DOE-UAP-D004, Los Alamos Conference on Aerial Phenomena, 1949
This document is a transcript of a 1949 conference held at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory (now Los Alamos National Laboratory), Los Alamos, New Mexico. Attendees included several eminent scientists and physicists, many of whom had contributed to the development of the first nuclear weapons during the Manhattan Project. The purpose of the conference was to discuss and gather hypotheses to account for the nature and origin of a phenomenon involving “green fireballs” that had been reported over a period of several months in the vicinity of the laboratory. The group did not come to a consensus on a likely attribution for the phenomenon, though a leading hypothesis was that the observations may have been related to meteors entering the atmosphere at a shallow angle and high altitude. Dr. Edward Teller suggested that if not a “material body,” an “electron phenomenon” might be the cause, while Dr. Lincoln LaPaz, an expert specializing in meteorics, expressed that “nothing like this, to [his] knowledge, has ever been observed in the case of meteorite drops.”
The summary above is sourced from the released file metadata as published to war.gov. The analysis sections below are original to this tracker.
Text of the document
Machine-extracted from the PDF war.gov published (its text layer or OCR), so expect errors, especially in names, numbers and handwriting; the PDF is the authoritative copy. Lines that did not extract as readable text are left out. Showing about 989 words from pages 1, 2, 3, 4 of 25.
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UNIT ED STATES ATOMIC ENERGY COMMISSION LOS ALAMOS, NEW MEXICO ADDRESS REPLY TO: 11ANAGER, SANTA FE DIRECTED OPERATIONS IJ, S. ATOMIC ENERGY COMMISSION LOS ALAMOS, NEW MEXICO ANO REFER TO: Very t ruly yours, Chief , Security Ope r ations Branch
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AERIAL PHENOMENA La.boi."'atory, Lo& Alamoa, Bew Mezico. Present: 4th Any: Major Winn Major Oodsoe t1n1versity ot XevMenco: University ot California: Dr. Bradbury 1-1r. Ilelfburger opened the contereD.Ce and s~ted that the subJect ot Aerial appropriate regulations o~ the Navy and A11: J'orce~, and tba.t oil penonnel at Beef, who briaf'ly outlined the purpoe" of tbia meet;ing. Captain Beet: It aU start d back 1n DecGmber, 1948, when w first received At this s~e v~ bad no idea what to do with it or vhat it ,ran. We e.pprooobf:d Dr. LaPaz 'Who has been aqsisting us, gratis, since tbat date. Almost over two " months now that he hao been assisting us, oo in order to have you get the tacts _·' as they ue to a sc1en-tiet, I'll let Dr. IaPaz q:plain these tbings as we have ~ :found t.hem. Then you ~ give ua your opinion trom. theft; that 18 what we are '" interosted in. conventional meteorite falls as providine tbp necessary bac~ for tlhat is ob3erved. Meteorite falls (tor next minute or two, Dr. L&Paz'a cet!Jments on recoi-d drowned out by noise trcm ditell digger immediately outeide conference me·lreor1te wiU cQWJe great frisht among button beings neceasar1.1.y but primari~ among animals, o~ all kind~. 'Ihe tact toll~, by- a meteorite falling into the
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Conference on AERIAL PHENOMENA Page 2 earth, ts as you would elt!)ect, one at rend.ool - in azimuth and elevation. I.f the rad.laat t7hite is knovn., yor: can preciict the minimum angle with respect to the plane of the horizon nt which the m.eteoi-i•ce path has been observed. There is no choice, e.s f'a.r as the ..... for direction wen rceteorites fe.11 in at ranc1om. I'd like to contrast 11o·n-, at this time, thia fact with what has been observed by some indivi.duals here at the co.:?lf'erence and by r.::aey of the AESS inspectorll, UAL pilota, special a.gents, goodness knows how many other categories of people. I choose to describe ·Ghe only one of the incidents that I vas pereonally o. wi:~nesa to. It io the only one of the incidents that I am in a nooiticn to vouch fo~ on the basis of experience, dating from 1915, as a member of the Am~rican !>1etaor Society; w-as most certainly not a. conventioll81 meteorite fall. It -was the so-called St:U.--vation Peak incident on the night of December 1.2, 19116. 'l'iue of observation around 9;02 P.M., plus or minus 30 seconds. This rir0·oa11 nppeared in full intenoity instantly • there was no increase in light. Its color,, estimated to be somewhere arotmd wave length 5200 engstroma, .ms a. hue green, or yello-11 green, such ae I had never observed in meteor falls before. The path ua.e a& I!.etlrly horizontal as one could determine by visual observation. We have ~ pho·togra:1>h which might be some li--;; ra ot departure from horizontal.. The trajectory was traverse at, I am inclined to believe, constant angular velocity. Just befor0 the end of the pat;h ·there we.a the very 811gb.test drooping of the path, that io the green fireball broke into fragments, still bright green. Dr. Teller: And all this time the intensity uas approxiJDately constant? Dr. !.a.Paz:: All -the time, as fa'.!." ae I cou.ld determine. The eye, of course, is e.dmitted.l.~r a very crude phcrcographer. Dr. Teller: Rov long did the phenomenon last1 Dr. 1-.'i.Paz~ Almost exactly two i:;econds. We have in the reports here, I brought the com:plt::te file nth ma and uould be glad. to circulate them, duration measures in 1•ela.tion. to all observations. Fev of -these, h~rever, I believe, were deter.Jlinoo under as favorable circumstancea as the duration of the Starvation Peak incident. Possibly I should go back and review the situation a little bit. Because oom~ report, iaau.ed by the AESS, uoul.d certain]Jr suggest that I was prinillrily responsible for starting this whole matter I am glad that Captain Reel' corrected that impression. Actually:- I YaS on an investigation in regard to -'che green fireball. observed on tho night of December 5th at the time the I h'.1.cl a stop vatch with me and a transit. We got into position and made measures, transit :ciee,suros, on azimuths and elevation readings; that is, we ma.de a dm.·a:cion check, certainly within not more than tvo or three minutes sftor the incident occurred. To that extent, I believe, it is posaibly' the best observed ot any incident up to tha time of the January 30th fall. Dr. Manl~r: Hem did you have time to use ·t;b.e tranait? Dr. La.Po.~: The transit was in the back of ·the car. The mament the car was parked a:c the aide of th2 road, we yanked. the transit out and set 1t u,p and
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Conference on AEBJ.AL PHENOMENA Page 3 very good check of 'Uhat w obsc!'Ved at the time on the road near Starvation Peak. Ue had a cJ.ea.r view of the sky to the Northwest om the WeBt, and the object wan so low over the horlzon it was possible to compare 1t not o:nly to were also visible. To continue, that duration vas a.bout two second.Q. 'l'his is one of tho puzzling ~s to the meteorists. I believe I do not exaggerate case of the green f'il."'eballs have given durations right in that vicinity. ·widest diversions in durations. You could take tbe same leason a.a observed by 100 people - possibly that0z a better example .. and there would be wide va.rietionn in the estimates of dm-ation. Dr. LaPe.z: No. T'.iJ.ere ie an azimuth factor here which I am goiDg to talk to you about, that relates to the choice of clirection. Both our observations are single station observations, no that it beeomes impossible ~am the observe.•
Where this file fits in the PURSUE archive
This file is one of Department of Energy's 5 files in the Trump PURSUE disclosure. Within the Department of Energy agency block it ranks #1 of 5 by Anomalousness Index. Across the entire 478-file archive it ranks #232 of 478.
That places it in the lower-scoring band of the archive (232 of 478 by score), typical of investigative-record style files where the report is paper-based rather than instrumented.
For the broader cluster context, this file is part of DOE Nuclear UAP Files - the 5 Department of Energy files tying the U.S. nuclear weapons complex to UAP (PANTEX, Los Alamos, the Pajarito Astronomers, and a 1949 Los Alamos conference record). The cluster page walks through all 5 member files with regional grouping, sensor breakdown, and standout analysis.
Anomalousness Index: 58/100
Evidentiary weight that this encounter remains unexplained after conventional analysis. Not a probability of extraterrestrial origin - that number is not honestly computable from the released files and this tracker refuses to publish it.
🤖 AI-ASSISTED SCORING · methodology
The six rubric components break down for this file as follows. Each component has a weighted contribution to the final score; the per-component explanation below describes what this file's particular value on that component means in the rubric's framework.
No sensor, camera, or instrument backs this observation - it is testimony, relayed through the Department of Energy, and scored on the rubric's lowest sensor-quality tier for that reason. That doesn't bear on the witness's credibility (a separate axis); it reflects only that nothing beyond human perception recorded the event.
The witness here is Department of Energy personnel, entering the report into the federal investigative system through standard channels. That's one of the rubric's higher credibility tiers - trained federal investigative staff, weighted level with a trained aviator and below only an astronaut witness - though the posture is reactive (responding to a report) rather than an active operational context.
On corroboration, this file from the Department of Energy - like every single-tier file in the PURSUE archive - is a single-witness or single-instrument capture per the released metadata. The rubric doesn't infer multi-witness confirmation the summaries don't actually establish; this score reflects the honest limit of what was released, not a judgment about the underlying event.
The released file contains no speed, acceleration, or vector data precise enough to score on the kinematic axis - and that's true archive-wide, not specific to this file. The rubric declines to infer kinematic anomaly from a witness's narrative estimate of how fast something moved; that itself says something about what PURSUE actually released: descriptive accounts, not flight-path telemetry.
Every file in the archive, including this one, scores this tier: a conventional explanation was considered in the released record but isn't treated as dispositive. That's a pattern in how war.gov's own summaries are written - they consistently hedge against strong conclusions either way - and the rubric takes that hedging at face value rather than resolving it for them.
This file was released as open by the Department of Energy after a formal review process concluded - not simply logged and left pending. That's a stronger disposition signal than 'unresolved, no review': a review actually happened, and remaining open is the Department of Energy's own published conclusion from it, not an absence of one.
Bottom line on the score: the Anomalousness Index of 58/100 reflects evidentiary weight that this specific file's encounter remains structurally unexplained by the rubric's six axes - it is not a claim that the underlying event involved anything non-conventional, and it is not comparable across rubrics that use different weights. For the full per-axis weights and the rubric JSON, see /methodology.
Related files in Department of Energy
Other PURSUE files in the same category, ranked by Anomalousness Index.
ODNI-UAP-D001, USPER Narrative, Senior USIC Official
CIA-UAP-002, Scientific Advisory Panel on Unidentified Flying Objects, Report, 1952-1953
CIA-UAP-003, The Central Intelligence Agency and Overhead Reconnaissance; The U-2 and OXCA…
CIA-UAP-004, CASE 17708 (CLOSED) and DR. Leon Davidson
CIA-UAP-005, German Scientist's Article on 'Flying Discs'
CIA-UAP-006, Sighting Of Unconventional Aircraft
Verification
SHA-256:
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