Guy Hottel ran the FBI's Washington field office. On 22 March 1950 he sent Director Hoover a memorandum headed Flying Saucers, recording that an Air Force investigator had reported three discs recovered in New Mexico, each one carrying three bodies of human shape about three feet tall, dressed in metallic cloth of a very fine texture.
The document is genuine. It is declassified, it is scanned, and it sits in the Bureau's own reading room where anyone can read it. The claim inside it is a different question. Hottel was writing down what an investigator said an informant had said, the FBI never investigated it, and the Bureau has since published a note saying exactly that.
A real government file can record a rumour rather than an event. That is the whole lesson of this one, and it is why the memo is in the archive: not as evidence of what was recovered, but as evidence of what was written down.
The journal19 October 2026
003 · Dispatch · Alienz
The agent who typed what he was told
An FBI memo counts nine bodies, three feet tall, in three discs recovered in New Mexico. The document is real and still in the Bureau's reading room. What it records is a rumour nobody checked.