Project Blue Book: 1957 RB-47 'Unknown' Over Fort Worth & Special Report No. 14

Project Blue Book: The 1957 RB-47 'Unknown' Over Fort Worth — and the 1955 Statistical Study Behind It

A newly surfaced Project Blue Book record documents a July 1957 UFOB sighting over Fort Worth involving an Air Force RB-47 crew — and Air Defense Command's formal decision to carry it as 'unknown.' Read alongside Special Report No. 14, it shows how the Air Force's two UFO tracks — statistical analysis and case-by-case investigation — operated in parallel.

Published

October 5, 2026

Declassified

Date not listed

Source agency

The Black Vault (FOIA archive)

ufociafoiaprojectbluebookspecialair

Opening summary

The Air Force ran two UFO programs at once. One was statistical — a massive attempt to reduce thousands of sighting reports into sortable data and ask whether anything anomalous survived the sorting. The other was case-by-case — a reporting pipeline that logged individual sightings, routed them between commands, and assigned each a conclusion.

Two declassified records hosted by The Black Vault show both tracks in operation. The first is Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14, dated 5 May 1955, prepared by the Air Technical Intelligence Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, which analyzed roughly 4,000 unidentified aerial object reports collected between June 1947 and December 1952.

S. Air Force RB-47 aircraft and Major Lewis D. Chase.

The 1957 record contains a Project 10073 Record Card, a 15 August 1957 memorandum from Headquarters Air Defense Command requesting the officer complete an Airborne Observer's Data Sheet, and routing of the…

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Both documents are hosted by The Black Vault, the online Freedom of Information Act clearinghouse maintained by John Greenewald, Jr. Special Report No. 14 carries the CIA release marking CIA-RDP81R00560R000100060001-5, approved for release on 2005/07/20. The 1957 record is a Project Blue Book document associated with the same archive. The available text for both is OCR-derived and partially garbled; figures, names, and dates should be verified against the original page images before being cited. Official source documents referenced in this article: - https://www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/project-blue-book-special-report-14-may-5-1955/ - https://www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/project-blue-book-the-rb-47-ufo-incident-july-17-1957/

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This article is based on declassified or officially released source material. DeclassifyAI summarizes and analyzes the linked government document. Always review the original official source directly — linked above — before relying on any summary or interpretation. Illustrations shown with articles are not part of the originally released documents; they are added by DeclassifyAI for substance when the source release does not include usable imagery.