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The oldest file in America's newly
declassified UFO archive is named after

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a cartoon fireman from a nineteen
thirties newspaper comic strip.

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On May eighth, twenty twenty-six, the
Pentagon opened that archive to anyone,

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and in twelve hours it took
three hundred forty million hits.

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The trail starts in December
nineteen forty-four,

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when night fighter crews over Germany
kept reporting balls of light that

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paced their planes.

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American pilots called them foo fighters,

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a name borrowed from a comic strip
fireman whose running catchphrase was,

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where there's foo, there's fire.

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By March nineteen
forty-five the Air Ministry

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in London had already filed its verdict,

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judging the fireballs were probably
German jets or flak rockets.

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Five batches have landed since May —

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one hundred sixty-two
files, then sixty-four,

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then seventy-two, then forty,
and another forty-one in early August.

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Researchers who read the very
first tranche found that

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at least one hundred of those
one hundred sixty-odd

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files still arrived carrying redactions.

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Pilots and analysts complained the
summaries arrived stripped of coordinates,

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altitudes and sensor settings,

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the very numbers you would
need to check anything.

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The Department of War
added its own warning,

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that many of these materials lack
a substantiated chain of custody,

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and offered no assessment.

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Every case in there is labeled
unresolved, but the department says that

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status usually reflects insufficient
data, not evidence of anything anomalous.

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The office that investigates
them has told the Senate that

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to date it has discovered no verifiable
evidence of extraterrestrial beings,

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activity or technology.

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So who knows — eighty-one years on,

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the best answer in the archive
is still the one

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the Air Ministry typed
in nineteen forty-five.