Tuesday 26 March 2013

FBI comes clean on 1950 UFO sighting memo from Washington D.C. chief



The Federal Bureau of Investigation has come clean on a 63 year old memo from the head of their Washington D.C. office pertaining to UFO sightings.
The memo was associated to a story relayed to four FBI from a third party reporting that an Air Force investigator had reported three “flying saucers” were recovered in New Mexico.
“They [the saucers] were described as being circular in shape with raised centers, approximately 50 feet in diameter,” the memo states. “Each one was occupied by three bodies of human shape but only three feet tall, dressed in metallic cloth of a very fine texture.”
“Each body was bandaged in a manner similar to the blackout suits used by speed fliers and test pilots.”
In an FBI release on March 24, 2013, the Bureau indicates the story is the single most popular file in their various records released under the Freedom of Information Act.
“Over the past two years, this file has been viewed nearly a million times,” the release stated.
The file is a single page memo from March 22, 1950 from Washington D.C. field office lead Guy Hottel.
Hottel, who died in 1990, addressed the memo to Director J. Edgar Hoover, which was protocol for all FBI memos. The memo was recorded and indexed soon after.
The informant claimed that the saucers had been found because the government’s “high-powered radar” in the area had interfered with “the controlling mechanism of the saucers.”
The memo ends with “[n]o further evaluation was attempted” concerning the matter by the FBI agent.
The FBI said that when their Vault released this information in April 2011, “some media outlets noticed the Hottel memo and erroneously reported that the FBI had posted proof of a UFO crash at Roswell, New Mexico and the recovery of wreckage and alien corpses.”
The FBI says they have only occasionally been involved with any investigations of UFO and extraterrestrials sightings, and this particular memo is not new. It was first released publicly in the late 1970s.
There is no connection to the infamous events of July 1947 in Roswell, the FBI says “Hottel memo is dated nearly three years after” that.
“For a few years after the Roswell incident, Director Hoover did order his agents—at the request of the Air Force—to verify any UFO sightings. That practice ended in July 1950, four months after the Hottel memo, suggesting that our Washington Field Office didn’t think enough of that flying saucer story to look into it.”
“Finally, the Hottel memo does not prove the existence of UFOs; it is simply a second- or third-hand claim that we never investigated,” explained the FBI release. “Some people believe the memo repeats a hoax that was circulating at that time, but the Bureau’s files have no information to verify that theory.”