UNCLASSIFIED // PUBLIC RELEASERELEASE 04 · JULY 10, 2026
PENTAGON UFO FILE · DOCUMENT · DOE-UAP-D004Los Alamos Conference on Aerial Phenomena, 1949
In early 1949 New Mexico was home to the nation’s most sensitive nuclear sites, and pilots, security inspectors and scientists had been reporting brilliant green fireballs over the area since December 1948. On 16 February 1949 the Atomic Energy Commission gathered military officers, an FBI agent and leading Los Alamos scientists, including laboratory director Norris Bradbury and Edward Teller, to hear the evidence. This is the transcript, sent onward in March 1949, with the subject classified Secret.
What was said
Lincoln LaPaz, a meteor expert at the University of New Mexico, led the discussion. He had seen one fireball himself on 12 December 1948 near Starvation Peak, timing it at about two seconds with a stopwatch and taking transit measurements. He listed what bothered him: an unusual green color, paths that were nearly horizontal at fairly low altitude, nearly constant speed, consistent short durations and, above all, no sound, even from a very large fireball on 30 January 1949 that his team traced across New Mexico and west Texas by interviewing many witnesses. A photographic patrol set up to catch one had missed.
After working on the blackboard, Teller said it ought to be a material body but might be an electron phenomenon, and LaPaz replied that nothing like this had been seen in meteorite falls. Bradbury closed by saying he still did not think meteors were ruled out.
What came next
The meeting reached no agreement. The green-fireball reports later led to an Air Force-backed observation effort in New Mexico, and the subject is part of the story of early government UFO work told in our explainers.
The official description
From war.gov/UFO, released July 10, 2026, quoted in full
This document is a transcript of a 1949 conference held at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory (now Los Alamos National Laboratory), Los Alamos, New Mexico. Attendees included several eminent scientists and physicists, many of whom had contributed to the development of the first nuclear weapons during the Manhattan Project. The purpose of the conference was to discuss and gather hypotheses to account for the nature and origin of a phenomenon involving “green fireballs” that had been reported over a period of several months in the vicinity of the laboratory. The group did not come to a consensus on a likely attribution for the phenomenon, though a leading hypothesis was that the observations may have been related to meteors entering the atmosphere at a shallow angle and high altitude. Dr. Edward Teller suggested that if not a “material body,” an “electron phenomenon” might be the cause, while Dr. Lincoln LaPaz, an expert specializing in meteorics, expressed that “nothing like this, to [his] knowledge, has ever been observed in the case of meteorite drops.”