The Top in the Mountains

He was lying on the ground in the mountains at about ten in the morning. Half a block away, the letter said, sat "a large silver metal, greenish in color, shaped like a child's top and about the size of the balloons used at County Fairs". It seemed to have two windows. Parts of its metal looked transparent. It looked like a sealed pressure chamber, and he had the impression of "some life within this object although he saw no persons". He stood up and waved. In a second the craft was off the ground, and it knocked him down as it went. Its power was silent. He asked whether this was a landing from another planet, whose people had grown curious about the atomic bomb and perhaps "solved the theory of negative gravity".

What is on the record

The story reached the FBI second-hand. On 9 July 1949 Ernest Cuneo read the letter over to the FBI's D. M. Ladd, who summarised it in a memo now in the headquarters file 62-HQ-83894. The Department of War released it on 8 May 2026. Cuneo called the letter well written and thought its author knew his physics. In any event, he said, it made "an awfully good story". The Bureau told its Los Angeles office to check Jones's background and interview him.

It could not. The owner and former manager of the court at the address on the letter did not know Peter Camerlon Jones, and the office reported that efforts to identify or locate him had failed. On 20 July Ladd concluded that "this may have been a prank". The letter came two years after the event it describes, and nothing else in the file supports it.

Why it sits where it does

The page grades L0 · SINGLE ACCOUNT. The only witness is a name on a letter that the FBI could not tie to any real person, so the record carries no identified witness. The tier measures sourcing rather than truth. What, if anything, rose from the mountains outside Los Angeles is not resolved here.