WASHINGTON — Six months after the Department of War began publishing decades of declassified UFO records at war.gov/ufo, a delegation of extraterrestrial visitors confirmed Thursday that it remains “genuinely baffled” as to why Earth has spent 79 years treating its 1947 visit as one of the planet’s most closely guarded secrets, given that the delegation left a note.
“We put it right on the door,” said a spokesbeing for the delegation, who gave its name as Thurl of the Ninth Arm, speaking through a translation device that repeatedly rendered “humans” as “hummus.” “Name, return address, a little drawing of the ship so you’d know which one. We said sorry about the fence. We said we’d swing back. Honestly, it was a nice note.”
According to the delegation, the note, an index card written in what Thurl called “our nicest handwriting,” was taped to the screen door of a New Mexico ranch house one July afternoon after the visitors had knocked for several minutes and nobody answered. It read, in full: “Stopped by! Nobody home. Love what you’ve done with the oceans. Sorry about the fence. Will try again later. — The Neighbors (4 stars over, 2 down).”
Within 72 hours, the delegation said, the card had been collected by men in hats, placed in an envelope, placed in a second envelope and stamped with a classification level that did not yet exist.
The delegation has been following the release closely. The first batch, posted May 8 under the Pentagon’s new PURSUE program, contained 162 files (120 PDFs, 28 videos and 14 images) from the Pentagon, the FBI, NASA and the State Department. The note was not among them. Nor did it appear in the Pentagon UFO office’s annual report, released in July, which counted 1,870 reports in its holdings, attributed its resolved cases to balloons, birds, satellites, aircraft and drones, and placed 191 more in an “active archive” for lack of sufficient data.
“Lack of sufficient data,” Thurl repeated. “There’s a signature.”
Declassify The Note
The original 1947 note is now eligible for public release, one word at a time, pending review. File a request to see how much of a fully signed visit the government can safely share.
Words are released in the order the reviewing agency finds least alarming, beginning with “the.” Any word released may be reclassified once the public knows it.
“We are committed to maximum transparency,” said a Department of War spokesperson who asked not to be named, adding that the note remains under review “to protect sources and methods.” Pressed, the spokesperson acknowledged that the source had signed the note and the method was a pen. Officials have also cited the note’s inclusion of a foreign national’s handwriting, along with concerns that releasing it would reveal how long the government has had it, which a senior official described as “the actual secret.”
The delegation said it initially assumed Earth was simply embarrassed about not being home. Later it suspected the note had fallen behind the refrigerator. In the following decades the visitors tried to follow up through what Thurl called “every channel you people seem to use”: a series of flyovers above the U.S. Capitol in the summer of 1952, “which was us honking”; geometric patterns pressed into English wheat fields, “because we were told that is how you leave a voicemail in rural areas”; and a mile-wide formation of lights over Phoenix in 1997, “which was us waving.”
Each attempt, the delegation noted, was logged, studied, classified and, in at least one case, explained as a flare. AARO’s latest report attributes 238 sightings to sunlight glinting off satellites.
“Two hundred thirty-eight,” Thurl said. “Some of those were us. We were holding up a sign.”
What confuses the visitors most, they said, is Earth’s own correspondence. On Nov. 16, 1974, astronomers at Puerto Rico’s Arecibo Observatory beamed a radio message toward the M13 star cluster, about 25,000 light-years away, meaning any reply would take some 50,000 years to come back. Three years later NASA sent the Voyager probes off with gold-plated records of greetings, music and directions to Earth, then spent the next half-century wondering aloud whether anyone was out there.
“You mailed a letter to your neighbor’s cousin across the ocean and checked the mailbox every day,” Thurl said. “Meanwhile your actual neighbor slipped a card under your door, and you put it in a safe.”
Scientists who study first contact say the confusion may come from a gap in the rules. A 1989 declaration endorsed by the International Academy of Astronautics says that a confirmed detection of extraterrestrial intelligence should be announced promptly and openly to the public. Several agencies, according to people familiar with internal legal memos, have argued that the protocol covers signals detected and does not apply to notes found, which they consider a loophole “roughly the size of an index card.”
The Interstellar Ghosting Meter
Someone left you a nice note. Drag the slider to the number of years you have waited to respond, and our etiquette desk will tell you where you stand and draft a reply.
The Etiquette Desk applies standard Earth guidance on thank-you notes, extended to visitors from four stars over and two down. Replies sent after 79 years are routed for review and will reach the neighbors when the review is finished.
Members of Congress who have pushed for more disclosure said they were “deeply troubled” to learn that the visit had been explained the whole time. One committee aide said lawmakers had planned an extensive set of hearings about what the government might be hiding and were now unsure what to do with an answer. “We had budgeted for a mystery,” the aide said.
The delegation stressed that it holds no hard feelings. “Everyone has a drawer like that,” Thurl said. “Mail you meant to answer. We just did not expect yours to have armed guards.”
At press time, the delegation had left a second note on the same screen door, reading “Hi again! Did you get our note?” It was collected within the hour and classified as a follow-up to a document that does not officially exist.
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