Sandia National Laboratories is one of the three research and development laboratories of the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration, alongside Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore. Its headquarters is on Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with a second campus in Livermore, California, and test sites in Nevada and Hawaii. It began as an engineering organization for the nonnuclear components of nuclear weapons and is now a multimission national security laboratory with about 17,000 staff. Since 2017 it has been run by National Technology and Engineering Solutions of Sandia, a Honeywell subsidiary.

Sandia grew out of Z Division, set up at Albuquerque's Oxnard Field in July 1945 as the ordnance design, testing and assembly arm of Los Alamos, and it became Sandia Laboratory in 1948. The University of California ran it until 1949, when President Harry Truman asked Western Electric, an AT&T subsidiary, to take over, calling it an "opportunity to render an exceptional service in the national interest." Sandia Corporation began managing the laboratory for the Atomic Energy Commission on November 1, 1949. Congress made it a Department of Energy national laboratory in 1979, and a Lockheed Martin subsidiary ran it from 1993.

Its early years coincided with the green fireballs, bright lights reported over New Mexico's atomic and military sites from late 1948. A 116-page file released on May 22, 2026, in PURSUE UFO Files Release 02 gathers reports from Sandia Base between 1948 and 1950; in one, a guard on January 6, 1949, described a bright diamond-shaped light near a C-97 aircraft, moving faster than low-flying jets. According to The Sentinel Network, the file also holds Air Force Office of Special Investigations records and a trip report by Commander Richard Mandelkorn of the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project on a February 16, 1949, meeting at Los Alamos that called the sightings "deserving of serious consideration." Project Twinkle, set up that December to photograph the lights, was never fully carried out, and officials judged them probably natural.

Its place on Kirtland put it at the edge of the 1980 Bennewitz affair. Paul Bennewitz, an Albuquerque businessman who had licensed a humidity sensor from the laboratory in 1966, came to believe that UFOs were flying near Kirtland, the Manzano weapons storage area and the Coyote Canyon test area; Richard Doty, then an Air Force counterintelligence agent at the base, later said he had fed false information to UFO researchers. More recently the researcher UAP Gerb devoted a three-hour video in November 2025 to what he presented as Sandia's role in UFO reverse engineering and legacy programs, and in April 2026 he named it among the federally funded laboratories he called the "missing link" in a hidden UFO program, an argument based on how such laboratories are organized.

Sandia's documented UFO history is real but bounded. Reports from its base and guards were part of what Air Force and atomic officials weighed at the 1949 Los Alamos meetings, and those records became public in 2026. Its later appearances in crash-retrieval theories rest on its standing as a secretive weapons laboratory, not on released records of recovered material.