FBI’s UFO files from ‘The Vault’ – Your Need to Know
In this next part of our Your Need to Know series, Antonio Huneeus examines the UFO files from the FBI’s The Vault. The Vault was created in 2011 as a storehouse for commonly requested FBI documents already released under the Freedom of Information Act. Go to Vault.FBI.gov, and from there you can easily search a multitude of topics ranging from counterterrorism to unexplained phenomenon.
The FBI recently revealed on its website that the most searched document is a simple one page memo called the “Guy Hottel Memo”. Its contents were written on March 22, 1950 by Guy Hottel, a special agent in charge of the Washington Field Office, and allude to the crash and recovery of the Roswell UFO. The memo ends abruptly with a sentence stating that no further evaluations were attempted. Major news organizations reported on this document being newly released, but it was actually released under the Freedom of Information Act, and available since the 1970s. Bruce Maccabee was the first to obtain this document, and he believes it to be part of an elaborate hoax.
Ref. FBI release of files under the Freedom of Information Act — I used to work in federal contracts, national and international, and if my recollection serves me well, the FOIA didn’t come along until the mid- to late 80’s. There may have been a similar disclosure law in place in the ’70’s but it would have existed under the ASPR’s (Armed Services Procurement Regulations, which “grew” into the Federal Procurement Regulations (FPR) and finally the Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR) ), circa 1975-1985.