65 HS1-834228961 62-HQ-83894 Serial 220

This serial from the FBI’s headquarters file on flying saucers, 62-HQ-83894, holds a letter that was never addressed to the Bureau. Dated March 19, 1950, it was written in Veracruz, Mexico, by Miguel Angel Garcia Macias, who signs as a pianist, composer and “Ideographic Inventor,” and it is addressed to the president of a “Commission of Scientific Investigation” in New York. What the FBI kept is an English translation by a Mrs. Sophia Saliba, complete with her notes on the writer’s Spanish and his habit of capitalizing words for emphasis.

The inventor’s proposal

Garcia Macias opens with a list of earlier ideas he says were taken from him or patented by others: a graduated dropper, automatic shovels for dump trucks, a device to prevent collisions at railway crossings, a system for dividing time on the world’s clocks. Then he reaches his subject, which he calls “stratospheric aerostats” — flying saucers, which he assumed the United States already built using atomic force.

His design joins the stability of a globe with that of a parachute in a cone-and-globe shape, pushed by nuclear-powered “stratospheric skyrockets” on its top or sides. He claims it could outrun light and sound, launch from land or water, and be used to study the stars, and he hopes it will serve progress rather than destruction.

The Durango photographs

Filed with the letter is a translated newspaper item about German Horacio Robles Jr., an engineering student said to have photographed a “flying saucer” over Durango at 8,000 to 9,000 feet. The paper describes a double truncated cone that seemed to move by something like jet propulsion, and the serial ends with translated drawings headed “Wings and Propellers.” The released pages show no FBI comment on any of it. A different kind of item from the same file is the Socorro report.