The CIA UFO Papers Read online

  This edition first published in 2019 by MUFON, an imprint of

  Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC

  With offices at:

  65 Parker Street, Suite 7

  Newburyport, MA 01950

  www.redwheelweiser.com

  Copyright © 2019 by Dan Wright

  Foreword copyright © 2019 by Jan Harzan

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

  transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

  including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage

  and retrieval system, without permission in writing from

  Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC. Reviewers may quote brief passages.

  ISBN: 978-1-59003-302-9

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  available upon request.

  Cover design by Kathryn Sky-Peck

  Cover image by iStock

  Interior by Steve Amarillo/Urban Design LLC

  Typeset in Minion Pro and Gotham

  Printed in Canada

  MAR

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  www.redwheelweiser.com/newsletter

  This work is dedicated to the memory of the late

  Walter H. Andrus Jr., cofounder and thirty-year-long

  International Director of the Mutual UFO Network, Inc.

  Walt served as my mentor and remained a true friend.

  If only we could interview him today to discover what

  else he has learned about non-human intelligences.

  Contents

  Foreword

  Preface

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Chapter 1 The 1940s: War and Beyond

  Chapter 2 1949: Curiouser and Curiouser

  Chapter 3 1950: Escalation

  Chapter 4 1951: Calm Before . . .

  Chapter 5 1952: A Genuine Wave

  Chapter 6 1953: Cold Water from Robertson and Others

  Chapter 7 1954: Through a Long Winter's Night

  Chapter 8 1955: The Ham Radio Flap

  Chapter 9 1956: Transitive

  Chapter 10 1957: Ham Sandwich

  Chapter 11 1958: Insurgencies Peak

  Chapter 12 1959: Same Cast of Characters

  Chapter 13 1960: What's This All About?

  Chapter 14 1961: Old News

  Chapter 15 1962: Blinders

  Chapter 16 1963: Cooper Spills the Beans

  Chapter 17 1964: From a Lull to a Quickening

  Chapter 18 1965: A Gathering Storm

  Chapter 19 1966: All Hell Breaks Loose

  Chapter 20 1967: The Tempest Rages

  Chapter 21 1968: Return to Relative Calm

  Chapter 22 1969: Where'd All the UFOs Go?

  Chapter 23 1970: AIAA Weighs In

  Chapter 24 1971: Science Journals—More to Say

  Chapter 25 1972: The Government Remains Quiet

  Chapter 26 1973: MUFON's Year of the Humanoid

  Chapter 27 1974: Gemini 4 Photos

  Chapter 28 1975: Ignoring Base Intrusions

  Chapter 29 1976: An Uptick in Agency Interest

  Chapter 30 1977: Start Spreading the News

  Chapter 31 1978: The New Zealand Film

  Chapter 32 1979: Three Decades of Lies

  Chapter 33 1980-81: Disclosure at Home and Away

  Chapter 34 1982-85: Habeas Corpus and Hudson Valley

  Chapter 35 1986-88: Claims and Counterclaims

  Chapter 36 1989: Lots of Activity . . . Elsewhere

  Chapter 37 1990: Back in the USSR

  Chapter 38 1991: USSR—Nay, Russia

  Chapter 39 1992-94: Spy Planes and Homemade Saucers

  Chapter 40 1995-98: Psychic Woo Woo

  Chapter 41 1999: A Fitting Climax

  Chapter 42 2000 and Beyond

  Postscript

  Endnotes

  Index

  Foreword

  Shortly after taking office as the Executive Director for MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network, I received a congratulatory email from Dan Wright, former Director of Investigations for MUFON in the 80s and 90s. It was a heartfelt moment, as I had followed Dan through his MUFON career and even heard him speak at a MUFON Symposium or two but had lost touch with him through the intervening years. He was writing to congratulate me on my new position and to offer his help with anything I might need. And there are always things that need to be done in any volunteer organization. I thanked him for his offer and told him I would keep him in mind as opportunities arose.

  Then in January of 2017 I received another email from Dan inquiring what MUFON planned to do with the million or so UFO documents the CIA had just dumped onto the internet. Or at least that was the headline in an online publication announcing this momentous event. My first thought was that's a whole lot of documents and it will take a team of MUFON volunteers years to weed through it, but Dan insisted it needed to be done and he would be happy to lead the charge. How could I turn him down!

  After a short discussion we agreed that he would make a first pass and see what the size and scope of the project looked like. After a few weeks I received another email from Dan stating that he had just scratched the surface but that he was finding some interesting facts about the “million” UFO documents on the CIA website. The first was that it was nowhere close to a million documents, but more like 20,000 or so documents placed in the CIA's Electronic Reading Room (ERR) on the UFO subject. The second was that many of the documents had nothing to do with UFOs. It was as if a machine had gone through the massive CIA archives and pulled out anything with the letters U-F-O in that order in a document and placed it in the reading room under the heading UFO.

  At that point Dan suggested that he dive in and take the first few years in the archive, since the documents were ordered chronologically, and give it a try to see what the effort would be like. And so, the journey began, Dan taking one to five years at a time, pulling the documents which might number one or two hundred and reading through them one by one to discern, first, was it UFO related, and second, what was the purpose of the document including when it was written, by whom, and for what purpose. It might be good here to remember the mission statement of the CIA, this coming from their website, “. . . to further US national security objectives by collecting intelligence that matters, producing objective all-source analysis, . . . and safeguarding the secrets that help keep our Nation safe.”

  The actions of the CIA with regard to UFOs was primarily gathering information on UFO events through public sources, and spending a good amount of time keeping track of individuals and organizations that were publicly following and actively pursuing the UFO subject. It's all documented here in the CIA's own documents. In the pages that follow are Dan's detailed and painstaking efforts to separate the wheat from the chaff and provide you the with the mother lode of what is in the CIA's files about the UFO subject. In doing so he has included everything that is UFO related that the CIA made public. It's all here for you in one simple body of work. He's done the hard work and provided it for you on a platter called The CIA UFO Papers. I hope you enjoy this fascinating look behind the veil of the CIA and what they are sharing with the public as much as I did.

  Jan C. Harzan

  Executive Director

  MUFON, Mutual UFO Network

  Preface

  As an Obama farewell before his second term expired, on January 17, 2017, the Central Intelligence Agency made available on its permanent website (www.cia.gov) a great cache of electronic files previously released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) housed at the National Archives—available for inspection onsite only. Among a variety of subject matters: unidentified flying objects. Finally, serious UFO res
earchers had a stockpile of reports and correspondence available to examine at home.

  Wading into this volume of material, two things became immediately evident. First, the documents were in no particular order—not chronologically, not by topic, not by office or other source. More importantly, the great share of documents had no bearing whatsoever on the subject of aerial phenomena. While one might be curious about just what Bulgaria's total rail tonnage was in 1956, it would not advance the cause of UFO research. Nonetheless, sharp eyes and perseverance won the day. When the sorting was finished, 550 files were shown to be useful.

  Notes

  All base documents are listed in chronological order, beginning with the World War II years. Attachments are often from an earlier date.

  Capitalized file identifiers, such as Office Memorandum, or Letter, indicate the document as presented was on formal Agency masthead (letterhead or memo-head)—definitely not a draft.

  The Agency was amazingly inaccurate in dating its files. The Publication Date listed on the introductory web page for each document very often preceded by a few or several weeks the actual event discussed or the date typed on the correspondence. If a date is shown on the document itself, that is used here. Certain types of documents do not include such a date of origin. For those, or if the publication date was obviously incorrect, the earlier of either a Release Date or Distribution Date is substituted.

  Regarding document numbering, three Agency numbering schemes were used over six decades. In those with (yes) 27 digits, variously two or three hyphens were inserted by the Agency. Two types of 10-digit numbers were also employed. This often resulted in document duplication, meaning the file was listed under one scheme, then later an identical file was included under another scheme. Care has been taken to eliminate duplicates.

  Acronyms and Abbreviations

  AD/SI: Assistant Director for Scientific Intelligence

  ADC: USAF Air Defense Command

  A/DDS&T: Assistant Deputy Director for Science and Technology

  AFOSR: Air Force Office of Scientific Research

  APRO: Aerial Phenomena Research Organization

  ASD: Applied Sciences Division

  ATIC: USAF Air (later Aerospace) Technical Intelligence Center

  DCD: Defense Communications Division/Domestic Collection Division

  DCI: Director of Central Intelligence (a.k.a. CIA Director)

  DD/I: Deputy Director for Intelligence

  DDS&T: Deputy Director for Science and Technology

  DIA: Defense Intelligence Agency

  Doc: Document

  FBIS: Foreign Broadcast Information Service—successor to JPRS

  FCDA: Federal Civil Defense Administration

  FOIA: Freedom of Information Act

  FTD: Foreign Technology Division (formerly ATIC)

  Hq: Headquarters

  IFDRB: Information from Foreign Documents or Radio Broadcasts

  IAC: Intelligence Advisory Committee

  JPRS: Joint Publications Research Service—later FBIS

  NICAP: National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena

  NPIC: National Photographic Interpretation Center

  NSA: National Security Agency

  NSC: National Security Council

  OACSI: Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff, Intelligence

  OCI: Office of Counter Intelligence

  OO: Office of Operations

  ORD: Office of Research Development

  OSI: Office of Scientific Intelligence

  P&E: Physics and Electronics Division

  SAFOI: Secretary of the Air Force, Office of Information

  SRI: Stanford Research Institute

  Acknowledgments

  The editor wishes to acknowledge numerous individuals who contributed mightily to the content contained in the chapter-ending section, “While you were away from your desk ...” While the names listed throughout the text are too numerous to repeat here, those whose contributions were especially compelling and useful include:

  Jerome Clark

  Timothy Good

  J. Allen Hynek

  Margaret Sachs

  John Schuessler

  Ronald D. Story

  John G. Fuller

  Don Berliner

  This is also to acknowledge two production workhorses: copy editor Lauren Ayer and Faye Thaxton, a career typesetter and copy editor. Both made scores of technical corrections as well as numerous suggested clarifications.

  Introduction

  The early success of British and French spies during the Second World War impressed upon the US military and Congress the importance of gathering reliable intelligence on one's adversaries. The House, Senate, and President Roosevelt agreed in the summer of 1942 to create an Office of Strategic Services (OSS) to better understand the capabilities and intentions of the Germans and Japanese. Among OSS objectives was to skew and distort the Axis powers' understanding of our own capabilities. OSS operatives in Europe worked on effectively unmasking the Nazi machine while disguising our own.

  Tangential to those black operations, as the conflict proceeded across both oceanic theaters, OSS heard stories from fighter pilots claiming that odd spheres of light or plasma escorted their planes from time to time. Moreover, German and Japanese pilots were apparently reporting the same. Discounted by some as atmospheric ball lightning, they nonetheless appeared when no thunderstorm conditions were present—which ball lightning requires—and sometimes remained in proximity to the plane over long minutes and miles, unlike ball lightning's fleeting nature.

  The Allies came to call them foo fighters. Still, OSS and the Army Air Corps stopped short of referring to them as an adversary. Foo fighters were never aggressive per se; though an airplane's engine might run rough in its presence, no Allied aircraft plummeted to the earth as a consequence. These were simply oddities, a staple of musings at the bar between combat missions. In any event, they were decidedly not essential to intelligence-gathering efforts.

  As successors to the OSS, the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Council were born in the summer of 1947—scant weeks after Kenneth Arnold's Cascade Mountains flying saucer sighting and the alleged saucer crash at Roswell, New Mexico. While Agency principals would thereafter admit to a certain curiosity about such anomalies, they were not at all interested in taking responsibility for determining origins or purposes. Indeed, they were more than willing to pass that baton to the newly reconstituted US Air Force. Still, thereafter the CIA would be periodically dragged back into the UFO controversy.

  Internally a decades-long sequence ensued—attraction and repulsion on this singularly peculiar subject. The Agency's Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI) would long be at the center. But far from seeking publicity, at every turn OSI and other CIA officials insisted on anonymity, perhaps with sound reasoning. Admitting Agency involvement in UFO research would be, to some, tantamount to admitting the reality of space aliens on our planet. That could have been a can of worms the bureaucrats were loathe to open. Acknowledging that the reported saucers, spheres, wingless cylinders, boomerangs, and the rest were technologically superior machines would at once give credence to sighting reports by the public and argue against American invincibility. Either was untenable.

  Some have suggested—emphatically—that any prominent nation openly acknowledging visits to Earth by a nonhuman intelligence could bring about the ruination of everything we cherish. Among the world's institutions, arguably one religion susceptible to such a crisis is Christianity. For every Christian cleric who accepts the presence on Earth of intelligent nonhuman beings as the greater glory of God, five or ten might proceed with a countdown to the end. Further, if aliens are an undeniable fact of life, then how could Jesus be the “only begotten Son”? It just wouldn't add up for many Christians.

  Financial markets might well suffer short- or long-term setbacks in the face of an undeniable UFO reality. An old adage insists that markets hate uncertainty. In the wake
of one or more nations admitting a UFO reality—without any assurance of what comes next—fewer people would be expected to invest their savings long-term or to purchase life insurance. More families would be expected to rent rather than buy a home. A greater share could be expected to collapse their time perspectives, live more day-to-day, eschew long-term financial investments of any kind. CIA officialdom long recognized that admitting a nonhuman presence on this planet would not be good for business.

  Among the various industries probably affected over time, producers of canned goods and other nonperishable foodstuffs would likely flourish. Weaponry would be another winner in the post-acknowledgment era, though perhaps not so much in the United States, where the three hundred million guns already sold might prove problematic. High gun sales worldwide would probably have less to do with the prospect of human-humanoid standoffs, more to do with a general breakdown in societal law and order. When tomorrow is not assured, some people's darker motivations will surface.

  Then again, such changes to popular attitudes would surely not be universal. As a friend of this editor once remarked about the prospect of an alien presence, “It's just one more thing to put up with.”

  The Mutual UFO Network, Inc. (MUFON) and its veteran members have of course given serious thought to the notion of an official government statement that UFOs are real—possibly even that contact has been established—and the potential negative consequences to humanity. That said, MUFON supports opening every pertinent file for inspection without redactions. All other considerations aside, the public has the fundamental right to know.

  Scintillating drama is not the showcase here. No CIA file suggests information was exchanged in a dim parking garage. This is a chronicle: the sequence in ebbs and flows, from the 1940s through the 1990s, of UFO-related news that reached the Agency's attention—plus what, if anything, was done about it.

  To be sure, certain threads within this tapestry were at cross-purposes. The leader of a civilian UFO investigative group, NICAP, himself a retired military officer, proved to be a persistent thorn in the Agency's backside, loudly shouting “Cover-up!” at every opportunity. Concurrently, a chemist at a New Mexico scientific research facility demonstrated stamina and single-mindedness over several years, advancing essentially baseless claims that hard evidence proving an alien presence on Earth was secreted away. As subplots in our story line, both men managed to cause great distraction and consternation within the Agency's ranks.