1998 Congressional UFO Correspondence File: NASA's Official

1998 Congressional UFO Correspondence File: NASA's Official Stance and the Astronaut Sighting Debates

NASA told Senator Grassley in 1998 that 'No unidentified materials were seen on missions to the moon' and that 'NASA has no program for investigating UFOs and has not withheld information on sightings' — part of a newly released government correspondence file that also encloses a 1976 article arguing the famous McDivitt Gemini-4 UFO was just the spacecraft's own booster.

Published

October 5, 2026

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1998 HATS File Documents Congressional UFO Constituent Inquiries

The document Senate offices routed constituent questions about unidentified flying objects into the federal bureaucracy during 1998. The file's own metadata shows the machinery at work: incoming correspondence actions logged under ID numbers L/1998-00407 and L/1998-00729, each stamped with dates written, received, due, signed, and closed, each assigned an action office, a signature office, and a list of information offices including UHeffernan, UHeninger, and UKerwin. The first action, L/1998-00407, records Senator Olympia Snowe forwarding a letter from a constituent in Stockington, Maine, who was interested in UFOs and in recently released photographs of Mars.

The second, L/1998-00729, records Senator Charles Grassley forwarding a constituent request for information on UFO sightings by astronauts. Both were directed to NASA's Office of Legislative Affairs, and both were answered by Edward Heffernan, Associate Administrator for Legislative Affairs. What makes the file significant is the contrast it preserves.

On one side are citizens writing to…

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Based on the official release at https://www.war.gov/UFO/

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USG-UAP-D001, Congressional, White House, UFO-related Constituent Correspondence, 1998

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https://www.war.gov/UFO/

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