Ever wonder what the most popular document in the vault of the Federal Bureau of Investigation is? You're probably not surprised to learn that it's a memo about a UFO.
The memo is a page long, dated March 22, 1950, and is addressed to then FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover from Guy Hottel, then head of the FBI's Washington, D.C. field office. It contained information from an informant with a subject "Flying Saucers Information Concerning."
The memo stated:
"An investigator for the Air Force stated that three so-called flying saucers had been recovered in New Mexico. They were described as being circular in shape with raised centers, approximately 50 feet in diameter. 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."
Hottel reported no further evaluation was conducted.
The file was released in April 2011 under the Freedom of Information Act. It has been viewed nearly a million times, in part because, according to the FBI, media outlets "erroneously reported that the FBI had posted proof of a UFO crash at Roswell, New Mexico [in 1947] and the recovery of wreckage and alien corpses."
In 2011, the Daily Mail reported that, "A bizarre memo that appears to prove that aliens did land in New Mexico prior to 1950 has been published by the FBI."
The FBI has posted a statement regarding the memo in a blog post on its website on Monday.
"The Hottel memo does not prove the existence of UFOs," the post read. "It is simply a second- or third-hand claim that we never investigated."
The FBI also pointed out that the date on the memo Hottel sent was approximately three years after the events in Roswell, which occurred in July 1947.
"There is no reason to believe the two are connected," the statement read. "The FBI has only occasionally been involved in investigating reports of UFOs and extraterrestrials. For a few years after the Roswell incident, Director Hoover did order his agents-the request of the Air Force-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."
This article is copyrighted by Travelers Today, the travel news leader
