What Americans Asked the White House About UFOs in 1998, and What NASA Told Them

While the Lewinsky scandal consumed the news cycle, a steady trickle of letters and emails reached Congress and the White House asking about UFOs, MJ-12, and a Pentagon briefing a fringe researcher claimed to have given. Each was routed to NASA for a reply. This file is the paper trail - 86 pages of real correspondence, released 28 years later as part of the Trump PURSUE disclosure. No incident report, no sensor data - just the government's actual, granular process for answering the public's UFO questions.

What this document actually is

USG-UAP-D001 is not a UFO incident report. It is a bundle of Headquarters Action Tracking System (HATS) records - the internal paperwork NASA's Congressional Inquiries office used to log, route, and close out constituent correspondence - along with the letters, emails, and draft replies themselves. Constituent names throughout are redacted per standard FOIA practice, appearing in the released text as (b) (6) markers; this piece preserves those redactions exactly as released rather than guessing at who wrote in.

The pattern repeats dozens of times across the file: a citizen writes to a Senator, House member, or directly to the White House about UFOs. That office forwards the letter to NASA's Office of Legislative Affairs, care of Associate Administrator Edward Heffernan. NASA drafts a reply, encloses a standard fact sheet, and closes the case in the tracking system - usually within a few weeks.

What people actually asked

The questions are specific, and often reveal the reader's own theory of the case:

To be precise about what these letters are and are not: they are evidence that citizens raised these specific claims and questions to the government in 1998. They are not evidence that Steven Greer's alleged December 1997 briefing happened as described, that Webster Hubbell was tasked with any such investigation, or that "MJ-12" refers to anything real - the Majestic 12 documents have been extensively disputed since they surfaced in the 1980s. This file documents the correspondence, not the underlying claims.

NASA's answer, and the real 1993 vote behind it

Every reply in the file lands on the same core message, largely verbatim: NASA "has no program for investigating UFOs and has not withheld information on sightings," the government is "not aware of evidence supporting the existence of extraterrestrial technology," and no congressional hearings on the subject were scheduled. On the Mars photos specifically, NASA explained that Mars Global Surveyor images "are received on Earth in digital format, meaning '0 and 1'" and are deposited in a public archive within six months - addressing the "75 vs. 256 shades of grey" authenticity question with a process explanation rather than a rebuttal.

More interesting is a line that recurs across several of the form letters, tied to an enclosed NASA fact sheet titled "The U.S. Government and Unidentified Flying Objects":

"As stated in the second paragraph of the Fact Sheet, Congress, in 1993, directed NASA to end its search program. Today search for extraterrestrials is conducted through the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (SETI Institute) in Mountain View, CA."

That is a real, independently verifiable event, and it checks out: in 1993, Nevada Senator Richard Bryan introduced a late amendment that eliminated funding for NASA's High Resolution Microwave Survey (HRMS) - the agency's last major search for radio signals from extraterrestrial intelligence, barely a year after it began operating. Bryan's own quip at the time was that it would mean "the end of Martian hunting season at the taxpayer's expense," even though the program's cost was a small fraction of NASA's budget. Cut loose from federal funding, the research continued privately through the newly formed SETI Institute. (Source: Live Science, on the Bryan Amendment's history.) So when NASA told worried constituents in 1998 that the government wasn't looking for aliens anymore, that specific claim was true and traceable to an actual Senate vote five years earlier - it is simply a fact about a defunded radio-astronomy program, not a statement about UFO investigation.

The other enclosure: a 22-year-old magazine article

Answering Senator Grassley's inquiry about astronaut UFO sightings, NASA did not commission new analysis. It enclosed a reprint of a 1976 SEARCH magazine article by James Oberg, an aerospace writer and historian, methodically working through the era's best-known "astronaut UFO" claims:

• James McDivitt's Gemini 4 sighting (1965): Oberg traces it to McDivitt's own booster stage, misidentified due to sun glare through a small window - and notes NORAD's initial tracking list omitted the Gemini 4 booster itself, because nobody had thought to ask about it.
• A "hexagonal UFO" photograph that circulated in UFO literature: identified as a retouched hoax - an ordinary Gemini 7 photo of the spacecraft's own thruster hardware, doctored to erase the spacecraft's outline so the lights appeared to float free in space.
• A Gemini 11/12 sighting promoted by a UFO researcher as one of the best cases on record: Oberg identifies it as the Proton-3 satellite, whose orbital decay caused it to run ahead of NORAD's predicted position - explaining the apparent discrepancy the researcher had seized on.
• Pete Conrad's "followed by a UFO" remark on Apollo 12: per Oberg (quoting Conrad directly), an in-flight joke about the lunar module's own jettisoned panels, tumbling nearby, later "taken out of context" by a UFO researcher who publicly accused Conrad of lying about it under government pressure.

Whether or not Oberg's specific explanations are the last word on each case, the choice itself says something: NASA's institutional answer to "what about astronaut UFO sightings" in 1998 was a magazine article already old enough to buy a beer, not a fresh review.

What this file does and does not establish

• It does not establish anything about whether UFOs are extraterrestrial. It is correspondence about public inquiries, not an investigation of any sighting.
• It does not confirm any of the claims constituents raised - not the alleged 1997 CSETI briefing, not the Hubbell rumor, not MJ-12. Those appear here as what citizens wrote, cited by this site as such.
• It does show, in granular, primary-source detail, exactly how the federal bureaucracy processed UFO-related public inquiry in a specific, culturally loaded year - complete with routing slips, due dates, and repeated form language.
• It does tie a real, checkable fact (the 1993 Bryan Amendment) directly to the government's standard reassurance script - which is a more substantial answer than "no comment," even if it addresses SETI radio astronomy rather than UFO investigation specifically.

Read against the 1953 Robertson Panel, which recommended an official policy of "debunking" UFOs to manage public interest, this file is a 45-years-later data point on the same posture: NASA in 1998 still opens with reassurance, still has no active investigation, and still reaches for an existing skeptical explanation rather than commissioning a new one.

How to verify everything on this page

1. All quoted correspondence - the Snowe, Grassley, CSETI, and MJ-12 letters, and NASA's replies - is transcribed from the OCR-extracted text of USG-UAP-D001, linked above. Some OCR artifacts from the scanned original (stray characters, redaction markers) are preserved rather than cleaned up, to avoid misrepresenting the source.
2. The 1993 Bryan Amendment and NASA's Project HRMS defunding are independently verified via Live Science's account of the amendment's history - not asserted from the file alone.
3. The James Oberg SEARCH magazine article's specific case-by-case claims (McDivitt, the hoaxed photo, Proton-3, Conrad) are summarized from the article's own text as reproduced in this file; this site has not independently re-investigated each 1960s sighting.
4. Claims made by constituents in their letters (the alleged CSETI briefing, the Hubbell rumor, MJ-12) are reported as claims, not verified by this site.

Bottom line

Most files in the PURSUE archive are about what someone saw. This one is about what the government said when people asked - form letters, a recycled 1976 magazine clipping, and one real, checkable fact about a defunded radio telescope program, all wrapped around a decade's worth of public curiosity that Congress and the White House had to actually answer, letter by letter.