These Aliens kind of suck

(Mark Wilson / AP)

The FBI has been putting a lot of its old documents online in the Vault, to better reassure the public that they weren't involved in vast conspiracies, just your run-of-the-mill anti-democratic chicanery. Their two most requested topics are Elvis and Roswell. Yesterday they released a memo that will no doubt send conspiracy nerds into a crazed frenzy:

The memo making the rounds Monday is the Hottel memo, written March 22, 1950, by Guy Hottel, a special agent in the FBI's Washington Field Office. The memo was sent to J. Edgar Hoover, then the director of the FBI.

It reads: "An investigator for the Air Forces stated that three so-called flying saucers had been recovered in New Mexico. They were described as being circular in shape with raised centers, approximately 50 feet in diameter. Each one was occupied by three bodies of human shape but only 3 feet tall, dressed in metallic cloth of very fine texture. Each body was bandaged in a manner similar to the blackout suits used by speed flyers and test pilots.

It's a pretty standard description of Little Green Men, though they could also be Munchkins that race competitively. Here's the part I don't get:

According to Mr. [Redacted] informant, the saucers were found in New Mexico due to the fact that the Government has a very high-powered radar set-up in that area and it is believed the radar interferes with the controlling mechanism of the saucers."

So these littlest test pilots, with their flashy suits of "metallic cloth of very fine texture," somehow travel across the galaxy only to be felled by… radar?

Maybe the government didn't cover up these aliens because they're dangerous or made some kind of deal. Maybe it's just because our first visitors from another world kind of sucked.