PURSUE Record — FBI 62-HQ-83894 — Wenyon Rehoboth Delaware 1946: Federal Bureau of Investigation · Delaware · 1946

Among the 120 PDFs in PURSUE Release 01, one of the oldest entries carries a file number that predates the modern UAP investigation apparatus by decades: FBI 62-HQ-83894, a declassified case file identified internally by the slug wenyon-rehoboth-delaware-1946. Released by the U.S. Department of War on May 8, 2026, this single-part document belongs to the FBI's long-running flying-discs investigation series and concerns an incident located in or near Rehoboth, Delaware, dated to 1946.

What this record contains

The releasing agency is the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the document is classified under the Bureau's headquarters file series 62-HQ-83894 — the "62" prefix indicating a domestic security matter, the category under which early UAP-adjacent reports were often routed in the postwar era. The record is a single PDF part, meaning it has been released as a unified document rather than split across multiple volumes. The public release inventory provides sparse case-specific metadata beyond the slug itself: the named locality is Rehoboth (most plausibly Rehoboth Beach, Delaware), and the incident year is 1946.

As the description acknowledges directly, "case-specific metadata is sparse in the public release inventory." There are no witness names, no object descriptions, and no resolution status attached to this record in the catalogued release data. What is documented is the institutional context: this file is part of the FBI's broader flying-discs case file spanning 1944 to 1973, a collection now partially accessible through PURSUE Release 01.

Historical & documentary context

The year 1946 places this record in a critically important transitional moment. The wave of "ghost rocket" sightings had been sweeping Scandinavia throughout that summer and autumn, drawing the attention of Western intelligence agencies including the FBI, which had begun accumulating reports of anomalous aerial phenomena from domestic correspondents. This was a full year before the 1947 Kenneth Arnold sighting that popularized the term "flying saucer," which means a 1946 Delaware report — if that is what this file represents — would predate the cultural inflection point most people associate with the modern UFO era. The FBI's role at this stage was not investigative in an aerospace sense; the Bureau was primarily concerned with whether foreign powers, particularly the Soviet Union, were conducting reconnaissance or psychological operations over American soil. Delaware's coastal geography, including its proximity to naval installations and the Atlantic seaboard, made it a plausible locus for such concerns.

FBI files from this period were typically composed of teletype communications, interoffice memoranda, and field agent summaries — not sensor data or imagery. The texture of a 62-HQ file from 1946 is almost certainly bureaucratic and testimonial: accounts relayed through the chain from field offices to headquarters, filtered through the institutional skepticism of J. Edgar Hoover's Bureau. That documentary character shapes what this PDF can and cannot tell a modern reader.

What this does and does not prove

The existence of this file proves that the FBI logged and retained a record associated with a reported aerial phenomenon in or near Rehoboth, Delaware, in 1946 — nothing more. It does not establish that anything physically anomalous occurred, and the public release inventory does not assign a resolution status to this case. The slug semantics (location and year) are metadata, not evidence. Readers should not interpret inclusion in PURSUE Release 01 as a governmental confirmation of anything unusual; the release explicitly includes resolved cases alongside unresolved ones to demonstrate analytical rigor. Until the document's contents are examined directly, its significance — if any — remains entirely open.

How it fits PURSUE Release 01

FBI 62-HQ-83894 is one of several Bureau archive files in the PURSUE Release 01 PDF set, which draws from three institutional streams: AARO-coordinated military sensor records, NASA archive materials, and historic FBI files extending back to the mid-twentieth century. This record sits at the oldest end of that temporal range — predating the formalization of UAP investigation programs that would follow in subsequent decades. Taken together, the FBI files in this release offer a window into how the U.S. government's domestic law-enforcement apparatus approached aerial anomalies before dedicated military and scientific programs existed to absorb that function. Broader coverage of the full release is available on the SkyLens PURSUE blog series.

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.