USG-UAP-D001, Congressional, White House, UFO-related Constituent Correspondence, 1998
This collection of documents, primarily from 1998, contains draft and final correspondence from the White House and the offices of members of Congress responding to constituent inquiries about Unidentified Flying Objects, or “UFOs.” These inquiries cover a diverse range of topics, including alleged UFO sightings by NASA astronauts, questions regarding the authenticity of photos collected during U.S. missions to Mars, alleged improper withholding of information by the U.S. Government, questions regarding the appropriateness of “UFO-related” governmental spending, and calls for congressional hearings regarding the nature and existence of “UFOs.” The official responses consistently state that, circa 1998, the U.S. Government is not aware of evidence supporting the existence of extraterrestrial technology, and that NASA does not actively investigate “UFOs.” The collection includes references to materials of both confirmed and unconfirmed authenticity, as provided by constituents, as well as references to historical, scientific literature addressing specific “UFO” sighting claims.
The summary above is sourced from the released file metadata as published to war.gov. The analysis sections below are original to this tracker.
Text of the document
Machine-extracted from the PDF war.gov published (its text layer or OCR), so expect errors, especially in names, numbers and handwriting; the PDF is the authoritative copy. Lines that did not extract as readable text are left out. Showing about 983 words from pages 2, 3, 4, 6 of 86.
PAGE 2
Headquarters Action Tracking System (HATS) INCOMING CORRESPONDENCE ACTION ID Number: L11998-00407 Title: WARD/Sen Snowe fwds ltr from who's interested in U.F.O. and the recent Mars photo Recipient: UHeffernan Author: SNOWE Organization: SENATE Date Written: 05/18/1998 Date Received: 05/26/1998 Date Concurred: Date Submitted: Date Signed: 06/24/1998 Date Closed: 06/24/1998 Original Due Date: Status: Closed Signature Office: UHeffernan Info offices: UHeffernan, UHeninger, L/Kerwin INTE:RESTED IN U.FO.'S AND THE RECENT PHOTOS OF MARS WHICH WERE RECENTLY RELEASED. Enclosures: NO Related Records: MAINE U.F.O. MARS File Plan: 1320.4 Analyst: BMoore
PAGE 3
Headquarters Action Tracking System (HATS) INCOMING CORRESPONDENCE ACTION ID Number: L/1998-00729 Title: Rothman/UFO_Sightings by Astronauts Recipient: UHeffernan Author: Grassley Organization: Senate Date Written: 08/03/1998 Date Received: 08/31/1998 Date Concurred: Date Submitted: Date Signed: 09/04/1998 Date Closed: 09/10/1998 Original Due Date: 08/22/1998 Status: Closed Signature Office: UHeffernan Info Offices: UHeffernan, UHeninger, UKerwin Senator Grassley forwards letter from (ts) (S) who is requesting information on UFO sightings by Enclosures: letter Related Records: File Plan: 1320.4 Analyst: JMassey
PAGE 4
yeA toGU The Honorable Charles E. Grassley United States Senate Dear Senator Grassley: Thank you for your letter of August 3, 1998, on behalf of(b <) who is requesting information about the possible sightings of Unidentified Flying Objects (U FOs) by NASA astronauts. Over the years there have been many objects sighted by the astronauts during space missions. Most of these items were later identified by photographs or NORAD records as material from launch vehicles or spacecraft or were such items as water droplets. No unidentified materials were seen on missions to the moon. The Air Force, in the interest of national security, received and investigated all reports for many years but has discontinued this activity. NASA has no program for investigating UFOs and has not withheld information on In 1976, James Oberg thoroughly researched the UFO/astronaut allegations and published an article about it in SEARCH magazine. We are enclosing that article for (b) (6) )nformation. In addition, enclosed is a NASA Fact Sheet which summarizes the current status of NASA's involvement in UFO We trust this information will aid you in responding to(b) ) inquiry. Edward Heffernan Associate Administrator for Legislative Affairs
PAGE 6
S,ncc tho ··auron.iut UFO" genre is one of rhe m13in pillolrs o f VFO Story! 15eeptic. ism and cri ticism from UFO buffs. Aation~I objections SGM{q~ and arguments wiH bo printed and ~\?-j ,1{ this magazina. Critics are urged to P/\LM~ fvBL\CA'11ou s raise specific points not address°'d Associate Editor in tho study. or to cite and modify or invalidate conclusions "Space World" magazine Space flight has opened many mysteries. True, scie11tists prefer to list tlie puzzles solved and u11knoums discovered, but as men venture beyond the earth it is inevitable that new mysteries will be encountered. Somewhere out there, many obsen:ers believe, are intelligent species with technological civilizations · far more advanced tha,z that of Earth. Perhaps they are sending us radio signals we have not recognized. Perhaps they have left artifacts ofpast visits for us to find. Perhaps they are even_ now keeping the earth under surveillance. If they are out there, someday we will meet them. As illustrated in science fiction, this meeting will probably occur in space. Have such meetings already occurred? Have astronauts and cosmonauts already seen alien spacecraft? The UFO lite!ature is full of tales of "space UFOs". Are any ofthem valid? What can a careful study reveal? H ardly a UFO book or movie is tigations Committee on Aerial Force operations, and space miss:ons complete without the standard Phenomena (NICAP) selected the might give me new insights into this assertion that "astronauts have seen "McDivitt UFO" photo as one of the most puzzling series of cases. I was not UFOs too". While critics may attack four best photographs ever taken. disappointed, and my results were the character or intelligence of many The "astronaut UFO" sightings startling. UFO witnesses, they cannot use these must appeal to many seriou:i The basic truths behind these tactics on American and Russian space researchers for a number of reasons. sightings seems lately to have gathered pilots. Where UFO photographs can be The witnesses and the photographs are an accretion of exaggeration, accused of distortion and forgery, unimpeachable as to honesty and confusion, and outright fiction. The photographs taken by astronauts and authenticity. The conditions of the 1968 "Condon Report" on UFOs processed by NASA must be of the space missions can be calculated and (conducted by the University of highest trustworthiness. Hence, most recorded, and every object near the Colorado for the U.S. Air Force) UFO scholars consider the family of spacecraft can be determined by con found itself unable to penetrate three astronaut UFO sightings to be one of sulting the giant space radars of the specific cases, which the analyst felt the strongest bodi~s of evidence in the North American Air Defense were • a "challenge" to any serious past thirty years. Command (NORAD), headquartered investigator. Stories later began The best of these cases include inside Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado. circulating about sightings of lunar astronaut James McOivitt's sighting of Extensive crew debriefings and surface lights and structures, and the o( an "unidentified spacecraft" near on-board tape recorder transcripts may discovery of artifacts on the moon, his Gemini-4 space capsule in 1965, a be available to obtain direct eye about near approaches of structured curious photo of a pair of UFOs with witness testimony. objects, and about attempts at radio glowing propulsion fields taken by the With all these facts and assumptions contact between Apollo capsules and Gemini-7 astronauts. reports of nearby in mind, and mindful of the numerous UFOs. Recent books on UFOs give objects from X-15 and Mercury 'unsolved' cases which might tell much lists of astronaut sightings which are spacecraft. tales of how ~he 1968-1969 about the lJFO phenomenon, I began out of numeric sequence, misdated, Apollo moon shots were followed by a special research program into this mispeUed, and otherwise distorted.
Where this file fits in the PURSUE archive
This file is one of U.S. Government's 1 files in the Trump PURSUE disclosure. Within the U.S. Government agency block it ranks #1 of 1 by Anomalousness Index. Across the entire 450-file archive it ranks #450 of 450.
That places it in the lower-scoring band of the archive (450 of 450 by score), typical of investigative-record style files where the report is paper-based rather than instrumented.
Anomalousness Index: 47/100
Evidentiary weight that this encounter remains unexplained after conventional analysis. Not a probability of extraterrestrial origin - that number is not honestly computable from the released files and this tracker refuses to publish it.
🤖 AI-ASSISTED SCORING · methodology
The six rubric components break down for this file as follows. Each component has a weighted contribution to the final score; the per-component explanation below describes what this file's particular value on that component means in the rubric's framework.
No sensor, camera, or instrument backs this observation - it is testimony, relayed through the federal government, and scored on the rubric's lowest sensor-quality tier for that reason. That doesn't bear on the witness's credibility (a separate axis); it reflects only that nothing beyond human perception recorded the event.
A civilian account, routed into the federal record via the federal government's investigative channels rather than an operational mission report. The rubric scores this tier below uniformed personnel specifically because of that remove - the witness wasn't reporting from within a federal mission context when the observation occurred.
On corroboration, this file from the federal government - like every single-tier file in the PURSUE archive - is a single-witness or single-instrument capture per the released metadata. The rubric doesn't infer multi-witness confirmation the summaries don't actually establish; this score reflects the honest limit of what was released, not a judgment about the underlying event.
The released file contains no speed, acceleration, or vector data precise enough to score on the kinematic axis - and that's true archive-wide, not specific to this file. The rubric declines to infer kinematic anomaly from a witness's narrative estimate of how fast something moved; that itself says something about what PURSUE actually released: descriptive accounts, not flight-path telemetry.
Every file in the archive, including this one, scores this tier: a conventional explanation was considered in the released record but isn't treated as dispositive. That's a pattern in how war.gov's own summaries are written - they consistently hedge against strong conclusions either way - and the rubric takes that hedging at face value rather than resolving it for them.
This file from the federal government is catalogued as unresolved, with no formal review process having concluded - logged into the system, but not yet finalized by any review. The rubric treats that differently from 'open after review,' because the absence of a completed review is itself part of the file's status, not a placeholder for one.
Bottom line on the score: the Anomalousness Index of 47/100 reflects evidentiary weight that this specific file's encounter remains structurally unexplained by the rubric's six axes - it is not a claim that the underlying event involved anything non-conventional, and it is not comparable across rubrics that use different weights. For the full per-axis weights and the rubric JSON, see /methodology.
Related files in U.S. Government
Other PURSUE files in the same category, ranked by Anomalousness Index.
ODNI-UAP-D001, USPER Narrative, Senior USIC Official
CIA-UAP-002, Scientific Advisory Panel on Unidentified Flying Objects, Report, 1952-1953
CIA-UAP-003, The Central Intelligence Agency and Overhead Reconnaissance; The U-2 and OXCA…
CIA-UAP-004, CASE 17708 (CLOSED) and DR. Leon Davidson
CIA-UAP-005, German Scientist's Article on 'Flying Discs'
CIA-UAP-006, Sighting Of Unconventional Aircraft
Verification
SHA-256:
This hash is the SHA-256 of the file body war.gov served on the verification date above. War.gov has re-processed some file bodies since first release (re-compression + OCR, no content removed - see /changes); we re-verify and record the change rather than silently serve a stale hash. How to check this yourself →