FBI-UAP-D011, D/FBI Correspondence Referral, 1949
This collection of documents contains correspondence between the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), J. Edgar Hoover, and Rev. Charles Barnes concerning Barnes’ account of an incident potentially involving unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP). Rev. Barnes described observing four beams of light “converging in the Cascade Mountains,” at an altitude of approximately 10,000 feet, with a “great explosion” visible at the convergence point of those beams for at least ten minutes. Director Hoover replied to Rev. Barnes thanking him for his letter and informing him that he had forwarded it to the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). Director Hoover conveyed to the AEC that Rev. Barnes believed that the event may relate to a military or scientific experiment within the commission’s purview.
The summary above is sourced from the released file metadata as published to war.gov. The analysis sections below are original to this tracker.
Text of the document
Machine-extracted from the PDF war.gov published (its text layer or OCR), so expect errors, especially in names, numbers and handwriting; the PDF is the authoritative copy. Lines that did not extract as readable text are left out. Showing about 294 words from page 2 of 4.
PAGE 2
REV. CHARLES C. BARNES, PASTOR Mre J. Edgar Hoover Dear Mr. Hoover: Here is a bit of information which may be of great signi ficance, or may be merely an observation of a sientific experi ment. It may be known by military authorities and the AoEoC. or only a few may have seen it and none reported it to the right place. Here it is. Can you pass it to the rig~t persons? Last May one afternoon I saw four beam~ in the sky passing from the northwest to the southeast and converging in the Cascade mountains. In those four narrow beams small slou.d§ vvere forming. And where the beams met apparently against the mountains a great explosion effect was to be seen. I wou~d say that· they were visible for at least 10 minutes or longer. The sight brought to mind an article read before the war about experiments carried on in Europe with various types of radio beams to effect rainfall. I would guess that I had seen the article. in the Science Digest. The Columbia River flood of last summer and the unusual precipitation this winter have forced me to_feel that this observation of mine should be sent somewhere in the interest I ~~ of national security. ii ctf I have one son in the Air Cor~and anothercwbtkg with the A.E.C. at Hanford which causes me to ptay for peace,· as weli I as the fact that as a minister I deplore.the waste and tragedy, I 1 . of war. That is one reason that I have fefrained from passing on information and id~as that might incite warlike attitudes. May I add these words to paragraph two. The explosion effect seemed to rise to a height of about ten thousand feet.
Where this file fits in the PURSUE archive
This file is one of FBI's 104 files in the Trump PURSUE disclosure. Within the FBI agency block it ranks #50 of 104 by Anomalousness Index. Across the entire 450-file archive it ranks #235 of 450.
That places it in the lower-scoring band of the archive (235 of 450 by score), typical of investigative-record style files where the report is paper-based rather than instrumented.
For the broader cluster context, this file is part of FBI Modern UAP Files - the FBI's modern UAP files: the 2022 Colorado Springs interview and the FBI-authenticated northeastern orb videos. The cluster page walks through all 47 member files with regional grouping, sensor breakdown, and standout analysis.
Anomalousness Index: 58/100
Evidentiary weight that this encounter remains unexplained after conventional analysis. Not a probability of extraterrestrial origin - that number is not honestly computable from the released files and this tracker refuses to publish it.
🤖 AI-ASSISTED SCORING · methodology
The six rubric components break down for this file as follows. Each component has a weighted contribution to the final score; the per-component explanation below describes what this file's particular value on that component means in the rubric's framework.
No sensor, camera, or instrument backs this observation - it is testimony, relayed through the FBI, and scored on the rubric's lowest sensor-quality tier for that reason. That doesn't bear on the witness's credibility (a separate axis); it reflects only that nothing beyond human perception recorded the event.
The witness here is FBI personnel, entering the report into the federal investigative system through standard channels. That's one of the rubric's higher credibility tiers - trained federal investigative staff, weighted level with a trained aviator and below only an astronaut witness - though the posture is reactive (responding to a report) rather than an active operational context.
On corroboration, this file from the FBI - like every single-tier file in the PURSUE archive - is a single-witness or single-instrument capture per the released metadata. The rubric doesn't infer multi-witness confirmation the summaries don't actually establish; this score reflects the honest limit of what was released, not a judgment about the underlying event.
The released file contains no speed, acceleration, or vector data precise enough to score on the kinematic axis - and that's true archive-wide, not specific to this file. The rubric declines to infer kinematic anomaly from a witness's narrative estimate of how fast something moved; that itself says something about what PURSUE actually released: descriptive accounts, not flight-path telemetry.
Every file in the archive, including this one, scores this tier: a conventional explanation was considered in the released record but isn't treated as dispositive. That's a pattern in how war.gov's own summaries are written - they consistently hedge against strong conclusions either way - and the rubric takes that hedging at face value rather than resolving it for them.
This file was released as open by the FBI after a formal review process concluded - not simply logged and left pending. That's a stronger disposition signal than 'unresolved, no review': a review actually happened, and remaining open is the FBI's own published conclusion from it, not an absence of one.
Bottom line on the score: the Anomalousness Index of 58/100 reflects evidentiary weight that this specific file's encounter remains structurally unexplained by the rubric's six axes - it is not a claim that the underlying event involved anything non-conventional, and it is not comparable across rubrics that use different weights. For the full per-axis weights and the rubric JSON, see /methodology.
Related files in FBI
Other PURSUE files in the same category, ranked by Anomalousness Index.
FBI-UAP-PR001, “Triangle Orbs,” Northeastern United States, 2021
FBI-UAP-PR002, “Red Orb Rotation,” Northeastern United States, 2022
FBI-UAP-PR003, “Orbs Over the Pond,” 2024
FBI-UAP-PR004, “Northeastern Orb Sighting,” 2025
FBI-UAP-PR005, Digital Recreation, Narrative Statement 3-1, Western United States Event, 2…
FBI-UAP-PR006, Digital Recreation, Narrative Statement 3-2, Western United States Event, 2…
Verification
SHA-256:
This hash is the SHA-256 of the file body war.gov served on the verification date above. War.gov has re-processed some file bodies since first release (re-compression + OCR, no content removed - see /changes); we re-verify and record the change rather than silently serve a stale hash. How to check this yourself →