Hanford Nuclear Site Luminous Disc 1945

In December 1945, weeks after the Japanese surrender formally ended World War II, security personnel at the Hanford Site in Washington State — the plutonium production complex that produced the materials for the Trinity test and the Fat Man atomic bomb — observed a luminous disc-shaped object hovering at approximately 600 feet altitude over one of the plutonium production reactor buildings. The object performed a slow circuit of the reactor area before departing at high speed to the north. Manhattan Project security personnel and DuPont Corporation security officers (who managed Hanford at the time) both filed reports to Army Intelligence. The Army Intelligence report was classified at a level consistent with the facility's sensitivity. The Hanford encounter predates the modern UAP era by nearly two years and represents a documented precedent for the nuclear facility incursion pattern that would become well-established by the late 1940s and 1950s. It was among the classified materials that Stanton Friedman's FOIA research uncovered in the 1980s.