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SALT LAKE CITY — The FBI has investigated some pretty wacky stuff from time to time, from incredible claims about UFOs to extra-sensory perception. You can read all of it on their wisely-named site, launched two years ago, called "The Vault".
The most popular document so far, reportedly garnering over a million page views since the site's launch, is a memo to J. Edgar Hoover telling a tale about three flying saucers and nine tiny aliens in jumpsuits found in New Mexico.
"They were described as being circular in shape with raised centers, approximately 50 feet in diameter," the memo states.
"Each one was occupied by three bodies of human shape but only three feet tall, dressed in metallic cloth of a very fine texture. Each body was bandaged in a manner similar to the blackout suits used by speed fliers and test pilots."
The one-page communication ends curtly, explaining that "no further evaluation" was made into the matter.
The document has made a little bit of a stir in recent days, after the FBI released a blog post explaining its history and circumstances surrounding it. It's spurred claims that it shows the purported alien landing in Roswell was real, or that the FBI knew about real UFOs. In fact, the memo isn't new; those in the UFO community have known about it since 1977 when it was released to physicist Bruce Maccabee in a Freedom of Information Request.
In reality, the memo likely describes the activities of a known con artist who was investigated by the FBI on and off from the 1950s to the 1970s.
The account is a second- or third-hand story which, told to Washington field office head Guy Hottel by someone in the Air Force, and then told to Hoover.
The story is probably a corrupted version of one told to investors in Colorado by one Silas M. Newton, who claimed to have found alien technology that could help locate oil.
Furthermore, the memo was produced three years after the supposed Roswell event, meaning there's not a connection to the two, at least according to the FBI's history of the document.
There are hundreds of other interesting documents posted to the site, including memos and correspondence relating to investigations of extra-sensory perception, and also Hoover's massive anti-communist infiltration program known as COINTELPRO.
