Science and WeatherFBI’s most-viewed UFO document: cover-up or con?
Just this past Monday, March 25th, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation issued a statement regarding the most-viewed document in their online database — The Vault — but is this really proof of the 1947 Roswell crash, or was it just part of an elaborate attempt to con people out of their money?
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According to the FBI statement, this document, an office memo dated March 22nd, 1950, from Special Agent in Charge Guy Hottel to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, has been viewed nearly a million times since the database was established in April of 2011. It tells of Hottel taking a report from an Air Force investigator about a possible UFO crash and reads:
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 3 feet tall, dressed in metallic cloth of a very fine texture. Each body was bandaged in a manner similar to blackout suits used by speed flyers and test pilots.
According to Mr. <redacted>'s informant, the saucers were found in New Mexico due to the fact that the Government has a very high-powered radar set-up in that area and it is believed that the radar interferes with the controling mechanism of the saucers.
However, the story about this is anything but new. Apparently this document was found within days (if it even took that long) of the online database opening, and it was discussed by LiveScience's Bad Science Columnist, Benjamin Radford, on April 11th, 2011.
Radford wrote about how some media headlines reported that this 'secret' memo 'proved' a government cover-up of the 1947 Roswell New Mexico UFO crash and then went on to give a more plausible explanation of the memo and its contents:
In fact this memo does not refer to Roswell, but instead to a reported UFO crash in another small New Mexico town called Aztec in March 1948. David E. Thomas, a physicist and researcher with the group New Mexicans for Science and Reason, discovered that the informant mentioned in the memo was almost certainly a con man named Silas Newton, who fabricated a UFO crash hoax, complete with stories of circular flying saucers carrying 3-foot tall aliens. He tried to convince investors that he had access to crashed alien technology that would make them all rich. It turned out to be a scam, and Newton was arrested in 1952 and convicted of fraud. Newton didn't just tell his story to the Air Force investigator that Hottel mentioned; he repeated it to many others including a writer for Variety magazine named Frank Scully.
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The number of times this document has been viewed is probably more a function of the media calling attention to it rather than any kind of 'proof' it offers, but it's still interesting that anyone would claim it to be proof of anything. If the U.S. government had held on to that kind of information for that long, not letting any conclusive proof out into the public, why would it suddenly show up, in a mostly-unredacted document, in a public FBI database, nearly 65 years after the fact?
If you'd like to read up on other FBI's other UFO files, you can see them in The Vault.
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