Alleged CIA report on recovered disc technology (1949)
From the UAP Encyclopedia, the open encyclopedia of UFO and UAP history · 🗓️ Event
Contents 7
| Type | Event (document of disputed authenticity) |
|---|---|
| Title | "Analysis of the Unidentified Lenticular Aerodyne Technology" |
| Purported origin | CIA Office of Scientific Intelligence |
| Dates given | 30 October 1950 on the copy circulated; 1947 and 1949 also cited |
| Programme named | "Unidentified Lenticular Aerodyne Technology Transfer (ULATT) Exploitation Program" |
| Circulated by | majesticdocuments.com (Robert and Ryan Wood) |
| Official status | Never appeared in any official CIA release |
| Date | 17 August 1949 |
| Topics | Crashes & retrievals (topic), Secrecy & cover-up (topic), Government programs (topic) |
| People | Ryan Wood, Harry S. Truman |
| Testimony | Shellenberger testimony, p. 41 |
| Year | 1949 in UFO history |
| Timeline | 1949 on the UAP Timeline |
| Sources | 6 |
This headline refers to a document presented as a CIA report describing a secret Defense Department programme to exploit technology from recovered discs, including a power plant. It belongs to the "Majestic" set of documents circulated anonymously from the 1990s onward, especially through the researchers Robert and Ryan Wood's website majesticdocuments.com. The document has never appeared in any official CIA release. Its date varies across copies, and its claims are unverified.[1][4]
The document
The copy circulated by majesticdocuments.com is titled "Analysis of the Unidentified Lenticular Aerodyne Technology". It is dated 30 October 1950 and presented as a report of the CIA's Office of Scientific Intelligence. It describes wreckage said to have been recovered from a crash site near Corona and Oscura Peak, New Mexico, in July 1947. It analyses the craft's flight dynamics, power plant, propulsion, construction and avionics. It refers to an "Unidentified Lenticular Aerodyne Technology Transfer (ULATT) Exploitation Program". It also describes a meeting at Blair House on 14 July 1949, where President Harry S. Truman supposedly proposed sharing the "know how" with Canada and the United Kingdom. The 1949 meeting is why the document is often dated to that year.[1][4]
According to the document, the craft used a fusion reactor. It is said to have travelled "by utilizing an ionizing plasma and the planet's magnetic lines of force flowing into the atmosphere". Structural analysis by the Air Materiel Command supposedly found that it was not piloted by radio, appeared to be manually controlled and had "seamless" construction. The Swedish physicist Hannes Alfvén is said to have been consulted on his work in magnetohydrodynamics to explain the propulsion.[1]
Authenticity
The document has never appeared in any official CIA release. Its date varies across copies: 1947, 1949 and 1950 have all been cited. Its claims, including the Blair House meeting, are unverified. It belongs to the larger "Majestic 12" family of documents. The first of these surfaced in the 1980s, and more than 100 more were given to the researcher Timothy Cooper from 1992. The FBI declared the core MJ-12 papers "completely bogus" in 1988, after the Air Force Office of Special Investigations confirmed that no such committee had existed. Researchers found idiosyncratic date formats and signatures that appeared to be photocopied from other documents. The CIA judged one Cooper-supplied MJ-12 document fraudulent.[5]
The genuine record
The genuine U.S. record on UFOs from this period is much more mundane. A real 1949 memorandum from Colonel H. M. McCoy, chief of the intelligence department at Air Materiel Command, discussed the Air Force Office of Special Investigations' inquiry into unidentified lights over parts of New Mexico. It concluded: "To date, no plausible explanation for the presence of these lights has been developed." Released files show the CIA monitoring reports and, in the early 1950s, convening the Robertson Panel. In 2014 the CIA itself highlighted, in what it called its most-read document of the year, that its secret high-altitude U-2 spy planes, flying higher than anyone thought possible, had been mistaken for alien spaceships.[2][3]
People and topics
- Central Intelligence Agency — The U.S. foreign intelligence agency, which has followed UFO reports since the 1940s.
- MJ-12 — Disputed documents describing a secret committee managing crashed saucers.
- Ryan Wood — Researcher who published the Majestic documents with his father Robert Wood.
- Harry S. Truman — 33rd U.S. president (1945–53), in office during the first flying disc wave and the start of official UFO studies.
- Federal Bureau of Investigation — The U.S. federal police agency, which helped check flying disc reports from 1947 to 1950.
- Unidentified flying object — An object in the sky that can't be identified; the older term for UAP.
- Robertson Panel — Robertson Panel
On the Timeline
- Albert Collins metal samples claim (1949) — Scientist Albert Collins claims he studied strange recovered metal samples that the Army later took away.
- Hebgen Lake disc report (1949) (17 August 1949) — An Air Force base reports an informant's account of seven discs and two crashed ones; a lake search finds nothing.
See every 1949 event on the UAP Timeline →
Further reading
- UFO documents — CIA Reading Room · cia.gov · archived copy
- Harry S. Truman — Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org · archived copy
References
- Scan and summary of the alleged ULATT report — UFOScans · ufoscans.com · archived copy
- Early CIA UFO documents (genuine releases) — Patrick Gross · ufology.patrickgross.org · archived copy
- CIA takes blame for most UFO sightings decades ago — KUER/NPR · kuer.org · archived copy
- majesticdocuments.com · majesticdocuments.com · archived copy
- Majestic 12 – Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org
Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia articles “Majestic 12 – Wikipedia”, “Majestic 12 – Wikipedia”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.
This page was last edited on 29 October 2026. Articles are written in our own words from the sources listed under References; disputed claims are attributed to the people who made them.
No discussion yet.