Oak Ridge Tests the Alleged 1947 Crash Metal: Earthly, and No Waveguide

Few physical objects in UFO lore have had a longer career than a small, layered piece of magnesium said to have fallen from a crashed craft in 1947. In 2023 and 2024 it went through a national laboratory’s instruments, and the two documents that came out of that work are now in the National Archives.

What this record is

This page covers two linked items in the Office of the Secretary of Defense series of Record Group 615. The first is “Synopsis: Analysis of a Metallic Specimen,” a nine-page summary by Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), with a page of references, cleared for open publication by the Pentagon’s prepublication review office on 1 July 2024 and filed by AARO as case 330UAP000012. The second is AARO’s own “Supplement to Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Analysis of a Metallic Specimen,” dated July 2024, three pages of text plus footnotes, case 330UAP000013. AARO’s release stamps mark both as released in full. The supplement says ORNL produced its summary in April 2024 and that it was posted on AARO’s website.

What it says

The synopsis opens with the claims it set out to test. The specimen, “whose origin and purpose are of long and debated history,” is claimed to have been recovered from a UAP crash “in or around 1947,” and its bismuth and magnesium layers are claimed to act as a terahertz waveguide capable of “inertial mass reduction,” which the paper glosses as levitation or antigravity. Before ORNL was involved, the Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM) had examined the material under a cooperative research agreement with To the Stars Academy (TTSA). The synopsis says TTSA authorized and oversaw all use of the material under that agreement, and that AARO and DEVCOM approved every analysis in advance. The DEVCOM Ground Vehicle Systems Center gave ORNL access to one parent sample and three subsamples from February 2023. AARO asked two questions: is the material terrestrial, and could its bismuth act as a terahertz waveguide?

ORNL used optical microscopy, CT scanning, scanning and transmission electron microscopy with X-ray spectroscopy, and several kinds of mass spectrometry. The specimen is about 97.5 percent magnesium and 2 percent zinc. The minor elements are lead and bismuth, with traces of thallium, iron, cadmium, manganese, gold, molybdenum, tin and barium. The layers merge and diverge, and ORNL read the fractures and edges as a once-whole material strained by heat and mechanical force, possibly over long periods. The lead and bismuth sit together in repeating bands at roughly a one-to-one ratio. The bismuth is not a clean crystal but nanocrystalline pockets in an amorphous matrix.

Those findings answer the waveguide question. The theory the claim relies on requires a single thin layer of pure, single-crystal bismuth between materials with a different dielectric constant. This specimen has many layers, the bismuth is mixed with lead, and nothing suggests a pure crystalline layer ever existed. ORNL judged it “highly unlikely” the material ever worked as a bismuth-based terahertz waveguide. On origin, the magnesium isotopes are fractionated but fall on the expected terrestrial trendlines, where material from another star system could plot almost anywhere. The lead isotopes match ordinary terrestrial “common lead,” well apart from lunar samples. ORNL stated high confidence that the material was manufactured on Earth, “albeit using an uncommon mixture of elements by today’s standards.”

AARO’s supplement concurs and adds a likely origin. It points to magnesium-alloy research that began around 1915 and peaked in the Second World War, including work on magnesium-zinc alloys with 1 to 4 percent zinc and studies of lead and bismuth additives for corrosion resistance. Those studies found that lead and bismuth concentrate at the surface, which matches the banding in the specimen. The grain structure also fits immature vacuum vapor-deposition methods from before 1970. AARO concludes the specimen is likely “a test object, a manufacturing product or byproduct, or a material component of aerospace performance studies.”

Context

AARO published this analysis in 2024, the same year as its review of historical crash-retrieval claims, and it follows a pattern seen in the office’s other materials cases. The central Ohio aluminum specimen is a separate case that also ended with an ordinary alloy. Both documents are careful about what they cannot say. Neither ORNL nor AARO could verify the chain of custody, and the supplement notes that “unverifiable, conflicting personal accounts” make the object’s history murky. The claimed 1947 crash appears only as the claim under test; no document offers any evidence for it. One small inconsistency is worth noting. The supplement says AARO contracted ORNL in 2022, while the synopsis dates ORNL’s access to the material from February 2023. Both can be true, but readers citing a start date should say which document they are using.

Status

Explained, on the laboratory’s evidence. The specimen is terrestrial, ordinary in its isotopes, and physically unable to do what was claimed for it. What remains open is only the mundane question of which mid-century program made it and how it came into private hands.

Sources

• NARA catalog: ORNL, Synopsis: Analysis of a Metallic Specimen (NAID 499915944)
• File: 12_ORNL_Analysis_Metallic_Specimen.pdf
• NARA catalog: Supplement to Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Analysis of a Metallic Specimen (NAID 499915945)
• File: 13_Supplement_to_Metallic_Specimen.pdf
• Series: Records from the Office of the Secretary of Defense Relating to Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (NAID 493468580)