A flying saucer full of secrets
Searching for the truth behind the infamous Guy Hottel FBI memo
Since the advent of the internet, governments around the world have built vast data repositories to release once-classified documents to the world. Over the years the FBI has disclosed thousands of documents and similar programs in the UK have seen the Ministry of Defence disclose its own classified papers. The FBI launched their own online document store, known as the FBI Vault, back in April 2011 but one of its most interesting documents had been released more than 40 years earlier.
The ‘Guy Hottel Memo’ — named for its sender, the then head of the FBI field office in Washington D.C. — detailed an encounter told to an FBI agent by an unknown Air Force investigator whose name was redacted before the release of the documents. The memo was digitized seven years prior to the launch of the FBI Vault but since its launch, the one-page document has become one of the most viewed on the website.
So what does the memo say? Its short, lasting around half of a single page and looks not dissimilar to most memos sent within the FBI during the 1950s. The FBI, founded by J. Edgar Hoover, Theodore Roosevelt and Charles Joseph Bonaparte in 1908, always addressed memos to Director J. Edgar Hoover but it was the content of this memo that made it stand out from the thousands flowing through the Bureau at the time.
It contained a rough account of a UFO that had crashed somewhere in New Mexico and details regarding what material was taken away from the site at the time. Hottel’s memo, dated March 22nd, 1950, read; “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.”
They were described as being circular in shape with raised centers, approximately 50 feet in diameter.
It goes on to describe the occupants who were removed from the wreckage as “bandaged in a manner similar to the blackout suits used by speed fliers and test pilots,” though it does not specifically refer to them as alien or extra-terrestrial. The cause of the crash is presumed to be radio interference from the government’s nearby high-powered radar which, the memo states, may have interfered with the UFOs systems.
While this memo had been in the public domain since the 70s, the release of the FBI Vault renewed interest in its contents with some pointing to another famous UFO crash that took place around the same time the memo was dated. Many news outlets reported that the memo was proof of the Roswell crash in 1947 or at least corroborated the version of events put forth by UFO researchers at the time.
The FBI has since released a statement in which they highlighted a few facts pertaining to the memo itself. When it was received the account detailed was never investigated as the FBI rarely did any investigative work into UFO sightings at that time. The FBI also point to the three-year gap between Roswell and the memo being sent but their statement does not offer any insight into the origin of the sighting within.
It is possible that this statement was merely perpetuating the paranoia surrounding UFOs during the 50s but as the sighting wasn’t ever investigated we may never know the truth about its validity leaving the memo another thread in an increasingly fascinating mystery.
