One of the more controversial memos the FBI has put out is the infamous Hottel Memo, about a special agent being informed of flying saucers and aliens by an Air Force investigator.
The memo has been around since the ’70s, but only now has the FBI gotten around to being a bunch of party-poopers.
On the FBI’s Vault blog, they lay out what, precisely, the Hottel Memo is:
…the FBI has only occasionally been involved in investigating reports of UFOs and extraterrestrials. For a few years after the Roswell incident, Director Hoover did order his agents—at the request of the Air Force—to verify any UFO sightings. That practice ended in July 1950, four months after the Hottel memo, suggesting that our Washington Field Office didn’t think enough of that flying saucer story to look into it.
In other words, it’s a friend-of-a-friend story that somebody reported to Hoover because Hoover was a crazy, paranoid weirdo who wanted to know everything about everything, including flying saucers, and there’s no records it was ever followed up on. It being a third-hand source is not exactly great, either.
Of course, this is also exactly what the Cigarette-Smoking Man would want you to think, so really, we should probably just assume this is real to stick it to that guy.