The above memo was written on 29 March 1950 by Guy Hottel, a special agent in charge of the FBI’s Washington Field Office, and addressed to the director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover.
The memo attracted a lot of attention when it appeared years later in the FBI’s online resource known as “The Vault”, since it describes the discovery in the New Mexican desert of a crashed alien craft with alien bodies in it. Unfortunately, it is no more than a fourth or fifth hand account of a story that had eventually caught the ear of the editor of the Wyandotte Echo, a weekly newspaper published in Kansas City. The FBI became interested when the story was picked up by a number of other papers around the country.
Hottel’s memo to Hoover essentially contains nothing more than an oft-repeated and exaggerated story that can be traced back to Silas Newton, a wealthy oil producer and con-man. After originally claiming he had personally seen a flying saucer crash on land he leased in the Mojave Desert, Newton admitted a couple of years later he had only been repeating comments he had heard from others.
The U.S. government does not dispute the fact that something crashed in the desert about 75 miles northwest of the small town of Roswell in the early part of July 1947, but, if, as is widely suspected, they were trying to cover up the discovery of an alien craft, this memo is not necessarily evidence of it.
However, on the 65th anniversary of the Roswell Incident, a long-serving CIA agent, Chase Brandon, claimed to have seen a hidden CIA file relating to the ‘UFO’ concealed in a vault within the agency’s Langley headquarters. “It was in a vaulted area,” he told reporters. “There was one box that really caught my eye. It had one word on it: Roswell. I rummaged inside it, put the box on the shelf and said ‘My God, it really happened.’ … It was not a damn weather balloon — it was what it was billed when people first reported it. It was a craft that clearly did not come from this planet, it crashed and I don’t doubt for a second that the use of the word ‘remains’ and ‘cadavers’ was exactly what people were talking about.”
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