A newly released FBI file from 1957, now part of the Department of War’s PURSUE archive, describes a man’s claim of seeing a large, circular vehicle rise vertically near a German military compound in 1944. The document, designated 65_HS1-101634279_100-DE-26505, was made public on May 8, 2026. For historians and researchers, the file raises more questions than it answers.
The report is an interview with Wladyslaw Krasuski. He told the FBI more than a decade after World War II ended that he saw the vehicle during the final year of the war in Europe.
The official description says the sighting occurred in 1944, near a German military compound. The location is given only as “Germany.” The document text itself is partially illegible, with fragmented sentences and classification markings that block much of the narrative. This is not a clean, tidy record.
It is a mess. That matters.
The PURSUE archive at war.gov holds government records the Department of War has chosen to make public. The FBI file on Krasuski is one of them. But the document’s condition—its gaps, its obscured passages—means anyone trying to verify the claim is working blind.
The PDF file, originally hosted at that site, is 5.1 MB. The viewer on the site does not work. Users must download it to read what little is legible.
The consequences of this release are practical. First, the document is not a definitive account.
It is a record of what one man said, taken down by FBI agents in 1957. There is no independent confirmation in the file. No second witness.
No physical evidence. The report itself does not even fully record the interview.
The illegible portions may contain key details—names, dates, locations, the exact nature of the German compound. Without them, the story is a skeleton. Second, the timing of the release matters.
The PURSUE archive went public in May 2026. That is decades after the events described. The witness, Krasuski, would be well over 100 years old if alive today.
There is no known effort to locate him or his family. No follow-up investigation is mentioned in the file.
The FBI’s interest in 1957 may have ended with the interview. The archive release is the first time the public sees the document. Third, the location of the sighting—near a German military compound in 1944—ties the claim directly to the heart of the Nazi war effort.
Germany in 1944 was a country under intense Allied bombing, with secret weapons projects scattered across its territory. The circular, vertically-rising vehicle described by Krasuski does not match any known Axis aircraft from that period.
That alone fuels speculation. But the file offers no evidence to connect the sighting to any specific program, German or otherwise. Researchers now face a wall.
The PURSUE archive holds the document, but the document holds little more than a fragment. The Department of War has not released any accompanying analysis. No cross-referenced files.
No declassified memos from the FBI’s internal review. The PDF is a single piece of a puzzle with no picture on the box.
What comes next is grunt work. Historians will try to track down other records from the same FBI field office. They will search for any mention of Krasuski in immigration files, military records, or census data.
They will compare the document’s classification markings to known FBI filing systems. The goal is to find the missing pieces—the sentences that were redacted or simply lost to age.
The release of the file is not an answer. It is a starting point. And the starting point is mostly blank.
