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.
Where this file fits in the PURSUE archive
This file is one of FBI's 87 files in the Trump PURSUE disclosure. Within the FBI agency block it ranks #46 of 87 by Anomalousness Index. Across the entire 334-file archive it ranks #203 of 334.
That places it in the lower-scoring band of the archive (203 of 334 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 30 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 a real credibility tier - trained federal investigative staff - though the rubric ranks it below mission-active military or astronaut testimony because 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:
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