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In 1947, something crashed outside of Roswell, New Mexico and was brought to Roswell Army Air Field by Army officers. Since then, there has been many a discussion about what exactly the object was. That's because soon after the incident, the Roswell Army Air Field issued a press release announcing that they had recovered a "flying disc." The Army was quick to retract that and say it was actually just a weather balloon. Then, in the '70s, a retired Army officer who retrieved pieces from the crash came out to say he believed it was extraterrestrial.
The conspiracies continued and in 1994, the Air Force published a report calling the object that crashed a nuclear test surveillance balloon, and any "alien bodies" were just test dummies dropped from a high altitude. Rather than stopping all the talk about it being a UFO, that only added fuel to the fire.
Now, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), a very interesting document has come to light. It is currently in the FBI's Vault, which contains thousands of records released via FOIA that have been scanned and uploaded. The Roswell document is a 1950 internal memo to J. Edgar Hoover, the Director of the FBI, from the head of the Washington, D.C. field office. The subject of the memo is "Flying Saucers" and it describes how an Air Force investigator reported that three flying saucers were recovered in New Mexico.
The memo went on to describe how each craft had "three bodies of human shape but only three feet tall dressed in a metallic cloth of a very fine texture."
The report alleges that the incident happened in New Mexico because of "a very high-powered radar" device that the government has there, which interfered with the UFOs' "controlling mechanisms."
The memo is pretty shocking, but the FBI stepped in to explain why it shouldn't be. They pointed out that the memo is actually just a second-hand account of what might have happened, one the Bureau never investigated. They also said that because the document was dated 1950, three years after the Roswell Incident, it might not even be referring to what occurred in Roswell. They went on to state that the document has been around for years and just because it has appeared on the FBI's Vault site doesn't mean it is earth-shattering.
That's not stopping conspiracy theorists who aren't buying what the FBI is saying about it and fully believe the report. There's a lot more about Roswell on the Vault site too, and you can read it all here.