Shortly after lunchtime on what was shaping up to be a relatively uneventful Wednesday, the @FBIRecordsVault Twitter account - which posts sporadic updates to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s FOIA reading room - tweeted out the words “Bigfoot” and a link. And with that, the Wednesday officially became eventful.

Recently, in response to Emma Best’s 2017 FOIA request for files on former Federal Bureau of Investigation Deputy Associate Director Cartha “Deke” DeLoach, the FBI released an additional 137 pages. As fellow MuckRock user Paul Galante was quick to point out, those new pages include a 1998 letter by DeLoach to one of the producers of the “X-Files,” offering his thoughts on the script of the fifth season flashback episode “Travelers.” To put it mildly, he was not a fan.

As you may be aware, part of the CIA’s CREST release included an extensive archive of files pertaining to UFOs, including photos of supposed sightings. As you might not be aware, the majority of those photos are hot garbage. And so, to round out our week of X-Files themed records, we’re going to take you on a tour of the most dubious examples of extraterrestrial evidence the Agency collected over the years.

A common question, especially as MuckRock continues to explore CIA and DIA’s involvement in psychic research, is how so many resources wound up being wasted on frivolous efforts that produced laughable results, absurd guides and even more absurd worries. The FBI’s file on Extrasensory Perception (ESP), which predates the CIA’s declassified psychic research program by more than a decade, may hold the answer: a basic failure to understand how math works.

The FBI file on Majestic-12 may be the Bureau’s most X-Filesy file of all - full of hoaxes, planted documents, and allegations of aliens. The Bureau, however, was essentially disinterested in the case, did no actual investigating, and barely pursued the very real crime that had been committed by forging government documents, only adding fuel to the suspicion that the papers were government sponsored, or at least tolerated, disinformation.