947 is not incidental. It is the founding year of American flying saucer documentation: Kenneth Arnold's June report over the Cascades, the Roswell incident in July, and the subsequent launch of Project Sign under the U.S. Army Air Forces all occurred within months of one another. The FBI entered this space at the explicit request of Army Air Forces intelligence, agreeing in late 1947 to receive and forward civilian sighting reports while maintaining its own internal file. The case number series 62-HQ reflects the Bureau's domestic security and intelligence intake, and the fact that this particular report from a small Oregon town made it into a headquarters-level file indicates it was not simply discarded at the field office level — it was centralized and retained.

Myrtle Creek sits along the South Umpqua River corridor, roughly 170 miles south of the Arnold sighting area. In 1947, the Pacific Northwest was already the geographic epicenter of the national flying saucer wave. FBI field offices in the region were receiving and logging reports with unusual frequency that summer and autumn. This record is a product of that institutional moment: a federal law enforcement agency that was, however reluctantly, building an archive of unresolved aerial observations from ordinary American towns.

What this does and does not prove

What the record establishes as documented fact is narrow: the FBI opened and retained a case file linked to a 1947 incident in Myrtle Creek involving individuals whose surnames appear to be Hatfield and Ellison, and that file has now been declassified and released. Nothing in the available public metadata confirms what was observed, how it was characterized by the reporting parties, or what conclusion — if any — the Bureau reached internally. The record's inclusion in PURSUE Release 01 reflects a policy decision to surface unresolved historical files, not a determination that the underlying incident involved anything anomalous. Unresolved means unexplained in the record; it does not mean confirmed extraordinary.

How it fits PURSUE Release 01

FBI 62-HQ-83894 is one of dozens of Bureau documents in the PURSUE Release 01 archive, which draws on three distinct source streams: AARO-coordinated military sensor records, NASA archive materials, and exactly this kind of historic FBI case file dating to the postwar flying-discs era. The FBI contribution to the release is specifically the 1944–1973 series — decades of Bureau-level intake that has never been systematically public before. Taken together, these files form the documentary spine of American institutional engagement with the UAP question. You can browse the full FBI file set alongside the military and NASA records on the SkyLens UAP files page, and for broader editorial coverage of the release see our PURSUE Release 01 coverage.

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.