Case file · Declassified record
The Hottel memo
A one-page FBI memo of 22 March 1950 that passes on a third-hand story of three saucers and small bodies recovered in New Mexico.
1950 CE · 38.90, -77.03 · status: official
The account
Guy Hottel, head of the FBI's Washington field office, relayed a claim that an Air Force investigator had said three flying saucers, each with three human-shaped bodies about three feet tall, were found in New Mexico. When the memo resurfaced in the FBI Vault in 2011, it became the Vault's most-viewed document.
The sceptical view
The FBI has said it was a second- or third-hand claim that it never investigated. Its details match the Aztec saucer hoax spread by con men Silas Newton and Leo GeBauer, and popularised in Frank Scully's 1950 book.