Hangar 18 — The Blue Room

Hangar 18 — The Blue Room

Overview

The Blue Room is the specific inner sanctum within the broader Hangar 18 complex — a sealed, heavily guarded space where, according to multiple independent accounts, the most sensitive recovered materials are stored. Its name has appeared consistently across independent witnesses, political figures, and researchers spanning multiple decades, lending it a specificity and persistence that researchers consider significant.

The Blue Room is described as:

• An inner room or secured space within Building 18 at Wright-Patterson
• Accessible only to personnel with the highest levels of security clearance
• Containing the actual physical evidence: craft debris, biological specimens, and technological artifacts
• Operating outside the normal classification and oversight structure — not accessible through standard security clearance requests

Senator Barry Goldwater's Account

The most politically significant Blue Room account comes from Senator Barry Goldwater (R-Arizona), the Republican presidential nominee in 1964 and one of the most prominent political figures of mid-twentieth century America.

Goldwater was fascinated by the UFO subject and had extensive connections throughout the military through his decades of service as a Major General in the Air Force Reserve. He made repeated attempts over the years to gain access to classified information about UFOs held at Wright-Patterson.

His most famous attempt involved directly asking General Curtis LeMay — then Air Force Chief of Staff and one of the most powerful military figures in American history — for access to the Blue Room. Goldwater's account of LeMay's response:

"He said, 'Not only can you not get in there, but don't you ever mention it to me again.'"

Goldwater made this account public on multiple occasions, including:

• A 1975 letter to UFO researcher Shlomo Arnon, in which he wrote: "I have long ago given up acquiring access to the so-called 'Blue Room' at Wright-Patterson... and I have had one long string of denials from chief after chief."
• A 1988 appearance on The Larry King Live program, in which he stated publicly that he had tried to gain access to the Blue Room and been refused
• Multiple other public statements and interviews over the decades

Goldwater's account is significant for several reasons:

• He was a sitting U.S. Senator and senior Air Force Reserve officer — not a civilian researcher making claims based on second-hand information
• His repeated requests and repeated refusals suggest an active effort to access a real, specific location rather than a legendary abstraction
• General LeMay's emphatic response — including the warning never to ask again — implies the existence of something worth protecting rather than a simple denial of a fictional location

Other Political Access Attempts

Goldwater was not alone in attempting to gain access to restricted areas at Wright-Patterson related to UFOs:

• Representative Steven Schiff (R-NM) filed FOIA requests in the 1990s seeking Roswell-related records; the General Accounting Office investigation that followed found that relevant records had been destroyed
• Multiple congressional staffers and investigators over the decades have attempted to access classified files related to Wright-Patterson's UFO-related holdings with limited or no success

Building 18 vs. Hangar 18

The Air Force's official position is that there is no "Hangar 18" at Wright-Patterson — but Building 18 does exist. The distinction between a "hangar" (a large structure designed to house aircraft) and a "building" (a general-purpose structure) is the Air Force's basis for denying the specific claim while acknowledging the physical reality that Building 18 exists.

UFO researchers have consistently interpreted this semantic distinction as a deliberate evasion: by calling the structure a "building" rather than a "hangar," the Air Force can technically truthfully deny the existence of "Hangar 18" while the relevant facility continues to operate under its actual designation.

When the television program In Search of... filmed at Hangar "18A" at Wright-Patterson in 1980, the building's manager (who had been in that position since 1942) stated that the freezing cells in the building were used to test airplane parts under cold conditions — not for the storage of alien bodies. Whether this represents the complete truth about the building's uses or a specifically prepared denial for the television camera has been debated.