Pajarito Astronomers Invitation, May 20, 1986 — Department of Energy File
A letter to the members of the Pajarito Astronomers club regarding an upcoming meeting featuring a presentation from a Los Alamos National Laboratory-affiliated physicist, Dr. John Warren, titled “Why Should a Scientist be Concerned about UFOs?” The referenced event was not officially hosted by…
Incident Overview
In May 1986, the Pajarito Astronomers — an amateur astronomy club serving the communities surrounding Los Alamos National Laboratory in northern New Mexico — received a letter announcing an upcoming meeting. The featured presentation was to be delivered by Dr. John Warren, a physicist affiliated with Los Alamos, and its title was “Why Should a Scientist be Concerned about UFOs?” LANL has stated it has no record of hosting the event, indicating Warren acted in a personal capacity, likely speaking at the club’s informal venue rather than on laboratory grounds.
The timing matters. By 1986, the U.S. Air Force had officially closed Project Blue Book for seventeen years, and the scientific establishment had broadly treated serious UFO inquiry as outside mainstream research since the Condon Committee issued its dismissive 1968 report. Yet 1985–86 had brought a wave of unexplained airspace intrusions over NATO member states in Europe, prompting formal diplomatic protests and renewed internal discussion within Western defense establishments. In that environment, a Los Alamos-affiliated physicist framing a talk around why a scientist should be concerned — not whether UFOs are real, but whether scientists should engage with the question — represents a documented undercurrent of scientific interest operating in parallel with the official government position.
The Department of Energy’s decision to preserve this invitation letter and include it in the PURSUE disclosure program forty years after the meeting suggests the agency viewed any documented institutional engagement with UAP at nuclear research facilities as part of the national security UAP record. That the engagement here was informal and personal rather than official does not appear to have diminished its relevance to the government’s assessment. The invitation is the latest dated document in the four-decade nuclear-facility thread the PURSUE files preserve.
What the government released
A letter to the members of the Pajarito Astronomers club regarding an upcoming meeting featuring a presentation from a Los Alamos National Laboratory-affiliated physicist, Dr. John Warren, titled “Why Should a Scientist be Concerned about UFOs?” The referenced event was not officially hosted by Los Alamos. The laboratory has no record of the subject matter discussed at the meeting.
Status of the case
Records released under the PURSUE program are designated unresolved by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, which means the federal government has not concluded the events were anomalous, has not concluded they were conventional, and has not ruled out either possibility. Where AARO has offered a likely source for an item — an infrared sensor aboard a military aircraft, a commercial camera, or a known optical effect — that attribution is the agency’s working assessment rather than a final determination. Conventional candidates such as drones, balloons, flares, satellites, parallax and forced-perspective artifacts, and ordinary aircraft remain on the table for any unresolved case absent better data than a single sensor pass or a witness recollection.