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65_HS1-101634279_100-DE-18221_Serial_844

Official WAR.GOV PDF via Open Sky release file copy.

Release 01#war-gov#pursue#release-01#official-source#evidence#fbi#pdf

65_HS1-101634279_100-DE-18221_Serial_844

Evidence media

Derived page render from the official PDF: 65_HS1-101634279_100-DE-18221_Serial_844, page 1

This derived page render is from the verified official one-page PDF. It shows the April 17, 1958 FBI Detroit memorandum, including the typed witness report, the object description, the attempted Selfridge Field/Air Force contact, and the recommendation to advise proper Air Force authorities.

Investigation reading

This is a one-page FBI office memorandum dated April 17, 1958, from SA Robert Ross Reynolds to SAC, Detroit, under the subject line "Unidentified Flying Objects." The source is not an investigation report with attachments; it is a short intake-style memo recording a telephone report and recommending that the information be passed to Air Force authorities.

The rendered page image was checked against the OCR. The main typed body is legible enough to read, but the scan includes dark pen marks, declassification overlays, stamps, and partly illegible handwriting. The page image matters here because the OCR appears to misread several low-level fields. On the rendered page, the report time reads as 4:08 A.M., and the path sentence reads that the object was "passing in a northern direction from southwest" before crossing the city three blocks south of Six Mile at Lamphere Street. Those details should be verified again before any structured correction is made to the extraction layer.

Review status: graph_investigation_draft. Investigation status: needs_human_review. Finding status: not_a_finding.

What the file appears to contain

The typed memo says David Weaver of Detroit telephoned the FBI Detroit office on April 17, 1958 to report that he had just seen an object in the sky. The object is described in the memo as a "circular object with a crystal-type dome that reflected lights." The document says it was seen moving in a northern direction from the southwest and crossing the city three blocks south of Six Mile at Lamphere Street.

The memo adds that Weaver had tried to call Selfridge Field to reach the Air Force, but that those attempts were unsuccessful, so he called the FBI office instead. It also says he was 23 years old, the son of a Detroit policeman, and had previous Civil Air Patrol experience, while also stating he was not very familiar with identifying aircraft. The final recommendation is brief: "Advise proper air force authorities."

No photograph, radar plot, aircraft track, weather check, astronomy check, witness interview transcript, or Air Force response is included in this released PDF. The page is therefore best treated as a contemporaneous report-of-report: an FBI memorandum preserving a telephone account, not a resolved case file.

Source custody and provenance

  • Official URL: https://www.war.gov/medialink/ufo/release_1/65_hs1-101634279_100-de-18221_serial_844.pdf
  • Open Sky release-file route: /api/explore/war-gov/release-file/war-gov-65-hs1-101634279-100-de-18221-serial-844-239d049d
  • SHA-256: 17e13c53b0cc0c3122b4d14d5b74a6cf8fda907179a9f8f8fea506c90c8fe09c
  • Release row: 31
  • Agency: FBI
  • Source type: one-page PDF, 677,153 bytes
  • OCR status: one page, one OCR chunk, with visual spot-check required for key fields
  • Visible archival identifiers include FBI file number 100-26505, FOIA number 90288, DocId 34715588, and a typed/handwritten serial reference ending in 844.

The official release manifest summarizes the file as a 1958 FBI memo about a Detroit man reporting a circular object with a crystal-type dome, with a recommendation to forward the information to proper Air Force authorities. That manifest description matches the broad content of the page, but the page itself is the stronger source for exact wording.

Graph context

The graph has this release item modeled as both an official release record and a linked PDF asset. The asset has 25 extracted claim records, 16 entity mentions, one sensor-event record, and no candidate crosslinks listed for this item.

The graph context is useful but needs careful reading. The lone sensor-event record appears to come from the memo's statement that Weaver had Civil Air Patrol experience but was not very familiar with aircraft identification. That is not instrument data; it is a witness-background sentence. The extracted claim layer also appears to inherit OCR readings for some fields that the rendered page reads differently, especially the call time and route wording. Treat those as extraction quality-control leads, not conclusions.

High-signal graph/source anchors for human review:

  • Witness/reporting party: David Weaver, Detroit.
  • Date and time: April 17, 1958; rendered page reads 4:08 A.M.
  • Location cue: three blocks south of Six Mile at Lamphere Street, Detroit.
  • Object description: circular object with a crystal-type dome reflecting lights.
  • Context cue: attempted contact with Selfridge Field / Air Force before calling the FBI.
  • Disposition in memo: advise proper Air Force authorities.

Leads to check

  • Compare the rendered-page reading against any alternate FBI, NARA, or WAR.GOV copy before updating structured OCR-derived fields.
  • Search adjacent FBI serials or file 100-26505 for any follow-up, Air Force referral, Selfridge Field response, or later disposition.
  • Run prosaic context checks for Detroit in the early morning of April 17, 1958: weather, astronomical objects, aircraft activity, and any regional reports near Selfridge Field.
  • Geocode the Six Mile / Lamphere Street location only as an investigative cue; do not overstate the witness's exact viewing position from this memo alone.
  • Treat the Civil Air Patrol sentence as a credibility/context note, not as proof of aircraft expertise or a sensor observation.

Lead check notes

  • Checked — The verified one-page PDF and its page render support the visual reading that the typed report time is 4:08 A.M. and that the route sentence says the object was passing northward "from southwest" before crossing near Six Mile and Lamphere Street. The OCR text still reads 1:08 A.M. and "traveling southward," so structured OCR-derived fields should remain review-needed until another official copy or human transcription check settles the discrepancy.
  • Partial — The current linked Release 01 OCR corpus includes a separate FBI Detroit file titled 65_HS1-101634279_100-DE-26505 that shares file number 100-26505, but those checked hits concern the Wladyslaw/Walter Krasuski account rather than a Weaver follow-up. No Air Force referral response, Selfridge Field reply, or later disposition for this Weaver memo was found in the checked linked corpus.
  • Needs external source — Weather, astronomy, aircraft activity, and regional Selfridge Field context for Detroit at around 4:08 A.M. on April 17, 1958 require external historical sources; they are not present in this one-page release file.
  • Checked — The Six Mile / Lamphere Street phrase is useful as a location cue, but the memo does not establish the witness's exact viewing position, distance, altitude, angular size, or line of sight.
  • Checked — The Civil Air Patrol sentence is witness-background context only. The memo itself says Weaver was not very familiar with aircraft identification and includes no instrument or sensor data.

Deep investigation — graph + web reconnaissance

Source reread and visual check

A fresh reread of the official one-page PDF and its rendered page keeps this file in the not_a_finding bucket. The page is an FBI Detroit office memorandum dated April 17, 1958, not a full Air Force case file: it preserves a telephone report, a short witness-background note, and the recommendation to advise proper Air Force authorities. The cached official PDF hash remains 17e13c53b0cc0c3122b4d14d5b74a6cf8fda907179a9f8f8fea506c90c8fe09c, with one PDF page and one OCR chunk.

The rendered page remains stronger than OCR for two key fields. OCR reads 1:08 A.M. and “traveling southward,” while visual review of the scan supports 4:08 A.M. and the path phrase “passing in a northern direction from southwest,” then crossing the city three blocks south of Six Mile at Lamphere Street. The scan is good enough for the typed body but degraded enough that these fields should remain human-review transcription issues, not automatic structured corrections.

Read-only graph connections

Read-only graph review shows the release asset linked to the official Release 01 CSV record for row 31, the WAR.GOV/PURSUE Release 01 source node, three text chunks (asset summary, official manifest description, and frontier OCR), 25 machine-extracted claim records, 16 entity mentions, and one machine-extracted SensorEvent. The “sensor” item is not instrument evidence: it is a deterministic extraction from the sentence saying Weaver had Civil Air Patrol experience but was not very familiar with aircraft identification. It should remain machine_extracted_needs_human_review / not_a_finding.

Same-file and same-file-number searches found a secondary UFO-USA Markdown conversion of this exact WAR.GOV asset and broader FBI file-number context for 100-26505. The adjacent Release 01 file 65_HS1-101634279_100-DE-26505 and FBI Vault Part 12 page hits concern the Wladyslaw/Walter Krasuski material and other Detroit UFO-file administration, not a confirmed follow-up to Weaver’s April 17, 1958 telephone report.

External provenance and context

The official WAR.GOV PDF and Release 01 CSV row remain the canonical source path, while the public Open Sky release-file route is the stable reader-facing copy used for the page render. A live server-side probe of the WAR.GOV URL/CSV during this review returned access-denied responses, so the already-ingested official file, hash, manifest metadata, and local release-file route are the practical provenance anchors for public verification.

The FBI Vault UFO Part 12 archived PDF is a useful official context source because it contains a Detroit 100-26505 UFO file reference, including a November 1957 SAC Detroit airtel on a separate UFO matter. That supports treating 100-26505 as a broader Detroit office UFO administrative file number, not as evidence that the Weaver memo was independently investigated or resolved. The visible NARA/FOIA/DocId markings on this page are custody clues, but no separate NARA catalog landing record was confirmed in this pass.

Prosaic checks

A sky-position check for Detroit at the visually supported time, April 17, 1958 at 4:08 A.M. local Detroit time, places the Sun about 17.8° below the horizon, the Moon below the horizon and only a thin waning crescent, Venus near the eastern horizon, Mars low in the southeast, Jupiter in the southwest, and Saturn toward the south. Those bright-object positions are useful context, but the memo’s claimed motion across the city and “circular object with a crystal-type dome” description do not cleanly resolve to a planet or Moon identification without duration, azimuth, elevation, angular size, weather, or independent observation details.

The graph has no Detroit-specific WeatherEvent, LaunchEvent, Satellite, or Aircraft record for this 1958 time window. The current WeatherEvent corpus is modern GOES/GLM material, and the Release 01 file itself includes no weather, radar, aircraft-track, or Air Force-response attachment. Historical weather, Selfridge Field traffic, early-satellite pass, and aircraft activity checks therefore remain follow-up work rather than resolved prosaic explanations.

Follow-up leads and limits

Highest-value follow-up remains official-first: search adjacent FBI serials around 100-18221-844 and 100-26505, the FBI Vault UFO parts, NARA/FOIA identifiers, and any Air Force/Selfridge Field correspondence that could show whether the “advise proper air force authorities” recommendation produced a response. The next pass should also use historical Detroit weather observations and a satellite/aircraft-pass reconstruction for the 4:08 A.M. local window.

Audit note: no Neo4j writes were made, no extracted claim was promoted, and no finding, hypothesis, or resolution decision is implied. The added context separates the source memo, unreviewed machine extraction, external file-number provenance, and prosaic-check gaps.

Limits

This draft makes no finding and does not resolve the report. The released file is a single scanned memorandum, not a full investigative case packet. It gives no duration, angular size, altitude, sound, color beyond reflected lights, independent witnesses, photographs, radar data, weather conditions, or follow-up interviews.

Some handwritten notes and stamp fields are only partly legible in the scan. Private contact details are present in the public source document but are not repeated here because they are not necessary for the investigative reading. The OCR is useful for discovery, but the page image should be treated as the reference for exact typed wording until a human reviewer confirms the discrepancies.

Sources