"Toilet seats" memo

On 3 September 1947, a memo from Colonel R H Smith (Assistant Chief of Staff Intelligence) to several Commanding Generals in the Army Air Forces stated that the FBI had been asked to assist the Air Force in UFO investigations “to relieve the numbered Air Forces of the task of tracking down all the many instances which turned out to be ash can covers, toilet seats and whatnot”.

The memo was supplied to FBI Special Agent Harry M Kimball by Lieutenant Colonel Donald Springer on 19 September 1947.

1. Web Resources

2. Book References

3. Other material

Web Resources

Complete images of relevant memo available online at page 21 (of 77) in Part 4 (of 16 parts) of the UFO material on the FBI’s FOIA website at the link below:

There is a rapid turnover of UFO material on the Internet. Many links to material on UFO websites quickly become out of date. Therefore, instead of giving many links to specific webpages I have instead included below a search box which can be used to search various leading UFO websites at the same time. You can then click on tabs at the top of the search results to list only results from forums, only results from websites I have labelled as "skeptical" etc. I have included tabs for a couple of specific websites that I find particularly useful, including the valuable archives of the UFO UpDates email discussion List. The relevant websites are all listed in the discussion of the "UFO Searchillion" search engine in Section 2.4 of the "Free UFO Researcher Starter Pack" and continues to evolve...

The relevant search box is one of the two main tools on this website which are intended to help reduce the amount of reinvention of the wheel within UFOlogy. The other main tool is the collection of tables of references to discussion of UFO incidents, personalities and other matters in various books. Those tables can be sorted by author, length and date. I hope these tools are useful.

Book References

Complete text of memo presented by Fawcett, George and Greenwood, Barry in their “Clear Intent” (1984) (available on Amazon USA and on Amazon UK) at pages 156-159 (in Chapter 10) of the Spectrum softcover edition (with the same page numbering in the Fireside softcover edition published under the title “The UFO Cover-Up”).

The table below includes references to relevant discussions in UFO/SETI books noted by Isaac Koi during a review of approximately 963 UFO/SETI books during the period 2003-2006 (with a few later additions). The table can be sorted by author, date and length of discussion by clicking on the relevant word in the top line of the table.

Many of the tables of references on this website are considerably longer than the references to books found on most other UFO websites. Indeed, some are probably the longest that have been collated in relation to some events and personalities. Together with the "UFO Searchillion" search box, I hope that these tables are found to be a useful contribution to UFOlogy.

For discussion of the toilet seat FBI memo see the following:

Other Material

Please use the comments section below to share references to any particularly interesting relevant articles.