Newly resurfaced FBI “UFO files” are reviving one of the government’s strangest old mysteries: reports claiming small beings emerged from flying saucers in New Mexico.
The decades-old records, posted in the FBI’s public Vault, include a March 22, 1950, memo from Guy Hottel, then the special agent in charge of the bureau’s Washington field office, to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.
The memo described an account from an informant who claimed an Air Force investigator had reported three “so-called flying saucers” recovered in New Mexico.
The craft were described as circular, with raised centers and about 50 feet in diameter. Each one allegedly contained three small bodies of human shape, dressed in metallic cloth.
The memo said the bodies were “only three feet tall,” though the newly resurfaced report has been widely described online as involving roughly four-foot-tall beings.
The memo also claimed the saucers may have crashed because a “high-powered radar” installation interfered with their controls. But the bureau did not treat it as a solved case, or even a proven one.
“No further evaluation was attempted,” the memo said.
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That has not stopped the file from becoming one of the most talked-about documents in the FBI’s online archive. The agency has previously said the Hottel memo became its most-viewed Vault file after being posted online, largely because UFO enthusiasts and tabloids seized on it as possible proof of a government cover-up.
The FBI, however, has been careful to pour cold water on the hype. In a 2013 explainer, the bureau said the memo was not new, was first released publicly in the late 1970s and had already been available online before the Vault launched in 2011.
More importantly, the FBI said the document “does not prove the existence of UFOs” and described it as a second- or third-hand claim that agents never investigated.
Still, the file remains catnip for Americans skeptical of Washington secrecy, especially as public interest in UFOs and unidentified anomalous phenomena has exploded in recent years.
For believers, the Hottel memo is another tantalizing piece of a much larger puzzle. For skeptics, it is an old rumor preserved in federal paperwork, not evidence of alien life.
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