Nick Redfern March 18, 2022

Over the years and decades, a large number of UFO-themed government documents have been declassified into the public domain thanks to the Freedom of Information Acts of various nations. There is, however, another aspect to this: namely, the files that should have been released but that can’t be found. Anywhere. We’ll begin with the Roswell affair of July 1947. When, in the 1990s, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (previously the General Accounting Office) dug deep to try and find any documentation on Roswell, many researchers of the still-mysterious case thought that at least some degree of answers would be found. Not so. There’s no doubt that the GAO did a very good job when it came to the search for the Roswell files, but even they couldn’t find what turned out to be a significant body of files. As the GAO said: “In our search for records concerning the Roswell crash, we learned that some government records covering RAAF activities had been destroyed and others had not. For example, RAAF administrative records (from Mar. 1945 through Dec. 1949) and RAAF outgoing messages (from Oct. 1946 through Dec. 1949) were destroyed. The document disposition form does not indicate what organization or person destroyed the records and when or under what authority the records were destroyed [italics mine].” The mystery is still not clear. Now, onto another famous (or infamous) case.

(Nick Redfern) Roswell: Files that can’t be found

In 2011, the BBC ran an online article titled “UFO files reveal ‘Rendlesham incident’ papers missing.” The BBC’s Neil Henderson wrote: “Intelligence papers on a reported UFO sighting known as the ‘Rendlesham incident’ have gone missing, files from the National Archives reveal. The missing files relate to a report of mysterious lights from US servicemen at RAF Woodbridge in Suffolk in 1980. The disappearance came to light with the release of 8,000 previously classified documents on UFOs. Officials found a ‘huge’ gap where defense intelligence files relating to the case should be, the papers show.” The files also referred to a “deliberate attempt” to “eradicate the records covering this incident.” Hmm.

(Nick Redfern) When documents vanish…

Now, onto the matter of the Contactees of the 1950s. Or, rather, one particular Contactee: Orfeo Angelucci, who came on the UFO scene in the early 1950s.. It’s a fact that nearly all of the UFO Contactees had files opened on them by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. The list included George Adamski, George Van Tassel, Wayne Aho, and George Hunt Williamson. Some of those FBI surveillance files ran to more than 300 pages. By the mid-1950s, Angelucci had moved on from his job at Lockheed and he and his family were now based out of Twentynine Palms, San Bernadino County, California. And, with his book The Secret of the Saucers on the bookshelves, he was becoming a familiar face at UFO lectures and conferences. It was in this period that Angelucci caught the attention of the FBI – and for a very curious reason. As he became more adept at public speaking, and more comfortable about discussing his claimed encounters with aliens, Angelucci revealed something disturbingly eye-opening. It was something which soon had the Feds on his tail. According to Angelucci, as his profile as one of the Contactees grew and grew, he found himself approached on several occasions by what he described as a “subversive element.”On occasion, those approaches were made at Giant Rock, California, near to George Van Tassel’s Integratron.

(Nick Redfern) George Van Tassel’s Integratron

This small group – “foreigners,” as he worded it – first approached Angelucci while he was engaged in a series of lectures along the east coast in the 1950s. Regular UFO enthusiasts, they were certainly not. They did their very best to try and encourage Angelucci to suggest to his listeners and readers that his alien comrades were communists. In correspondence with Jim Moseley, who, as we have seen, spent time addressing the matter of a communist plot to manipulate the U.S. UFO scene, Angelucci claimed that this “gang of four,” as we might describe them, bought him dinner on three occasions and plied him with plentiful amounts of booze, in plush, New York hotels and bars. Angelucci admitted to Moseley that he was “flattered” by the attention, but remained very uneasy about the agenda. Angelucci would later say of this curious affair: “Failing in their desperate attempts to convert me to communism and slant my talks along the Party Line, they invariably defiantly demanded: ‘Well, then, just what do you think is wrong with Communism?’” Angelucci was a scared man.

(Nick Redfern)

Shortly before Angelucci publicly revealed that a certain “subversive element” was mixing and stirring left-wing, extremist politics with extraterrestrials, the FBI came knocking on the front-door of the Angelucci home. While we don’t know the full story, we do at least have the bones of it, thanks to Jim Moseley. According to what Angelucci told Moseley, a pair of FBI agents visited Angelucci at his Twentynine Palms home, telling him that they had heard of the actions of this east coast group – from who, though, was something that the FBI was not prepared to reveal. The questions posed to Angelucci were many: How did he first meet the group? Did they give their names? Were they Americans? Did they offer him money to slant his tales down a politically-driven path? The list of questions went on and on. Angelucci – admittedly scared out of his wits by the fact that the FBI was onto him, even though he hadn’t really done anything wrong – blurted out just about all that he could. The group had first approached him, in an overly friendly fashion, at a lecture in New York, he told the special-agents. No names were ever given to him, but all four were well-dressed, all seemed to be around the forty-mark, and all had overseas accents. No money ever crossed hands. They invited Angelucci to dinner, which he accepted, admittedly intrigued by the prospect of developing new contacts. It was over dinner that the matter of communism surfaced its head. This mysterious group wanted Angelucci to present his lectures in a fashion that suggested the aliens were communists – and that communism was a good thing. No wonder the FBI opened a file on the man. There’s something else, though: on October 24, 2017, the FBI informed UFO researcher John Greenewald that Angelucci had indeed been the subject of a Bureau file, but that it was destroyed on October 30, 2009.

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