Pajarito Astronomers Invitation, 1986

This one-page letter is the most ordinary document in the Department of Energy’s part of the release: a meeting notice from the Pajarito Astronomers, an amateur astronomy club in Los Alamos, New Mexico, dated 20 May 1986. It is in the files because the speaker was connected with Los Alamos National Laboratory, which is run for the Department of Energy.

What it says

The letter tells members that the next meeting will be on Thursday, 29 May 1986, at 7:30 p.m. in the Ranch Room of Fuller Lodge, with directions to reach the room from outside the lodge. The guest speaker was Dr. John Warren, identified by a laboratory group code, and his talk was titled “Why Should a Scientist be Concerned about UFO’s?” The club’s officers are listed by laboratory mail-stop codes, which suggests that many members worked at the lab. Names and some details are blanked out.

What it does not tell us

The department notes that the laboratory did not host the event and has no record of what Warren said, so the letter shows only that the subject was being discussed among scientists in Los Alamos at the time. It is a small piece of a longer story: Los Alamos staff took an interest in aerial phenomena from the green-fireball reports of the late 1940s onward, as the 1949 conference transcript in this collection shows (DOE-UAP-D004), and another lab physicist’s UFO correspondence is in DOE-UAP-D002.