UNCLASSIFIED // PUBLIC RELEASERELEASE 07 · OCTOBER 23, 2026
PENTAGON UFO FILE · DOCUMENT · EOP-UAP-D002Memorandum on Interagency Coordination for the Recovery of Foreign Materiel, May 1963
This single page is a May 29, 1963, memorandum from R. W. Hale of the National Aeronautics and Space Council staff to the council’s executive secretary, Dr. Welsh, headed “Conference with Frutkin – Fragments.” Hale says he spent more than an hour on May 28 with Arnold Frutkin of NASA and his assistant, Marvin Robinson, and had to go back over the previous year’s meetings because Frutkin had been away then and was now “very negative on the project.”
Frutkin’s seven points
As Hale records them, Frutkin felt that no public announcement was needed any longer; that an Executive Order or White House statement would frighten people for no reason; that the problem lay overseas, where the State Department wanted to be able to name NASA as the responsible U.S. agency without a public alarm; that the Defense Department and the Air Force wanted NASA as a “cover” but meant to let it do little beyond returning some pieces; that CIA and NASA already worked well together on the matter; that NASA should wait for the U.S. Intelligence Board’s decision; and that although NASA was drafting legislation, it (Hale guesses its lawyers) would oppose sending anything to Congress for fear of a harmful debate.
Where it fits
The “project” is the effort, run through Welsh’s council from October 1962, to fix which agency receives, analyzes and returns satellite and rocket fragments; the drafts and letters are in USG-UAP-D002. Those drafts named NASA publicly as the receiving agency, while a Defense revision of March 1, 1963, had foreign fragments go to Defense first for intelligence analysis — probably the arrangement Frutkin means by a “cover,” though the memo does not say so. Two days after this memo Welsh pressed the CIA director for Intelligence Board action. The memo is about man-made space debris and says nothing about unidentified objects; it shows a NASA official’s objections, reported secondhand by Hale.
The official description
From war.gov/UFO, released October 23, 2026, quoted in full
This document is an internal National Aeronautics and Space Council (NASC) memorandum from staff member R.W. Hale to Executive Secretary Edward C. Welsh. NASC was a 1958–1973 body within the Executive Office of the President responsible at the time for coordinating U.S. space policy. The memorandum records a May 28, 1963, meeting with Arnold Frutkin, Director of International Programs at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), concerning the development of a coordinated interagency policy for recovering reentering U.S. and Soviet space debris and satellite fragments that might land on foreign soil. This memorandum is associated with a larger body of interagency correspondence included in this collection under the title “USG-UAP-D002.”
The memorandum highlights an interagency policy debate over organizational jurisdiction during the early Space Race. It states that the Department of State and Department of War sought to leverage NASA’s standing as a civilian scientific agency to help facilitate discreet recovery of sensitive space hardware while publicly returning non-sensitive components to the country of origin. As described in the memorandum, the proposed arrangement would have served several purposes: enabling access to adversary technologies, protecting U.S. technologies, preserving diplomatic goodwill, and obscuring the intelligence gathering dimension of technology recovery operations. The memorandum also presents Director Frutkin’s reaction to the proposed arrangement as “very negative.”