THE DOCUMENT
(Unchanged: an FBI field office file, Detroit file 100-DE-26505, captioned “Unidentified Flying Objects”, from November 1957. It records the interview of Wladyslaw Krasuski, a Detroit resident, conducted on 7 November 1957 by Special Agent Cassius Rathbun, together with the teletypes and memoranda around it. The file also holds an unrelated 1966 letter from a private UFO group. Released in PURSUE Release 01, hosted at war.gov.)
Why this one is worth your time
The account in this file is dramatic: a circular craft, the width of a sports field, rising vertically from behind a screen at a guarded site in wartime Germany, recalled in 1957 by a man who said he had seen it thirteen years earlier, in another country, during a war. It is one of the documents that gets cited as a primary source for the idea that Nazi Germany built flying discs. What makes it worth reading is the gap between the account and the paperwork around it: the FBI recorded the sighting in careful detail, and the one and only judgement the Bureau itself entered in the file was about the witness, not the craft.
What the document says
In early November 1957, a Detroit man named Wladyslaw Krasuski wrote a letter to Robert Cutler, a senior aide to President Eisenhower, saying he “might have some information about the rocket in Texas”, something he had heard about on a Polish-language radio programme. The letter reached the FBI, and the Director ordered the Detroit office to interview him at once. The interview produced the sighting.
Why the file exists. The FBI did not open it to investigate a flying craft. It opened it because a member of the public had written to the President’s staff, and the Bureau’s task was to find out who he was and whether he was a concern. On 6 November 1957 the Director sent an urgent teletype to the Detroit Special Agent in Charge ordering an immediate interview. The file is captioned “Unidentified Flying Objects” and was kept in the Bureau’s internal-security class of records. It holds the Detroit office’s reply teletypes, a memorandum recording the interview, a records check, and, filed loosely at the back, a 1966 letter from an Oklahoma UFO research group asking the Detroit office for local sighting information. That last item has nothing to do with Krasuski; it is in the folder because the folder is where “unidentified flying objects” correspondence was kept.
The witness and the structure of the account. Krasuski, a Pole, had been brought to Germany as a prisoner of war in May 1942 and held at Gut Alt Golssen, a site he placed about 30 miles east of Berlin. After the war he spent years in displaced-persons camps, trained as a radio technician, and emigrated to the United States in 1951, settling in a Polish neighbourhood of Detroit, where by 1957 he was married with four children. The FBI’s records check found nothing on him. He was describing, in 1957, an event he placed in 1944: a thirteen-year gap, recalled from his time as a prisoner of war, observed, by his own account, briefly and at a distance from a site he was not free to move around. The file is a contemporaneous record of the 1957 interview, not of the 1944 event.
The sighting, as the file records it. At the guarded site, in 1944, there was a circular enclosure ringed by a tall tarpaulin-type wall, the teletype puts it at about 50 feet high, screening whatever was inside from view. Krasuski said he watched, briefly and from perhaps 500 feet away, a vehicle rise slowly and vertically from behind that screen, high enough to clear the wall, then move off slowly and horizontally a short distance before trees blocked his view. The teletype summary describes the vehicle as circular, 75 to 100 yards in diameter and about 14 feet high, with upper and lower sections. He described a high-pitched whining noise, and said an engine or tractor in the area failed to operate during that period and on several other occasions when the noise was heard. He described uninsulated metal cables, possibly copper, an inch and a half to two inches thick, running along and under the ground nearby, sometimes under water, between the enclosure and a small concrete column.
The FBI’s own contribution. It is procedural and short. The interview was conducted by Special Agent Cassius Rathbun. The Bureau noted that Krasuski had written to Cutler, rather than directly to the President, after seeing Cutler’s photograph in a local paper. It logged his address, his family, the negative records check. And it recorded, in two separate documents, the same single assessment: “no indication of irrational or otherwise abnormal behavior” during the interview, and “no indication of mental instability”. That is the whole of the FBI’s evaluation, and every word of it is about the witness. There is no FBI judgement anywhere in the file about the craft.
What the document does not say
That the craft Krasuski described existed, or that wartime Germany built a circular flying vehicle. The file contains one person’s recollection, given thirteen years after the fact, with no corroborating witness, no contemporaneous record and no physical evidence.
An FBI conclusion about the sighting. The Bureau made exactly one judgement, that the witness showed no indication of irrational behaviour or mental instability, and that judgement is about the man. The file records no assessment of the object, the noise, the stalled engines, or the cables; it records that Krasuski reported them, and stops there. It does not corroborate them, test them, or connect them to anything.
That the file is a UFO investigation. It is an internal-security and identity check on a member of the public who wrote to the White House, captioned and filed in the Bureau’s internal-security records, with a UFO account as its content rather than its purpose.
From the record
“Might have some information about the rocket in Texas.” Krasuski’s letter to Robert Cutler, the trigger for the file
Circular, 75 to 100 yards in diameter and about 14 feet high, with upper and lower sections. The teletype summary, describing the vehicle Krasuski reported
“No indication of irrational or otherwise abnormal behavior.” The FBI, on the witness during the interview
“No indication of mental instability.” The FBI’s second record of the same single assessment
Where the case connects
This sits alongside Briefing 16 (the September 2023 sighting) on the difference between recording what a witness said and assessing what was seen, the FD-302 question pushed back to 1957. It also sits with Briefing 11 on how a file caption gathers unlike documents together, the 1966 Oklahoma letter loose at the back being the example here. Briefing 1 covers the release and its tier system.
The file leaves its loose ends as neutral facts. The account is single-witness: no other observer appears anywhere in the file. There is no corroborating record and no physical evidence; the cables and the stalled engines are further elements of the same recollection, reported by Krasuski and not independently tested in the file. The 1966 UFO-group letter at the back has no link to Krasuski. Any later record that corroborates the account, or anything more on Gut Alt Golssen, lands in this series when it does.
Read it yourself
FBI Detroit file 100-DE-26505, the Krasuski interview with its associated teletypes and memoranda, is hosted at war.gov in PURSUE Release 01.
Read the file. Decide for yourself.
Related wiki entries
The wiki entries below give background on the programme and the publisher behind this briefing.
References and further reading
- Primary document: FBI Detroit file 100-DE-26505, “Unidentified Flying Objects”, interview of Wladyslaw Krasuski, 7 November 1957, with associated teletypes and memoranda, PURSUE Release 01, hosted at war.gov
- Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, U.S. Department of War, war.gov/ufo
- Briefing 16 in this series, on the FD-302 form and the difference between recording a witness and assessing a sighting
- Briefing 11 in this series, on how a file caption gathers unlike documents together
- Briefing 1 in this series, on PURSUE Release 01 as a whole and the evidence tier system