Date
March 22, 1950
Document Type
Gov. Memo
Pages
1
Authentication
Official PublicationRedaction Status
✓ Fully ReleasedIssuing Authority
Guy Hottel, Special Agent in Charge, FBI Washington Field Office (to J. Edgar Hoover, FBI Director)
Summary
A one-page FBI internal memo from Washington field office chief Guy Hottel to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, dated March 22, 1950. The memo describes a source's account of three 'flying saucers' and their occupants - small humanoid bodies - being recovered in New Mexico. The FBI has made the document publicly available through its online Vault and notes explicitly that the information is third-hand and unverified. Despite the FBI's own caveats, the Hottel Memo is the most-accessed document in the FBI Vault and is cited constantly in UAP disclosure discussions as evidence that crash-recovery claims were circulating at the highest levels of federal law enforcement within three years of Roswell.
Significance
The Hottel Memo is significant not because its specific claims have been verified - they have not - but because of what its existence demonstrates. An FBI Special Agent in Charge considered the information credible enough to forward to the Director personally. The memo was written in March 1950 - before the public Roswell narrative had been established - showing that crash-recovery information was circulating in government channels independent of the public story. Its current status as the FBI Vault's most-accessed document reflects the public's persistent interest in official government references to UAP recovery claims.