The Mystery Remains

New Mexico UFO memo FBI's most popular

One week and 63 years ago, FBI field office chief Guy Hottel got a strange memo.--- A New Mexican man reported that an Air Force investigator told him an unidentified flying object had crashed. The crash was somewhere in New Mexico. The informant’s name is blacked out of the March 22, 1950 FBI “Hottel” memo.

First released in the 1970s, the Hottel memo is now available on the bureau’s new web “Vault.” The Vault, an online reading room of declassified documents, contains approximately 6,700 reports. The mysterious New Mexico crash

; it’s been read almost one million times.

Three years before the New Mexican man reported his story, another UFO crash had come to the FBI’s attention. A flying object, later identified as a weather balloon, crashed near Roswell. The media made use of the out-of-this-world hysteria. But the pubic wasn’t the only party disturbed by the Roswell crash. It also shook up then-FBI Director J Edgar Hoover. At the request of the Air Force, he ordered his agents to verify any reported UFO sightings until further notice. This retraction was delivered in July of 1950, four months after the Hottel memo.

But the FBI never investigated the memo. Despite a fascinating description of the scene, involving three  “flying saucers” “50 feet in diameter,” each of which contained three-foot-tall men “in metallic cloth of a very fine texture," the FBI simply filed the memo away.  According to the FBI, “the Hottel memo does not prove the existence of UFOs; it is simply a second- or third-hand claim that we never investigated.”

But don’t worry, loyal UFO truthers: the FBI isn’t closing the door on the possibility of extraterrestrials. Their own commentary on the Hottel memo finishes with this open-ended apology: “Sorry, no smoking gun on UFOs. The mystery remains…”

Featured image via Wikimedia Commons.
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