The CIA UFO Papers

by Dan Wright

  Chapter 41

  1999: A Fitting Climax

  On July 1, 1999, historian Gerald Haines of the National Reconnaissance Office in the Defense Department published a paper on the Central Intelligence Agency's continuous, covert involvement in the UFO subject.1 Dr. Haines' account, broadly paraphrased, with direct quotes where appropriate, follows.

  The June 1947 pilot sighting near Mount Rainier, Washington, was followed only a week later by the alleged Roswell, New Mexico, saucer crash. Soon came a rash of sighting reports across the country. In January 1948 Air Force General Nathan Twining established Project Sign. It would collect, evaluate, and distribute all flying saucer data—on the premise of a national security concern. The Technical Intelligence Division of the Air Material Command at Wright Field (soon thereafter Wright-Patterson AFB), Dayton, Ohio, assumed control of the project.

  The Air Force soon concluded that almost all UFO reports were easily explained and not extraordinary. Most stemmed from mass hysteria or hallucination, hoaxed accounts, or misinterpretation of known objects or atmospheric effects. Still, the ten percent left unexplained included “a number of incredible reports from credible observers.” Project Sign called for continued military intelligence involvement and “did not rule out the possibility of extraterrestrial phenomena.”

  For reasons not well explained since, attitudes changed within Air Force officialdom. In just a year Project Sign was disbanded. “Under new management”—menacingly renamed Project Grudge—the Air Force would seek to allay public anxiety via education, that UFOs were actually IFOs. Grudge officers reported no evidence of any foreign weapons design or a national security threat and suggested reducing the project's scope. Continued official interest, the Grudge officers contended, would only encourage hysterical belief by the American populace in a UFO reality. On December 27, 1949, that project was terminated as well.

  Then in early 1952, perplexed by an unexpected increase in UFO reports by the general public, the USAF director of intelligence ordered a new effort, Project Blue Book. Never intended to include a considerable staff, the office would consist of one or two low-ranking officers or one officer and a noncom, plus a secretary. It would be housed in the Air Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC) at Wright-Patterson, Dayton, Ohio. Its mission did not specifically include persuading the public that all UFO reports had prosaic origins, not of any unusual nature or design. Still, “only a voice or two at ATIC believed there was even a remote possibility of interplanetary aircraft.”

  The CIA quietly monitored Air Force efforts for security reasons. The 1952 spate of sighting reports, culminating in radar tracks on July 19, 20, and 27 in and around Washington, D.C., was not immediately identifiable, and a clearly bungled military response failed to allay the public's concerns. After repeated hours-long logistical delays, jet interceptors proceeding from Delaware had found nothing amiss—friendly or otherwise.

  In the absence of anything substantive to account for all the D.C. radar returns, all were eventually reasoned to be the products of temperature inversions. But that weak attempt to explain all the occurrences across three nights as meteorological was lost amid headlines of unidentified intruders in the skies over our very capital.

  As a consequence of those and other flying saucer sightings across a wide expanse throughout 1952, principals in the CIA came to realize that only a scientific study would satisfy the public. Reaching into universities, especially, a small cadre was formed in December 1952 with input from the Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI). In doing so, the Agency acknowledged the public's probable alarmist tendencies if that were known. It thereby concealed its involvement. This decision was later interpreted as an interagency conspiracy and cover-up.

  The study group, headed by physicist Howard P. Robertson, feared the Soviets might use UFO reports to panic the American public or overload warning systems as a nuclear attack ensued. The OSI assistant director believed those concerns should be taken to the National Security Council. Ultimately, no such document for NSC consideration was prepared.

  OSI had regularly studied the Soviet press for UFO accounts but found none; it concluded that must be due to official government policy. Great Britain, meanwhile, had its own wave underway. The British press and public were convinced of a UFO reality. Whether these phenomena originated here on the planet or untold light years away was the question.

  The Agency's hand-picked physical scientists met for 12 hours over four days in January 1953, reviewing two controversial amateur films and a dozen or so written anomalous accounts in some detail. They concluded that all of those and most, if not all, UFO reports arising elsewhere were explainable.

  The so-named Robertson Panel declared that such cases were neither extraterrestrial in origin nor a national security threat. It was concerned that the government's “orderly functioning” could be threatened by clogged communications channels, inducing “hysterical mass behavior” harmful to constituted authority. The Robertson Panel called on the National Security Council to debunk UFO reports and educate the public on the lack of related evidence. It suggested using mass media, advertising, business clubs, schools, even Walt Disney to get the message across. The panel further recommended monitoring APRO and other civilian UFO research groups for possible subversive activities.

  Mounting reports in Europe prompted Agency concern that the Soviets were operating saucer-type vehicles, built by captured German scientists and engineers. A British-Canadian saucer construction project was also underway.

  The advent in 1955 of secretive U-2 flights at 60,000 feet prompted UFO reports by airline pilots and ground controllers. CIA officials who worked on the U-2—or subsequent SR-71 Blackbird—project later claimed (dubiously) that those accounted for half of all UFO reports through the late 1960s.

  In 1956 USAF Captain Edward Ruppelt, the original Blue Book chief, called for release of the 1953 Robertson Panel Report. Both NICAP and APRO followed suit, but the Agency's OSI refused. Instead, a very brief sanitized version was released which made no mention of the CIA or any psychological warfare component.

  A flap involving a code recorded from a radio broadcast drew in civilian groups and individuals over an extended period. The CIA called it simple Morse code, but the incident deepened public distrust.

  Another situation the Agency handled poorly involved five photos of an unknown taken by an employee of a TV station. CIA staff acquired the photos then ignored requests for their return. This aggravated suspicions that they were hiding the truth. Although the Agency had a lessened interest in the subject, it continued to monitor UFO sightings. Agency officials felt the need to keep informed on such incidents if only to alert the CIA Director (DCI) to the more sensational UFO reports and flaps.

  In 1964, at the DCI's request, OSI obtained a sampling of NICAP's recent compelling cases but found nothing new. That year, the USAF Scientific Advisory Board, with help from astronomer Carl Sagan, reached the same conclusions: no security threat and nothing obviously beyond terrestrial origin. Again in 1966 the Air Force requested the CIA to release the entire Robertson Panel Report, but the Agency refused.

  University of Arizona atmospheric physicist James E. McDonald by chance read the original Robertson Report at Wright-Patterson AFB in June 1966—including an instruction to the Air Force to debunk future reports arising from the public. On returning to the base three weeks later for a printed copy, he was denied access. Over the next few years McDonald spoke out against CIA secrecy and its dictating of Air Force policy.

  In August 1966, the Air Force announced its intent to contract with a university for an intensive scientific review of its UFO files, “to blunt continuing charges that the US Government had concealed what it knew about UFOs.” Two months later, on October 7, an 18-month, $325,000 agreement with the University of Colorado was signed. Physicist Edward U. Condon would head the effort. Calling himself “agnostic” and open-minded, he stated extraterrestrial origins were “improbable but not impossible.�
� USAF coordinators were Brigadier General Edward Giller and J. Thomas Ratchford from the Office of Research and Development (ORD).

  General Giller enrolled the CIA's National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) for photographic analysis, without public mention of the arrangement. Dr. Condon and four committee members visited the Center on February 20, 1967. NPIC Director Arthur Lundahl emphasized that its help would be strictly technical—no report writing—and that the CIA would remain anonymous. Impressed by NPIC briefings, they met again in May 1967 to hear the Zanesville, Ohio, photos debunked. Condon intended to ask citizens for more UFO photos and to provide guidelines to taking useful shots. Whatever his real intentions, those initiatives were not acted upon.

  In April 1969 the Condon committee released its findings. “The report concluded that little, if anything, had come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years and that further extensive study of UFO sightings was unwarranted.” It called for Project Blue Book to end. A National Academy of Sciences panel concurred with the report. On December 17, 1969, Air Force Secretary Robert Seamans dissolved Blue Book.

  Continued UFO reports by the public elicited more cover-up claims. In 1975, an Agency spokesman wrote brusquely that the Robertson Report was “the summation of Agency interest and involvement in UFOs.” A September 1977 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request tested that statement, seeking all CIA UFO-related files. Fourteen months later in November 1978 came the release of 355 documents, while 57 others were withheld “on national security grounds and to protect sources and methods.” Though the release showed only low-level CIA interest, the press treated it sensationally. An FOIA request for the 57 retained files and any others followed. “No matter how much material the Agency released and no matter how dull and prosaic the information, people continued to believe in a [sic] Agency coverup and conspiracy,” one principal wrote. The CIA soon requested a federal district court to intervene. In May 1980 that court dismissed the FOIA lawsuit.

  In the 1980s Agency analysts in OSI's Life Science Division were concerned with: (a) the KGB using UFO groups to get information on sensitive US weapons programs (for example, stealth aircraft), (b) American air defense network's vulnerability to missiles mimicking UFOs, and (c) evidence of advanced Soviet technology related to UFOs. “. . . Agency officials purposely kept files on UFOs to a minimum to avoid creating records that might mislead the public if released.”

  The 1980s also brought renewed assertions of secret documents on the alleged 1947 crash at Roswell, New Mexico—that the government had recovered debris and alien bodies there, and that it refused to divulge its investigation results and research.

  Such was the case for secrecy made by the DoD historian Haines. Nothing nefarious was at work, he argued. Instead, the Agency's reasoning for its anonymity was borne of a distrust within the general public. Permitting the CIA's tempered interest in the subject to become widely known would tend to add false credence to further UFO matters in the press. Hence, Haines argued, discretion was indeed the better part of valor.

  Chapter 42

  2000 and Beyond

  A German parapsychology journal carried an entry titled “The Spectrum of UFO Sightings” on May 17, 2000. It argued that scientists' collective prejudice against UFO phenomena was socio-psychological. Most reports were by laypersons, were anecdotal, lacked physical evidence, and did not appear in science journals. Scientists eschewed UFO claims due to unreliable data, the premature public opinion that UFOs were ET spaceships, and their overall disrespect for obscure events involving untrained observers. Condon and others in the late 1960s traced all UFO reports to natural phenomena, conventional aircraft, hallucinations, illusions, and frauds. But only when 50,000 computerized cases were tested could one say UFO phenomena were primarily physical or “parapsychical.”1

  To fulfill requirements for a master's degree, one individual developed a survey on various topics within parapsychology. “The purpose of this study (was) to ascertain the subjects, frequency, and degree of information exchanged between US and Warsaw Pact scientists concerning the field of parapsychology. . .” The UFO subject was among dozens of paranormal topics.2

  At the University of Edinburgh, in August 2000 an experiment was conducted on belief in parapsychology (psi). Subjects were asked to rate a list of psi and anomalous phenomena, including UFOs.3

  While you were away from your desk . . .

  January 5, 2000

  About 4:00 a.m., police officers in Lebanon, Millstadt, Shiloh, and Dupo, Illinois, observed a UFO 2–3 stories in height and of football field proportions. One officer within 1,000 feet described it as a silent, “massive elongated triangle” emitting intense white light. Another called it a fat arrowhead, 500–1,000 feet aloft. The object's speed was generally slow, punctuated by pivots and extreme acceleration. After traveling generally southeast, it turned northwest toward Scott AFB, Illinois. Air Force and Boeing Corporation spokespersons subsequently denied responsibility.4

  May 3, 2000

  A “Fact Sheet” released by NASA explained why it had turned down President Jimmy Carter's 1977 overture to that agency to assume a role in UFO investigations similar to Project Blue Book's. In response came some NASA plain talk:

  From 1947 to 1969, the Air Force investigated UFOs; then in 1977, NASA was asked to examine the possibility of resuming UFO investigations. After studying all of the facts available, it was determined that nothing would be gained by further investigation, since there was an absence of tangible evidence.5

  In effect, NASA had proclaimed to President Carter, “No, we won't, and you can't make us.”

  Postscript

  The New York Times published a front-page article on December 16, 2017, curiously titled “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon's Mysterious U.F.O. Program.” The Times' authors outlined the functioning of an obscure research office originating in DoD's Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). Its benefactors were former Senate majority leader Harry Reid and Robert Bigelow, founder and CEO of Bigelow Aerospace.

  As revealed by personnel records therein, once again, a post-century UFO investigative team effort was contemplated. The futurist Robert Bigelow and his staff were agreeable initially to a contractor role, prepared to analyze an array of any undefined materials acquired from civilian-reported UFO sites. Even after federal funding ended and its head was reassigned, that individual—likely Luis Elizondo—reportedly continued a part-time effort around his unrelated official duties. In recent years he left federal civil service to continue his research into this peculiar subject, now under the aerospace umbrella.

  Sixty years after the Central Intelligence Agency endeavored to discover whether claims of uninvited otherworldly visitors were real or not, the effort briefly shifted next door, to the DIA, before moving into the quasi-private sector implicitly in cooperation with volunteer investigative organizations such as MUFON. Dedicated to the best energies of APRO and NICAP before us, MUFON contends we're not all wrong! Above the highest scientific principles and phrasings is this ever-common assertion: “I know what I saw.”

  Endnotes

  Chapter 1 The 1940s: War and Beyond

  1. Arlington National Cemetery website, last updated June 11, 2015, www.arlingtoncemetery.mil.

  2. Central Intelligence Agency, CIA Library, “The Office of Strategic Services: America's First Intelligence Agency,” last updated September 6, 2017, www.cia.gov.

  3. Ibid.

  4. Ibid.

  5. Ibid.

  6. Ibid.

  7. Central Intelligence Agency, Library, Center for the Study of Intelligence, last updated January 11, 2008, www.cia.gov.

  8. “Glorious Amateurs: The Spies of World War II's OSS Celebrate a Birthday,” NBC News, aired July 1, 2017.

  9. Jerome Clark, The UFO Book (Detroit, MI, Visible Ink Press, 1998).

  10. Central Intelligence Agency, About CIA, “History of the CIA,” last updated September 18, 2017, www.cia.gov.

  11. Ibid
.

  12. C. Thomas Thorne Jr. and David S. Patterson, eds., “Foreign Relations of the United States, 1945–1950, Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment.” Office of the Historian, 1996, https://www.state.gov.

  13. “History of the CIA,” https://www.cia.gov.

  14. Doc # 0000015471, IFDRB, March–May 1953, “Engineer Claims Saucer Plans Are in Soviet Hands; Sightings in Africa, Iran, Syria,” distributed August 18, 1953.

  15. Allen Hall, “Roswell was not aliens, it was the Nazis, according to a German documentary,” Sunday Express (London), October 4, 2014, www.express.co.uk.

  16. Ibid.

  17. Wikipedia, “Operation Paperclip,” last updated December 15, 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org.

  18. Ibid.

  19. Clark, The UFO Book.

  20. Bruce Maccabee, “How It All Began: The Story of the Arnold Sighting,” MUFON 1997 International UFO Symposium Proceedings, pp.99–120.

  21. Lawrence Fawcett and Barry J. Greenwood, Clear Intent: The Government Coverup of the UFO Experience (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1984).

  22. Timothy Good, Need to Know: UFOs, the Military and Intelligence (New York: Pegasus Books, 2007), p. 45.