CIA Destroyed Records Related to a Mysterious “Message from Space”

A buried line in a 68-year-old confidential memorandum has reignited one of the most perplexing questions in the history of American intelligence.

The question is whether the Central Intelligence Agency received or investigated a transmission from space in the 1950s and then deliberately destroyed the evidence.

The memo, dated January 9, 1958, was written by a CIA officer identified only as R.P.B. Lohman.

It contains a terse but explosive admission that the agency informed atomic scientist Dr. Leon Davidson that his inquiries about a “space message and its transmitter” could not be resolved because records on the matter had been destroyed by the evaluating agency.

The evaluating agency, based on the document’s context and the structure of intelligence operations at the time, is assumed by researchers to be the CIA itself.

The Pentagon released the third batch of formerly classified files related to Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena on June 12, 2026, through the government’s dedicated disclosure website.

The release came under the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, known as PURSUE.

Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell confirmed that the website had received more than 1.7 billion visits worldwide since launching on May 8.

The third release added 72 new documents to the growing archive, spanning records from the 1940s to 2025.

Those files include photographs, videos, drawings, and intelligence records from the CIA, FBI, Department of Defense, NASA, and other agencies.

The Lohman memo is the document from the new release most likely to generate sustained investigation from researchers and lawmakers.

Its subject, Dr. Leon Davidson, was a chemical engineer who worked on the Manhattan Project and later became one of the most rigorous scientific investigators of the UFO phenomenon.

Davidson spent years collecting and studying reported sightings, eventually assembling what is now preserved at Columbia University as the Leon Davidson Flying Saucer Collection.

He was not a credulous amateur, but a scientist with high-level security experience and the analytical discipline of someone trained to separate signal from noise.

Davidson had been seeking information about what he described as a “space message,” a transmission he apparently believed had been received on Earth and then suppressed.

The details of how he learned about the message, what form it took, how it was received, and what it contained are not explained in the Lohman memo.

The document tells us only how the CIA responded to Davidson’s persistent inquiries.

Lohman wrote that two CIA operatives contacted Davidson by telephone and told him the agency could not resolve his questions because records on the matter had been destroyed.

Crucially, the CIA operatives concealed their identities and agency affiliation during the conversation.

Lohman acknowledged that Davidson almost certainly knew who he was speaking with, but the agency maintained the pretense anyway.

The second paragraph of the memo makes the cover-up concerns even more explicit, with Lohman writing that many agencies had been involved and that the answer given to Davidson was intentionally noncommittal and evasive.

In plain terms, the memo appears to show a CIA officer admitting that the agency had been instructed to avoid contradicting prior statements made to Davidson by the CIA and other agencies.

Researchers have proposed several possible explanations, including that the “space message” was part of a hoax, a psychological operation, or a genuine transmission of unknown origin.

The new release also includes other UAP-related files, including records of a secret CIA panel, a 2008 sighting at Harare International Airport in Zimbabwe, 2023 reports from federal law enforcement agents, and references to Apollo-era claims that remain unexplained.