The craft
Every claimed crash, and what came back in the truck
A crash is the most testable claim in the whole subject. Lights in the sky are gone by morning; a crashed vehicle is a physical object with mass, and somebody has to go and pick it up. So the useful question is never "did people see something come down" — often they did — but "what was in the truck on the way back."
Every time a laboratory has opened the bag, the contents came from Earth.
The record here is not ambiguous, and it is not the government stonewalling. It is the government answering. Oak Ridge National Laboratory — the place that separated the uranium for Hiroshima and has been doing isotope work ever since — was handed a magnesium alloy said to be a component of a crashed extraterrestrial vehicle, claimed to function as a terahertz waveguide and to generate antigravity. Oak Ridge reported that the specimen was terrestrial in origin and did neither. That analysis is in this archive. It is the most rigorous test of a claimed craft component anywhere in the file, and it came back negative.
The same holds going backwards. Roswell's disc was foil, rubber and balsa from a Project Mogul balloon train. Maury Island's wreckage — the first material ever handed to the United States government as a piece of a flying saucer — was slag from a Tacoma mill, and the man who produced it recanted. Captain Mantell's 1948 crash was real, and the craft recovered from it was Captain Mantell's F-51.
It holds going forwards, too. In 2021 the intelligence community expanded a controlled-access programme whose stated scope included UAP reverse-engineering, which sounds, on paper, exactly like the crash-retrieval programme everybody has been looking for. AARO investigated it. Its finding, which is also in this archive: the programme never recovered or reverse-engineered any craft, and was disestablished for lack of merit.
What is left after all that is the interesting part, and we have kept it separate rather than burying it. There are cases where something demonstrably came down, a serious search followed, and the search found nothing. Eleven people watched an object go into the water at Shag Harbour and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Coast Guard and Navy divers went in after it; they surfaced with yellow foam. Swedish military divers went into Lake Kölmjärv in 1946 and found craters and torn plants and no metal. In February 2023, American and Canadian fighters shot down three unidentified objects — the only confirmed downings in the whole archive — and the debris recovery failed in all three, in sea ice, in wilderness, and in deep water.
Those cases are genuinely open. They are open in the ordinary way that a cold case is open: not because the evidence points somewhere extraordinary, but because there is no evidence to point anywhere at all.
Recovered and analysed
A laboratory examined the object and reported what it was.
4 cases
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The single most rigorous laboratory test of a claimed craft component anywhere in this archive. Oak Ridge National Laboratory examined a magnesium alloy said to be a piece of a crashed extraterrestrial vehicle, claimed to work as a terahertz waveguide and to generate antigravity. It found the specimen terrestrial in origin and incapable of doing either.
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The Army Air Field really did announce it had recovered a flying disc, and then recovered it: foil, rubber and balsa from a Project Mogul balloon train. AARO reviewed the case again in 2024 and reached the same place.
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Wreckage was produced — an actual, physical bagful of it. It was lead slag. Harold Dahl recanted to the FBI and the Bureau closed the file as a hoax.
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A craft did crash and a body was recovered. Both were Captain Thomas Mantell and his F-51, and the thing he climbed after is now attributed to a Skyhook balloon.
A real file, recording a rumour
The government document is authentic. What it contains is the government writing down a claim it did not make and did not check.
3 cases
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The Guy Hottel memo — the most quoted document in UFO history, and the most misread. An FBI agent writes down what an informant told him: three saucers recovered in New Mexico, each with three occupants three feet tall. The Bureau never investigated it. The informant chain runs back to Silas Newton, who was convicted of fraud in 1953.
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Little men in the wreckage of a saucer. The FBI file itself dismisses the story as the unsubstantiated account of a single traveller.
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An informant tells the Bureau a UFO was shot down over the DEW Line and that beings from outer space were trying to retrieve it. One anonymous source, no corroboration, no object.
Claimed, never produced
Asserted by a witness, a whistleblower, or a document nobody can authenticate.
8 cases
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Sworn testimony to Congress that the United States holds craft of non-human origin. Grusch has never seen one; his account is entirely second-hand. AARO — whose report is also in this archive — found that the programme he describes never recovered or reverse-engineered anything and was shut down for lack of merit.
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Documents describing the management of a recovered craft. The FBI stamped its copy BOGUS.
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Nine recovered discs, reverse-engineered at S-4. No employment record, no education record, no physical evidence has ever been substantiated.
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An acorn-shaped object, banded with what witnesses described as hieroglyphs, allegedly trucked away by the military. Nothing was ever produced. The re-entry of the Soviet probe Kosmos 96 is the standing candidate.
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A disc collides with a light aircraft; Mexican troops recover it and die; American forces take it away. The entire story traces to one anonymous document that surfaced in 1978 with no provenance. The archive records zero witnesses.
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A minister called out to a plane crash finds a circular craft and its crew. The source is a family recollection recorded in the 1980s. The craft, the bodies and the photograph have all vanished.
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A bell-shaped craft and a secret Mussolini cabinet under Marconi. It rests on documents that appeared anonymously in 1996 and have never been authenticated.
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A physical sphere that genuinely exists and is genuinely in private hands — with no chain of custody, no peer-reviewed analysis, and a claim that it spontaneously grew from 1.5 to 9 kilograms.
Came down, left a mark, found nothing
A search happened. It recovered nothing. These cases remain genuinely open.
5 cases
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Eleven witnesses watched something go into the water. The RCMP, the Coast Guard and Navy divers searched for it. They found yellow foam. No debris on the surface, no impact on the harbour floor. Sixty years on, this is still the cleanest unresolved recovery case in the file.
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Landing-gear impressions and scorched brush — the strongest physical trace in the archive, left by an object a police officer watched take off. Blue Book never identified it. Nothing was retrieved.
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Ground indentations and raised radiation readings which the UK Defence Intelligence Staff judged to sit within normal background variation. No craft, no retrieval, and a lighthouse two miles up the coast.
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Swedish military divers went into the lake after a winged object was seen entering it. They found craters and torn plants. No wreckage, no debris, no fragments, no metal.
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The only confirmed shoot-downs of unidentified objects in the entire archive. Three of them, by American and Canadian fighters, in February 2023. Debris recovery failed in all three cases — Arctic sea ice, boreal wilderness, deep water — and the assessment settled on commercial or hobbyist balloons.
A note on the famous ones
The cases that carry this field are, without exception, the cases with the weakest chain of custody. Kecksburg's acorn was trucked away by soldiers nobody can name. Coyame rests on a single anonymous document that surfaced in 1978. Cape Girardeau is a family recollection recorded forty years after the fact, and the craft, the bodies and the photograph have all vanished. Majestic 12 was stamped BOGUS by the FBI. The pattern is consistent enough to be a rule: the better a crash story is, the less of it survives contact with a record.
Each case is scored by the Alien Proof Index. Bodies are handled in alien recovery, and the physical debris in recovered technology. The primary documents are in the disclosure archive.