CIA's Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947–90

CIA's Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947–90

Full title	"A Die-Hard Issue: CIA's Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947–90"
Author	Gerald K. Haines, historian
Published	Studies in Intelligence, unclassified edition, 1997; public release August 1997
Basis	Agency-wide file review ordered by DCI R. James Woolsey in late 1993
Best-known claim	U-2 and OXCART flights "accounted for" over half of UFO reports from the late 1950s through the 1960s
Main conclusion	CIA concern was substantial until the early 1950s, then "limited and peripheral"
Press headline	"C.I.A. Admits Government Lied About U.F.O. Sightings" (New York Times)
Date	3 August 1997
Topics	Secrecy & cover-up (topic), Government programs (topic)
People	Gerald Haines, Bruce Maccabee
Testimony	Shellenberger testimony, p. 129
Year	1997 in UFO history
Timeline	1997 on the UAP Timeline
Sources	8

"CIA's Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947–90" is a 1997 history by Gerald K. Haines, published in the CIA's journal Studies in Intelligence and released to the public that August.^[1][2][5] It is the agency's official account of its involvement with UFOs. It traces how the CIA took the subject seriously in the early 1950s, sponsored the Robertson Panel, and then paid "only limited and peripheral attention" while hiding its role.^[1] It is best known for stating that U-2 and later spy-plane flights accounted for over half of UFO reports in the late 1950s and 1960s, and that the Air Force misled the public to protect them.^[1][3]

Origins

In September 1993 John Petersen, an acquaintance of CIA Director R. James Woolsey, brought him a package of heavily redacted CIA UFO material that had been released to the researcher Stanton Friedman. Petersen and Friedman wanted to know the reasons for the redactions, and Woolsey agreed to look into it.^[1] In late 1993, "after being pressured by UFOlogists for the release of additional CIA information", Woolsey ordered a review of all agency files on UFOs.^[1] Haines's study drew on the records collected in that review, held by the Executive Assistant to the Director, and on interviews he conducted in 1994.^[1] The earlier version of this article described Haines as historian of the National Reconnaissance Office.^[1] The study opens by noting that 95 percent of Americans had heard of UFOs and 57 percent believed they were real, and that many were convinced of a CIA cover-up.^[1]

Early interest (1947–1953)

Haines describes how the CIA closely monitored the Air Force's Projects Sign, Grudge and Blue Book.^[1] In 1952 agency officials asked whether the sightings reflected "midsummer madness". They accepted the Air Force's conclusions, but held that "since there is a remote possibility that they may be interplanetary aircraft, it is necessary to investigate each sighting".^[1] After the radar sightings over Washington, D.C., on 19–20 and 27 July 1952, the Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI) and the Office of Current Intelligence formed a study group.^[1] Its findings and the reactions to them included:^[1]

• Edward Tauss reported that most sightings could be easily explained, but urged continued monitoring and concealment of CIA interest "in view of their probable alarmist tendencies".
• Director Walter Bedell Smith believed there was "only one chance in 10,000" of a security threat, "but even that chance could not be taken". He also asked how UFOs might be used in psychological warfare.
• The group worried that the Soviets might use UFO reports to spark mass hysteria or to overload U.S. air warning systems before a nuclear attack.
• H. Marshall Chadwell, head of OSI, told Smith in December 1952 that "something was going on that must have immediate attention", and drafted a National Security Council directive.

Chadwell and the physicist H. P. Robertson then assembled the Robertson Panel, which met from 14 to 17 January 1953. Its members were Robertson, Samuel Goudsmit, Luis Alvarez, Thornton Page and Lloyd Berkner.^[1] After 12 hours reviewing cases, it attributed the Tremonton film to seagulls and the Great Falls film to two Air Force interceptors. It found no threat and no evidence of extraterrestrials.^[1] It recommended that the National Security Council "debunk" UFO reports through the mass media, schools and "even the Disney corporation". "Reporting at the height of McCarthyism", it also recommended that civilian groups in Los Angeles and Wisconsin be monitored for subversive activities.^[1] The CIA forbade any mention of its sponsorship of the panel, an attitude Haines says "would later cause the Agency major problems relating to its credibility".^[1]

The spy-plane claim

The CIA began the U-2 project with Lockheed's Skunk Works in November 1954 and was test-flying the aircraft by August 1955. It flew at 60,000 feet, when most airliners flew at 10,000 to 20,000 feet, and pilots and controllers soon reported a large increase in UFO sightings.^[1] The early U-2s were silver and caught the sun at dawn and dusk, often looking like "fiery objects" from below.^[1] Blue Book investigators, Haines wrote, checked sightings with the CIA's U-2 project staff and attributed many to U-2 flights. They were "careful, however, not to reveal the true cause", and instead linked them to natural phenomena such as ice crystals and temperature inversions.^[1]

In the study's best-known sentence, Haines wrote that, according to later estimates from CIA officials on the U-2 and OXCART (A-12) projects, "over half of all UFO reports from the late 1950s through the 1960s were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights (namely the U-2) over the United States".^[1] This, he said, "led the Air Force to make misleading and deceptive statements to the public in order to allay public fears and to protect an extraordinarily sensitive national security project". He added that, "while perhaps justified, this deception added fuel to the later conspiracy theories".^[1] His footnotes cite the CIA's own history of the U-2 and OXCART programs and a 1994 interview with John Parongosky, who oversaw OXCART's day-to-day affairs.^[4]

Secrecy and flaps in the 1950s and 1960s

Haines describes how the agency's secrecy repeatedly backfired:^[1]

• It refused to declassify the full Robertson report, offering only a version sanitized of any CIA mention.
• When the UFO researchers Donald Keyhoe and Leon Davidson pressed it, an officer suggested involving the FBI.
• In the 1955 "radio code" affair, CIA officers posing as Air Force men obtained a Chicago tape that turned out to be ordinary Morse code. They then told Davidson the tape had been destroyed, which he compared to Jimmy Hoffa destroying records.
• In 1957 the agency returned Ralph Mayher's 1952 UFO photographs without comment, then refused to confirm its officer's employment.

In 1964 Director John McCone asked for an updated evaluation, and OSI obtained sighting reports from NICAP's acting director, Richard Hall. In 1967 the CIA's National Photographic Interpretation Center, under Arthur Lundahl, secretly helped the Condon Committee analyze photographs, on condition that no work be credited to the agency.^[1]

Later decades

Haines describes the Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by Ground Saucer Watch in September 1977. A search led by the CIA lawyer Launie Ziebell, which even found an old UFO file under a secretary's desk, turned up 355 documents of about 900 pages. On 14 December 1978 the CIA released all but 57 of them.^[1][5] When The New York Times reported the release, Director Stansfield Turner asked his staff, "Are we in UFOs?" He was told there had been no organized effort since the 1950s, and the court dismissed the follow-up suit in May 1980.^[1]

For the late 1970s and 1980s, Haines found only a "low-key interest". Analysts devoted small amounts of time to counterintelligence fears that the KGB was using UFO groups to learn about programs such as stealth aircraft, to air-defense vulnerabilities, and to parapsychology.^[1] He found "almost no documentation" for the 1980s, noting that files were kept to a minimum to avoid misleading the public. He also reported that the CIA was "reportedly" a member of an Incident Response Team to investigate UFO landings that "has never met".^[1] He dismissed the MJ-12 papers as "fabrications". He cited the historian Larry Bland's finding that one copied the wording of a 1944 letter from George Marshall about the "Magic" intercepts.^[1] He concluded that, like the Kennedy assassination theories, the UFO issue "probably will not go away soon, no matter what the Agency does or says".^[1]

Reception

The New York Times headlined its 3 August 1997 story "C.I.A. Admits Government Lied About U.F.O. Sightings".^[7] The Deseret News headlined its report "Government lied to public about UFO sightings, CIA admits". It quoted Richard Hall of the Fund for UFO Research calling it "very significant", and John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists saying "the flying-saucer community is definitely onto something".^[3] The study is available from the CIA and from the Federation of American Scientists.^[1][2][6]

Critics, including the physicist Bruce Maccabee, argued that the "over half" figure is not supported by Blue Book data, and that the U-2 could not explain most reported shapes and behavior.^[8] A Metabunk discussion traced the claim to Haines's footnotes, which cite the CIA's U-2 history and a single 1994 interview. It set the claim beside Blue Book's totals of 12,618 reports, 701 of them unidentified.^[4] The article remains an important official admission that the government knowingly gave false explanations for some sightings.^[1][3]

People and topics

• Central Intelligence Agency — The U.S. foreign intelligence agency, which has followed UFO reports since the 1940s.
• Gerald Haines — Historian who wrote the CIA's 1997 history of its role in UFO study.
• Unidentified anomalous phenomena — The U.S. government's current term for unidentified objects in the air, in space and underwater.
• National Reconnaissance Office — The U.S. agency that builds and operates spy satellites.
• The New York Times — The newspaper that revealed AATIP in December 2017.
• Unidentified flying object — An object in the sky that can't be identified; the older term for UAP.
• Robertson Panel — Robertson Panel
• U.S. Air Force — The U.S. military service that ran the official UFO projects from 1947 to 1969.
• Bruce Maccabee — Navy optical physicist and leading analyst of UFO photographs.
• Project Blue Book — The Air Force's public UFO investigation from 1952 until its closure in December 1969.

On the Timeline

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See every 1997 event on the UAP Timeline →

Further reading

References