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Disclosure

Disclosure is the record of what governments have said about things in the sky they could not explain: a press release from Roswell in July 1947 that was withdrawn the next day, an FBI memo from 1950 that tells of three saucers and their small crews, Navy cockpit videos released in 2020, and a former intelligence officer sworn in before Congress in 2023. Each came out of an official file. None of them has yet been followed by the document that would settle it.

Still open · documents arriving

At a glance

The claim: Governments know that craft not made by human beings have reached Earth, have recovered some of them, and have kept that secret since 1947 under orders that only a president can lift. An announcement, the claim runs, is close.
What the record shows: On 8 July 1947 Roswell Army Air Field announced it had recovered a “flying disc”; the next day the Army said it was a weather balloon. On 22 March 1950 the FBI's Washington office passed on an informant's account of three saucers recovered in New Mexico; the FBI first released the memo in the late 1970s and put it online in 2011. In April 2020 the Pentagon released three Navy videos, and in July 2023 David Grusch told a House subcommittee under oath that the government holds non-human craft.
The official position: The Air Force reported in 1994 and 1997 that the Roswell debris came from Project Mogul, a balloon train for detecting Soviet nuclear tests. The FBI describes the 1950 memo as an unverified second-hand report. In March 2024 the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office told Congress it had found no evidence that the government ever recovered extraterrestrial technology.

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Featured Investigation

The Hottel Memo and the Three Saucers of New Mexico

The Hottel memo is a one-page FBI report of 22 March 1950: three saucers recovered in New Mexico, each holding three bodies 3 feet tall, said to have been found there because of a powerful radar. Since at least 1998 it has been read as written proof of a crash retrieval. Here is the page, the case made for it, the Denver story the FBI points to, and the 2022 release naming a police detective as the source, whose own informant is still unknown.

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The Record

Investigations

David Grusch Under Oath and the Pentagon's Historical Record

On 26 July 2023 David Grusch, a former Air Force and intelligence officer, testified under oath to a House subcommittee that the US government runs a crash retrieval and reverse engineering program and holds non-human biologics. In March 2024 the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office published a 63-page review of the historical record that addresses the same claims. This is the record of both, what each covers, and what is still open.

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The story so far

What came out of the files

Every strand in this hub begins with a piece of government paper: a press release, a field office memo, a cockpit video, a sworn statement. That is what sets it apart from the rest of the record. These are not stories told about the government. They are things the government itself put out, and then explained, withdrew, or left standing.

Some were explained within a day. Some were explained fifty years later. Some have never been explained at all.

Roswell, July 1947

On 8 July 1947 the public information officer at Roswell Army Air Field, Walter Haut, issued a release saying the base had recovered a “flying disc” from a ranch nearby. Within a day General Roger Ramey in Fort Worth showed the press foil, rubber and sticks, and called it a weather balloon. The story went quiet for thirty years, and came back in 1978 when the intelligence officer who had collected the debris, Jesse Marcel, said it had been nothing of the kind.

The files that followed

In March 1950 the head of the FBI's Washington office, Guy Hottel, sent the Director a one-page memo about three saucers and their crews, recovered in New Mexico. In the 1950s and 1960s the Air Force ran Project Blue Book. In 2017 the New York Times reported a Pentagon program that had studied unidentified objects in secret, and in 2020 the Pentagon released three of its Navy videos. In 2022 the Pentagon set up an office, at Congress's direction, to collect the reports, and in July 2023 a former intelligence officer, David Grusch, told a House subcommittee under oath that the government held craft not made by people.

What the claim asks for

The claim is not that the sky holds things nobody has identified. The government now says so itself. The claim is that someone has identified them, and kept the answer. That is a claim about a document, and this hub follows each lead back to the paper it rests on.

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