Game Changing FBI Memos

Last week the FBI released a series of memos covering UFOs and government reaction to them. Among these is one that is truly extraordinary, to the FBI Director from an agent called Guy Hottel that states unequivocally that three "flying saucers," each containing three small humanoid bodies, were recovered by the US Air Force in New Mexico.  The memo is dated March 22, 1950 and makes no direct reference to the Roswell Incident. It does, however, state that "the saucers were found in New Mexico due to the fact that the government has a very high-powered radar setup in that area and it is believed that the radar interferes with the controlling mechanism of the saucers." (To read the memo on the FBI’s website, click here.) The memo is not classified and has been around for years. In fact, it was originally obtained by UFO researcher Bruce Maccabee via a Freedom of Information request. What is interesting here that it has been released from within the FBI’s own filing system, meaning that it is not the hoax that it has been claimed to be by such investigators as Karl Pflock.

It is already being pointed out in the media that it is not ‘proof’ of anything. No, it’s not a flying saucer or an ailen body. But it certainly IS proof that Guy Hottel believed his informant truthful enough to transmit the information to J. Edgar Hoover, and the source that has now released it would suggest that it really was written by Hottel, who was a real person and was indeed head of the FBI’s Washington Field Office at that time.

The memo is debunked here and seemingly very convincingly. However, the article states, "In 1998 Linda Mouton Howe, a documentary filmmaker, claimed to have government documents proving that an alien ship had landed in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. That proof was the Hottel memo." Linda told me today that this claim is false. The Hottel memo has played, at most a minor part in her work. So how much of the rest of this article is true? Any of it?

And if the Hottel memo is nothing more than another fork in the path, then I would remind the media that most of the record from the Roswell Army Air Field generated between 1947 and 1949 was found to have been destroyed when the General Accounting Office sought it on behalf of New Mexico Congressman Steve Schiff. The GAO stated, "in our search for records concerning the Roswell crash, we learned that some government records covering RAAF activities had been destroyed and others had not. For example, RAAF administrative records (from Mar. 1945 through Dec. 1949) and RAAF outgoing messages (from Oct. 1946 through Dec. 1949) were destroyed. The document disposition form does not indicate what organization or person destroyed the records and when or under what authority the records were destroyed."

Now, in itself, that is no big deal. However, the GAO also states that only two government records were found referencing the Roswell Incident, one of them an FBI memo that "revealed that the military had reported that an object resembling a high-altitude weather balloon with a radar reflector had been recovered near Roswell."

They fail to mention what the memo actually says, which is, "the object found resembles a high altitude weather balloon with a radar reflector" but that "telephonic conversation between their office and Wright Field had not borne out this belief." Then it adds, "Disc and balloon are being transported to Wright Field by special plane for examination."

The GAO mentioned nothing about the "disc" referenced in the memo. Or why the Air Force would rush debris from a radar reflector via a special plane to the Air Materiel Command at Wright Field.

I knew two of the officers who were aware of the debris when it arrived at Wright, my uncle Mickey and Arthur Exon, who later became Commandant of Wright after it had become Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Both men had distinguished careers in the Air Force.

The Hottel memo corresponds to things that I was told by General Arthur Exon in a long telephone conversation that I had with him at the instigation of my uncle. My uncle arranged the coversation after he read my book Communion.

I have always been circumspect about certain things that General Exon told me, because he asked me not to quote him on them. Instead, I included them in my book Majestic, which is one of the many ‘true fictions’ I have written about our visitors.

Two of the things that he asked me to treat with discretion are directly covered in the Hottel memo. I have carefully kept these things under my belt for years. I did not, frankly, believe that the Hottel memo was an actual FBI document. Now that I know that it is, a lot changes for me.

General Exon said that there were bodies found. The general also told me that, as of our conversation in the late eighties, they were still in the possession of officials in a preserved state. When I asked him if he had personally seen them, he did not say yes, but he also did not say no.

The second is that at least one craft was brought down after its ability to stay aloft was disrupted by powerful new radars that had just begun to be tested at White Sands. Apparently the combination of these unexpected radar signals and the effects of a violent thunderstorm caused the initial crash at Roswell. Now I see direct corroboration of the general’s comments in this memo.

The debunking memo states, "an alien craft disabled by "high-powered radar" is implausible given that ordinary airplanes can fly without incident through radar, and "high power" radar is not enough to damage even conventional electronics. (Radars were even less powerful in the 1940s)." This is untrue. Powerful radar signals could disrupt aircraft instruments in the 1940s, and new radars were being tested at White Sands at the time that the Roswell Incideent took place. What they might have done to craft powered in a manner completely unknown to us, especially if the pilots were surprised by them, cannot be known to us, so the conclusion drawn here is not supportable.

The media has committed 60 years to the idea that UFOs are not real and that anybody who believes that they are is intellectually weak and deserving of dismissal and ridicule. The Air Force and NASA are equally invested in their denial and, as I point out in my upcoming book ‘What is to Come’ (January 2012, Tarcher/Penguin) legally required not only to deny what they know, but also to lie to conceal their secrets.

It is worth taking a longer look just now at what the release of this information from the FBI has to mean. The FBI has been silent about the Hottel memo for 60 years. There was no way to confirm it. Now, suddenly, here it is, confirmed as an authentic FBI document. Of course, questions remain. Was Hottel fooled? The debunking article makes a case for this, saying that Hottel’s informant picked up the story from a local Kansas City newspaper called the Wyandotte Echo, and that the story was concocted by two con men. However, they also say that "Not only is the information not first-hand and far removed from New Mexico, it is connected to a 60-year-old hoax that resulted in a conviction for fraud." But it does not explain why Hottel, who was writing a memo for Hoover himself, would have placed the incident in New Mexico if the information he was using did not say that it took place there.

There is a bottom line here: the FBI has now officially confirmed that the Hottel memo is part of its file. It was written by Guy Hottel for Director Hoover. There exists a case, with some discrepancies in it, that suggests that Hottel was using poor information. But there is also another memo that has been seriously misrepresented by the General Accounting Office, that strongly suggests that some very strange debris was indeed flown from the Roswell Army Air Base to Wright Field.

What to make of all this? Well, I’m not a professional investigative reporter. I think that the Roswell incident was real because my own uncle, who said he had firsthand information, told me that it was, and no less a man than the commandant of Wright Patterson Air Force Base said to me, and I am quoting him exactly, "everyone from Truman on down knew that what we had found was not of this world within 24 hours of our finding it."

It is time for powerful media such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, le Monde and the Times of London, to take this whole issue more seriously, and for investigative reporters with genuine power and established professional credentials to demand access to more information. If they go about this without any preconceptions, most particularly the assumption that they won’t find anything, or the desire not to, I can assure you that this door that has been closed for so long can be opened. But I can also assure you that the key cannot be turned except by the very most respected of our established media institutions.

I might also offer a reminder that, to this day, we do not know where our visitors are from, or even if they are actually aliens. I doubt that anybody does, not even people privy to essentially all the information in our possession.

In ‘What is to Come’ I also outline very clearly what science needs to do to examine and qualify the physical evidence that is at present publicly available or obtainable without reference to anything that may be held in secret. Little has been done behind closed doors to answer the two fundamental questions: who are they and why are they here?