A declassified FBI document, catalogued under case file 62-HQ-83894, Serial 220, contains a March 19, 1950 letter from Miguel Angel Garcia Macias, a pianist, composer, and self-described ideographic inventor based in Veracruz, Mexico, addressed to the president of what he called the "Commission of Scientific Investigation of the United States of North America" in New York. In the letter, Garcia Macias advanced the claim that flying saucers were stratospheric aerostats powered by atomic force and in the possession of the United States government.
The Core Assertion: American Atomic Aircraft
Garcia Macias did not frame his letter as a report of an unexplained sighting. Instead, he offered an explanatory hypothesis: that the aerial objects widely discussed in the press and among the public were, in his view, an American invention. According to the document, he wrote to the commission because he believed it was, in his words, his duty to make his studies available for the commission's "deep consideration."
"This deals with stratospheric aerostats (?) or Flying saucers as people commonly call them, and which I believe your great Nation, making use of ATOMIC force, possesses."
The parenthetical question mark in the document appears in the FBI's own translation, noting that Garcia Macias had written "aereo-astactos extratofericos" — an apparent phonetic approximation of "aereo-estaticos estratoesfericos," or stratospheric aerostats. The translator flagged the discrepancy directly in a footnote, suggesting the rendering was interpretive rather than exact.
No evidence in the document indicates Garcia Macias had access to classified information, direct observation data, or any technical basis beyond his own speculative reasoning. His assertion that the craft belonged to the United States was offered as personal belief, not documented fact.
The Inventor's Broader Claims and Grievances
A substantial portion of the letter was devoted not to flying saucers but to Garcia Macias's account of his inventions, which he alleged had been stolen and patented by unknown third parties. He described four inventions he attributed to himself.
The first, which he called "Gote-Graduns" — translated tentatively in the document as "Drop Graduation" — arose, he wrote, from studies on atmospheric graduations. He claimed the plans were stolen and subsequently patented in the United States. The second invention, automatic shovels for dump trucks or concrete mixers, followed a similar trajectory: Garcia Macias said he drew up plans after observing laborers slowly loading a truck near the Veracruz customs house, submitted them to Mexico's Secretary of National Economy, and received notification eight months later that the patent had already been granted to someone else.
A third invention — "Rooms for Measuring Optics" intended for vision examination — he stated he had not yet registered because certain proofs remained incomplete. A fourth, described as "The Gradual Centimetric Music of the Future," encompassed what he called pianometrics, phonometrics, centimetrics, and discophonometrics. He noted that plans for this work were deposited in the town library of Veracruz.
The letter does not indicate whether Garcia Macias received a substantive reply, nor does the available document contain any FBI analytical commentary on the claims themselves.
Document Context and Reliability Considerations
The source for this document is war.gov, assigned a trust rating of 20 percent, indicating significant caution is warranted in interpreting the filing's broader context. The document appears to be an FBI translation of an original Spanish-language letter, and the translator's footnotes acknowledge interpretive uncertainty at several points, including the key technical terminology Garcia Macias used to describe the aerial phenomenon.
What the document does establish with reasonable confidence is narrower: that in March 1950, a private citizen in Veracruz wrote to what he understood to be an American scientific authority, proposed that flying saucers were U.S. atomic aircraft, and framed this claim alongside a series of grievances about stolen inventions. The FBI retained and catalogued the correspondence, which is consistent with the bureau's documented practice during the late 1940s and early 1950s of collecting public correspondence related to flying disc reports.
The letter does not constitute evidence of extraterrestrial craft, classified American technology, or any corroborated claim about UAP. It is, rather, a primary source document illustrating the range of theories circulating among the civilian public at the outset of the modern UAP era — and the degree to which ordinary individuals, in multiple countries, were attempting to rationalize a phenomenon that official channels had not yet explained to their satisfaction.