THE DOCUMENT
USG-UAP-D001, “Congress-White House UFO Correspondence, 1998”, is a document from the U.S. Department of War’s PURSUE Release 03, published at war.gov/ufo, cleared 12 June 2026. It is a file of correspondence from 1998, routed through NASA’s Office of Legislative Affairs: letters and emails from members of the public, the congressional and White House cover notes that forwarded them, NASA’s replies, and the enclosures NASA sent with those replies.
Why this one is worth your time
This is not a sighting report. It is a paperwork trail of how a government office handled the public’s UFO questions in a single year. In 1998, members of the public wrote to President Clinton and to their senators and representatives asking about UFOs: astronaut sightings, Area 51, the recent Mars images, and whether Congress would hold hearings. Those letters were forwarded to NASA, and NASA’s legislative-affairs staff wrote back. The file holds both sides, plus the internal tracking slips that logged each item. This briefing sets out what the correspondence records: who wrote, what they asked, and what NASA said in reply.
What the document says
What kind of file this is. It is a correspondence and casework file, built around NASA’s Office of Legislative Affairs. Each item is logged on the agency’s “Headquarters Action Tracking System (HATS)” forms, which record an incoming letter’s author, organisation, dates and status. The substance is the letters themselves: incoming correspondence from the public, the forwarding notes from Senate, House and White House offices, and NASA’s outgoing replies over the signature of its Associate Administrator for Legislative Affairs.
How a letter reached NASA. The file shows two routes. A member of the public writes to a member of Congress, who forwards the letter to NASA with a request to respond to the constituent. Senators Olympia Snowe and Charles Grassley and Representative Bart Gordon each appear doing this on behalf of named constituents. The second route runs through the White House: emails sent to president@WhiteHouse.GOV were gathered and referred to NASA in bulk under a memorandum from the Director of the Office of Agency Liaison, “Referral of Casework in Bulk”, which states that “an unprecedented number of individuals still write the President and the First Lady for help” and forwards the letters for any appropriate action.
What the public asked. The letters cover a range of UFO topics. One constituent questions the authenticity of recently released Mars images, on the basis that a picture had fewer shades of grey than he expected. Another asks for information on UFO sightings by astronauts. Several, identifying as members of CSETI (the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence), urge the President to hold open congressional hearings, or a presidential discussion, on the existence of “alien beings and spacecraft”. One twelve-year-old self-described UFO researcher writes to Senator Snowe asking for government documents on the Roswell crash and listing sightings and abductions he has heard about. Some letters enclose long compilations of alleged astronaut UFO quotes; one of these reproduces the Gemini 7 “bogey” exchange between astronaut Frank Borman and Houston, the same transmission covered in the Gemini 7 briefing.
What NASA wrote back. The replies are consistent and largely standardised. To the astronaut-sightings inquiry, NASA wrote that objects sighted by astronauts had been identified as material from launch vehicles, spacecraft or items such as water droplets, that the Air Force had investigated such reports for years but discontinued the activity, and that “NASA has no program for investigating UFOs and has not withheld information on sightings”. To the hearings requests, NASA replied that it was “not aware of any hearings scheduled on UFO” and enclosed a fact sheet. To the Mars-image questions, NASA explained that the images came from the Mars Global Surveyor, were received as digital data and processed for viewing, not tampered with, and were deposited in a publicly accessible archive. Several replies enclosed a 1976 article by James Oberg from SEARCH magazine, examining the astronaut-UFO claims, and a NASA fact sheet, “The US Government and Unidentified Flying Objects”.
The enclosed fact sheet. The file includes the fact sheet NASA sent with many of its replies. It states that no branch of the US Government is then involved in or responsible for investigating UFOs or the possibility of alien life, summarises the Air Force’s Project Blue Book (1947 to 1969) and its conclusions, and records the Blue Book totals: of 12,618 sightings reported, 701 remained “unidentified”. It also recounts the end of NASA’s own search-for-extraterrestrial-intelligence programme, which Congress directed NASA to stop in 1993.
What the document does not say
It is not a report of any sighting, and it records no investigation. It is correspondence: it documents who asked what and how NASA answered, not any finding about a UFO.
It does not endorse the claims in the incoming letters. The astronaut quotes, the Area 51 accounts and the alien-craft assertions are reproduced as the public’s own correspondence; NASA’s replies neither confirm nor investigate them, and direct the writers to public archives and fact sheets.
It is redacted. The names, addresses and contact details of private citizens are withheld throughout, in line with privacy practice; the senders are identifiable in the file mostly by the forwarding member of Congress or by organisation.
It is bounded to one year and one office. The file is NASA legislative-affairs correspondence from 1998. It does not show what, if anything, happened beyond the replies, and it is not a record of White House or congressional deliberation, only of the letters that passed through to NASA and back.
From the record
NASA has no program for investigating UFOs and has not withheld information on sightings. NASA’s Office of Legislative Affairs, replying to an inquiry about astronaut UFO sightings
We are not aware of any hearings scheduled on UFO. NASA’s reply to a White House referral supporting congressional hearings
No branch of the United States Government is currently involved with or responsible for investigations into the possibility of alien life on other planets or for investigating Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO’s). The opening of the NASA fact sheet “The US Government and Unidentified Flying Objects”, enclosed with the replies
Where the case connects
The file connects to the NASA and astronaut material elsewhere in these releases. One of its enclosures reproduces the Gemini 7 “bogey” transmission; the Gemini 7 briefing covers that exchange from the primary debriefing record, and this Release 03 cluster includes the fuller Gemini-era debriefings. The file’s standardised “no program / no investigation” answer is the public-affairs counterpart to the actual debriefing documents released elsewhere. Briefing 1 of Release 01 covers PURSUE and the tier system.
The file also leaves its own loose ends. The replies point to enclosures, archives and fact sheets that are summarised rather than reproduced in full; the constituents’ identities are redacted; and the file stops at NASA’s reply, so what each writer did next is not recorded. Any later release of related agency correspondence, or of the materials these letters reference, lands in this series when it does.
Read it yourself
USG-UAP-D001, “Congress-White House UFO Correspondence, 1998”, is hosted at war.gov in PURSUE Release 03.
Read the file. Decide for yourself.
Related wiki entries
The wiki entries below give background on the programme and the publisher behind this briefing.
References and further reading
- Primary document: USG-UAP-D001, “Congress-White House UFO Correspondence, 1998”, PURSUE Release 03, U.S. Department of War, hosted at war.gov/ufo
- Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, U.S. Department of War, war.gov/ufo
- AARO UAP Records, All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, aaro.mil/UAP-Records
- Briefing 13 of Release 01, on the Gemini 7 “bogey” transmission
- Briefing 1 of Release 01, on PURSUE and the evidence tier system