Doyle Rees

Doyle Rees was a U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel and commander of the 17th District Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) in New Mexico. In 1950 he authored a letter central to early American UFO history, in which he documented 18 months of continuous anomalous aerial phenomena near sensitive military installations in New Mexico — a concentration of region and timeframe that was later maintained as its own investigative focus.

• U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel
• Commander of the 17th District Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI)
• Area of responsibility: the state of New Mexico
• In 1950 author of a key letter on anomalous aerial phenomena
• Documented 18 months of continuous sightings in the vicinity of sensitive military installations
• Sensitive installations included nuclear and aerospace sites in New Mexico
• Basis for later investigations and official correspondence

For the UAP timeline, Rees is the institutional anchor of the New Mexico wave of the late 1940s and early 1950s: his letter turns countless individual sightings into an officially recorded time series of an AFOSI district command and thus becomes one of the earliest systematic military documentations of sustained UAP activity over a strategically central U.S. region.