Bruce Maccabee's CIA talk (1987)

Bruce Maccabee's CIA talk (1987)

Date	7 July 1987
Place	CIA headquarters, Langley, Virginia
Speaker	Bruce Maccabee (1942–2024), U.S. Navy optical physicist
Audience	About two dozen CIA employees
Invited by	Ron Pandolfi, CIA scientific intelligence analyst
Source	Maccabee, The FBI–CIA–UFO Connection (2014)
Topics	Secrecy & cover-up (topic)
People	Bruce Maccabee, Ron Pandolfi, Jaime Shandera, Budd Hopkins
Testimony	Shellenberger testimony, p. 100
Year	1987 in UFO history
Timeline	1987 on the UAP Timeline
Sources	7

On 7 July 1987 Bruce Maccabee, a U.S. Navy optical physicist and one of the best-known analysts of UFO photographs, lectured on UFOs to about two dozen people at CIA headquarters.^[1] It was one of a series of informal contacts with CIA staff, from 1979 into the 1990s, that he described in his 2014 book The FBI–CIA–UFO Connection, published by Richard Dolan Press.^[1] Afterwards he wrote that the lecture had "created a lot of 'spies'" inside the agency.^[1] His account shows individual CIA scientists taking a personal, largely unofficial interest in UFOs, without any sign of a hidden agency program.^[1][2]

Maccabee

Maccabee was born on 6 May 1942. He studied physics at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and earned his master's and doctorate at American University in Washington.^[7] In 1972 he joined the Naval Ordnance Laboratory at White Oak, Maryland, which later became part of the Naval Surface Warfare Center. He worked on optical data processing, laser-generated underwater sound, and high-power laser work for the Strategic Defense Initiative and ballistic missile defense, retiring in 2008.^[1][7]

He joined NICAP in the late 1960s and MUFON in 1975, serving as MUFON's Maryland state director until his death. In 1979 he helped found the Fund for UFO Research and chaired it for about 13 years.^[7] His investigations included:^[7]

• the Kenneth Arnold sighting
• the 1950 McMinnville photographs
• the 1976 Tehran incident
• the 1978 New Zealand radar-visual sightings
• the 1986 Japan Air Lines Flight 1628 encounter
• the Gulf Breeze photographs of 1987–88
• the 1997 Phoenix Lights

He was the first to obtain the FBI's "flying disc" file, and he reanalyzed Blue Book Special Report No. 14 and the Condon study.^[7] He died at his home in Lima, Ohio, on 10 May 2024.^[7]

First contacts, 1979–1986

After investigating the December 1978 New Zealand sightings, Maccabee was referred to Gordon MacDonald of the MITRE Corporation, who passed him to a CIA contact.^[1] In mid-March 1979 a caller from the CIA offered him technical help if he would present his work. He showed his New Zealand analysis to seven CIA employees, among them the physician Christopher "Kit" Green.^[1] Green, a medical doctor and longtime CIA employee and contractor, invited him back for a wider discussion. Maccabee recalled that Green presented his interest, and that of his colleagues, as "more of a personal than an agency interest".^[1][6] (He is not the English performer of the same name.)^[3] Green was later reported to have studied injured defense and intelligence personnel, some of whom described UAP encounters.^[5]

In August 1984 Ron Pandolfi, described as a scientist and intelligence analyst in the CIA's scientific intelligence branch, phoned Maccabee about his work on laser-generated underwater sound. Pandolfi knew of his UFO interests through Green.^[1] Maccabee wrote that this began "a more than fifteen year association", based on the agency's interest in the laser research and on Pandolfi's unofficial interest in UFOs.^[1]

Pandolfi told Maccabee about the 17 November 1986 Japan Air Lines Flight 1628 sighting over Alaska on 30 December 1986. He then arranged a meeting on 5 February 1987 with John Callahan, a division chief in the Federal Aviation Administration's accidents and investigations branch.^[1] As they left, Pandolfi handed Maccabee a box of radar printouts, interview transcripts, a copy of the air traffic control voice tape and other documents. In 2008 Pandolfi told him the official concern had not been alien craft. It was that Soviet jets might be using a large airliner as cover for clandestine flights over Alaska.^[1]

The 1987 talk

Pandolfi then invited Maccabee to speak about UFOs at CIA headquarters, and he did so on 7 July 1987 to about two dozen people.^[1] He later wrote that his lecture "created a lot of 'spies' within the agency". By this he meant employees who used their top-secret clearances to "nose around" for UFO information and projects. He added that he did not know whether any of them found such projects.^[1] Pandolfi later told him that a CIA archivist had searched the agency's files and found no trace of "MJ-12".^[1]

A few weeks earlier, on 25 June 1987, Maccabee, then chairman of the Fund for UFO Research, had taken part in an on-the-record briefing at the Foreign Press Center in Washington. The briefing, titled "The 40 Year History of Unidentified Flying Objects from a Worldwide Perspective", also featured Lawrence Koss, Jaime Shandera and the abduction researcher Budd Hopkins. A large group of foreign correspondents attended, with Stanton Friedman in the audience.^[4]

Later contacts

Maccabee kept Pandolfi informed of his Gulf Breeze investigation. In mid-September he showed some of the Gulf Breeze photographs to several employees, was invited to discuss them with a branch chief, and later lectured at the CIA on the case.^[1] In August 1989, during a wave of Soviet sightings, Pandolfi arranged translations of Russian newspaper articles and copies of Foreign Broadcast Information Service translations. He later said that official reports by the Soviet air defense general Igor Maltsev about a 21 March sighting had caused "quite a stir" at upper CIA levels.^[1]

In 1993 the Director of Central Intelligence, James Woolsey, asked the historian Gerald Haines to write the official history of CIA involvement with UFOs. Maccabee read it in 1996 and learned nothing new.^[1] His last CIA lecture was about a UFO with a "magnetic personality". This was the 11 September 1992 Gulf Breeze sighting, where an investigator used a flux-gradient magnetometer to detect a magnetic field at the site. Maccabee said the CIA staff were as puzzled as he was.^[1] The earlier version of this article said the last lecture was given on 11 September 1992. In the account available, that is the date of the sighting it discussed.^[1]

What he learned

Maccabee said he had wanted to know whether the CIA held top-secret UFO information and whether it controlled a cover-up.^[1] He found that Green treated the subject as of "medium importance", while Pandolfi treated it more as "a joke or an amusement".^[1] In 1990 Pandolfi gave him the official reason for CIA interest: in the 1970s the agency had obtained "firm evidence" that the KGB planned to use American citizens, including ufologists, to penetrate U.S. defense programs.^[1] In March 1994 Pandolfi told him that the Director and Deputy Director of Central Intelligence came to him when they wanted to know about UFOs. He allowed that there might be a liaison "mole" working with a UFO group in another agency, but said he was "not aware of any group in the CIA".^[1]

In a 2008 conversation, Green told Maccabee he had questioned 18 senior figures, from top CIA officers to cabinet ministers, senior military officers and a president. Most knew nothing, but some did, which led him to conclude that "there was something going on, but not in the government".^[1] Maccabee felt he knew more about UFOs than any CIA employee he met. He also noted that in 2012 the former CIA officer Chase Brandon claimed to have seen a "Roswell box" in a CIA vault.^[1] His account fits other evidence that individual CIA employees kept an informal interest in the subject. The researcher Jan Aldrich has noted that the agency received hundreds of UFO reports from the Air Force between 1951 and 1963, and Navy reports going back to the 1946 "ghost rockets", so the small number of documents released suggests the CIA cannot easily search its own holdings.^[1] The CIA's released UFO documents are available in its online reading room.^[2]

People and topics

• U.S. Navy — The U.S. naval service, whose pilots reported the UAP encounters revealed in 2017.
• Bruce Maccabee — Navy optical physicist and leading analyst of UFO photographs.
• Unidentified anomalous phenomena — The U.S. government's current term for unidentified objects in the air, in space and underwater.
• Central Intelligence Agency — The U.S. foreign intelligence agency, which has followed UFO reports since the 1940s.
• Unidentified flying object — An object in the sky that can't be identified; the older term for UAP.
• Gulf Breeze UFO incident — The 1987–88 Florida UFO photographs by Ed Walters, later linked to a model.
• NICAP — The leading U.S. civilian UFO group of the 1950s and 1960s.
• MUFON — The largest civilian UFO organization in the United States.
• Ron Pandolfi — CIA scientist who appears in several UFO stories.
• Jaime Shandera — TV producer who received the MJ-12 film in 1984.
• Budd Hopkins — Artist and abduction researcher.

On the Timeline

• Cheyenne Mountain and Lake Kickapoo sighting (1986) (December 1986) — A Navy officer says sensors at Cheyenne Mountain detected a UAP.
• John Lear's ParaNet statement (1987) (29 December 1987) — Pilot John Lear claims the government has worked with gray aliens since the 1960s.

See every 1987 event on the UAP Timeline →

Further reading

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia articles “Kit Green”, “Bruce Maccabee”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.