UFOpedia

clinton-library-ufo-collection-finding-aid

6 min read

Clinton Presidential Library — UFO Collection Finding Aid (FOIA 2006-0474-F)

Source: https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/36386 PDF: https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/files/original/8951918bb5726e586b28d95927e60197.pdf Publisher: William J. Clinton Presidential Library & Museum (administered by NARA) Processed by: Staff Archivist, 2010 Sourced: 2026-05-17

This is the .gov URL the Reddit “60-year disclosure-attempts” thread cited as the primary source for the alleged JFK November 12, 1963 memo to the Director of Central Intelligence. The URL does not contain that memo. It is a finding aid for a Clinton-era FOIA collection of UFO-related correspondence — mostly material sent TO the Clinton White House by Steven Greer’s CSETI organization.

Key facts about the collection

  • FOIA request number: 2006-0474-F
  • Extent: 27 folders, 899 pages
  • Status: “No items in this collection have yet been scanned nor made available online” (per the website item record)
  • Access: Open to all researchers under Presidential Records Act + FOIA
  • Processed: 2010 by staff archivist; restricted materials added as released

Composition of the collection

The finding aid PDF describes the collection contents:

  1. WHORM Subject Files: correspondence from White House, NARA, a Member of Congress, and the Director of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library — all responsive to requests for information about UFOs, extraterrestrial intelligence, or “the alleged Roswell incident”

  2. White House Staff and Office Files: the largest portion. Documents sent to the White House by Steven M. Greer and CSETI. The finding aid explicitly notes:

“Some of the purportedly official documents, presented as evidence by CSETI, have been in the public domain for several years and are widely disputed with regard to their origin and authenticity.”

  1. Agency Liaison Files: letters from individuals to the White House or directly to the President, referred to NASA for reply, with one 3-page enclosure explaining the history of government UFO investigations

  2. NSC Cable, Email, and Records Management Systems: cables containing translated foreign news reports of UFO sightings; emails containing transcripts of press briefings and Clinton remarks where UFOs were mentioned

  3. Automated Records Management / Tape Restoration Project: news transcripts and correspondence about reported sightings

Why this matters for the “JFK Nov 12 1963 memo” claim

The Reddit thread by u/Better-Waltz-2026 (May 2026) cites this URL as documentation that “JFK sent the memo on Nov 12. He was assassinated on Nov 22.” The chain implied is:

  1. JFK memo exists
  2. Clinton Library has it
  3. Therefore the disclosure-attempt history is on the .gov record

The URL does not support that chain. It supports something more limited: that Steven Greer / CSETI sent a body of “purportedly official documents” to the Clinton White House in the 1990s; those documents (which may include a typed copy of the alleged 1963 memo) are in the FOIA collection; and the NARA archivist who processed the collection has flagged that the documents are “widely disputed with regard to their origin and authenticity.”

This is the opposite of what the Reddit thread implies. The .gov URL preserves a record of who claimed what to the White House, while explicitly marking the underlying documents as disputed.

The actual provenance of the alleged JFK Nov 12 1963 memo

The “Classification review of all UFO intelligence files affecting National Security” memo dated November 12, 1963 from JFK to the DCI was introduced into UFO research by Timothy Cooper in the late 1990s, as part of what came to be called the Majestic Documents / Wood “Burned Memo” collection. Robert and Ryan Wood’s project “Majestic Documents” promoted it as authentic. The same project promoted other documents (the MJ-12 papers, the Cutler-Twining memo variant, the Marilyn Monroe death memo, the “Special Operations Manual SOM 1-01”) whose authenticity is overwhelmingly rejected by mainstream historians.

The 1963 memo has the same provenance pattern as the MJ-12 papers (Wikipedia: “Majestic 12” — generally considered a hoax):

  • No verified paper trail to the National Archives (NARA does not list it in its Kennedy Presidential Library collections as an authenticated record)
  • First appearance via a single source (Cooper) decades after the date on the document
  • Document characteristics (terminology, format) inconsistent with November 1963 White House style per archivists who have examined it
  • Stanton Friedman, who defended the MJ-12 documents, did NOT endorse this 1963 memo

The honest accounting is: the memo exists as a piece of paper that has been circulated since the late 1990s. Whether JFK actually wrote it is unverified at best; mainstream historiography treats it as a probable forgery in the Cooper-promoted document set.

What the Clinton Library finding aid does establish

Even with the memo’s authenticity unestablished, the finding aid documents real things:

  • Clinton-era correspondence about UFOs is real and substantial enough to fill 27 folders
  • Greer/CSETI did submit “purportedly official documents” to the Clinton White House
  • The Clinton White House did receive press-briefing-level inquiries about UFOs that prompted Presidential remarks
  • A NARA archivist in 2010 took the trouble to flag that some submitted documents are disputed — meaning the archivist read them, took them seriously enough to catalog, and was professional enough to caveat them

These are interesting facts about the institutional handling of UFO-related material in the 1990s. They are not “JFK ordered the CIA to declassify UFO files.”

What is independently verifiable about the Clinton-era UFO interest

The more credible adjacent claim is Webb Hubbell’s 1997 memoir Friends in High Places, where Hubbell (former Associate Attorney General, Clinton confidant) wrote that Clinton asked him to look into two things: (1) the JFK assassination, and (2) “Are there UFOs?” — and that Hubbell was unable to get satisfactory answers on either. This is a published memoir, not a forged document, and is the actual evidentiary basis for the “even the President couldn’t find out” framing.

The Reddit thread conflates the Hubbell memoir (verifiable, credible) with the JFK 1963 memo (disputed, likely forged) by citing a Clinton Library URL that supports neither.

How this fits the broader credibility framework

This is a sub-pattern within the credibility-assessment work (see community-credibility-assessment):

Pattern: cite a real .gov URL as if it proves a claim; the URL actually shows something more limited.

Other examples in the infobase:

The pattern is consistent: real institutional artifact + suggestive framing = claim treated as documented. A well-functioning credibility framework distinguishes the artifact from the framing.

In each case the artifact is real. The interpretation isn’t. The Reddit thread’s “60 years of documented disclosure attempts” includes both genuinely documented attempts (Hillenkoetter, the 1968 House Symposium, Goldwater’s interviews, Reid/AATIP, Grusch) and disputed-or-forged attempts that get the same evidentiary register (the JFK 1963 memo). Mixing them weakens the credible parts by association.

Graph View

Backlinks