Arthur Lundahl and presidential briefings

Arthur Lundahl and presidential briefings

Subject	Arthur Charles Lundahl KBE (1915–1992)
Position	Head of CIA photo interpretation from 1953; director of the National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) from its creation in January 1961 until June 1973
Documented briefings	Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, on reconnaissance imagery; Kennedy on Cuba, 16 October 1962
Documented UFO contact	Briefings for the University of Colorado (Condon) UFO project, February and May 1967
Claim	That he also briefed presidents on UFOs (reported by Grant Cameron)
Status	Unconfirmed; no record of a presidential UFO briefing found
Date	1994
Topics	Government programs (topic)
People	Grant Cameron, Arthur Lundahl, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Frank Rand, Lyndon Johnson
Testimony	Shellenberger testimony, p. 118
Year	1994 in UFO history
Timeline	1994 on the UAP Timeline
Sources	6

Arthur Charles Lundahl (1 April 1915 – 22 June 1992) was the Central Intelligence Agency's chief photo interpreter. He founded and led the National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC). He is best known for briefing President John F. Kennedy on the Soviet missiles found in Cuba in October 1962, and he also briefed President Dwight D. Eisenhower on reconnaissance imagery.^[1] Grant Cameron, a researcher who studies what US presidents knew about UFOs, reports that Lundahl also briefed presidents on UFOs and took a personal interest in the subject.^[2] That claim has not been confirmed. The documented record shows NPIC helping the Air Force-funded University of Colorado UFO study in 1967, but no presidential UFO briefing.^[1]

Career

Lundahl was born in Chicago and studied geology at the University of Chicago, earning a bachelor's degree in 1939 and a master's in 1942. He combined his geology training with his hobby of photography and became expert at reading fine detail in pictures, especially at telling natural features from man-made construction.^[1] In the Navy during the Second World War he studied aerial photographs of targets in Japan and the Aleutian and Kuril Islands. After the war he became chief engineer of the Photogrammetry Division of the Naval Photographic Interpretation Center, the original "NPIC".^[1]

In 1953 Lundahl moved to the CIA to lead its Photographic Interpretation Division. In 1954 he was president of the American Society of Photogrammetry.^[1] When U-2 spy-plane flights over the Soviet Union began in 1956, the CIA's first analysts were gathered in an abandoned Washington car dealership under Lundahl's direction. They included Dino Brugioni, who became his key deputy, and a small team of Second World War photo interpreters.^[4] Their work disposed of the "bomber gap" in 1956 and the "missile gap" in 1961. They also covered the Suez Crisis, Lebanon, Tibet, Laos and the islands off the Chinese coast held by Taiwan.^[1][4]

Shortly before leaving office in January 1961, Eisenhower authorized the National Photographic Interpretation Center as a joint project of the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency. It was formed from Lundahl's CIA group combined with military imagery units.^[4][5] Lundahl built it into a center combining photo interpretation, photogrammetry, data processing, graphic arts, communications, research and technical analysis.^[1] NPIC later became part of what is now the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.^[5] The earlier version of this article gave his NPIC tenure as 1953 to 1973. He did join the CIA in 1953, but NPIC itself dates from 1961.^[1][5]

On 19 August 1960 Lundahl gathered his staff to show them the first pictures from a reconnaissance satellite, Discoverer 14. They covered more than a fifth of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in eight broad strips, and the staff broke into cheers.^[1] He later served on the Purcell panel on future satellite reconnaissance. There he argued that photographs with 5-foot resolution gave no more intelligence than those with 10-foot resolution. This contributed to the panel's decision to improve the CORONA satellite instead of building a new search system.^[1]

Cuban Missile Crisis

NPIC analysts under Lundahl studied U-2 photographs taken on 14 October 1962. In them they found evidence of Soviet SS-4 medium-range ballistic missiles in Cuba, able to reach the continental United States with nuclear warheads.^[1][4] Lundahl briefed Kennedy on 16 October. He introduced the CIA's Soviet-missile expert Sidney Graybeal, and the president asked when the missiles would be ready to fire.^[1] In one account, Kennedy turned to Lundahl and asked whether he was sure. Lundahl replied that he was as sure as anyone could be in photo interpretation.^[4] Lundahl agreed with Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and the Chief of Naval Operations that the Navy's VFP-62 reconnaissance squadron should fly low-level missions over Cuba. Those photographs also came to NPIC for round-the-clock analysis.^[4]

Brugioni later recalled that the photographs were driving the crisis faster than policy papers could keep up. Lundahl suggested that policymakers should work the same twelve-hour shifts as the analysts. Brugioni also said Lundahl liked to end briefings with a touch of humor to leave Kennedy smiling.^[1] On 25 October Adlai Stevenson showed declassified NPIC images to the United Nations Security Council.^[5] Lundahl received a personal commendation from Kennedy, and NPIC received a Presidential Unit Citation.^[1]

When he retired in June 1973, Lundahl received the National Security Medal, the intelligence community's highest honor. He also received the CIA's Distinguished Intelligence Medal and the DIA Director's Award. John J. Hicks succeeded him at NPIC. On 17 December 1974 he was made an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire, the eleventh American to receive the honor. He died of respiratory failure in Bethesda, Maryland, on 22 June 1992, aged 77.^[1] He appears in Robert F. Kennedy's memoir Thirteen Days, and Dakin Matthews played him in the 2000 film.^[1]

UFO work

CIA documents show the agency monitoring UFO reports from 1952.^[1] In January 1953 the CIA-sponsored Robertson Panel reviewed the Air Force's UFO files. On its first day it heard two Navy photo analysts, Lieutenants R. S. Neasham and Harry Woo, report on more than 1,000 hours of work on the 1952 Tremonton, Utah film and the Great Falls, Montana film. The Navy analysts concluded the objects were not known aircraft, animals or weather. The panel rejected that conclusion, judging that the Tremonton objects were probably birds and the Great Falls objects reflections from aircraft.^[3] The sources used here do not connect Lundahl personally to that analysis or to the panel.

Lundahl's first documented meeting with a UFO study group came in 1967. The Air Force had contracted the University of Colorado to study UFOs under the physicist Edward Condon, with Brigadier General Edward Giller as contract monitor.^[1][6] At 9:15 a.m. on 20 February 1967, Condon visited NPIC with Richard Love and David Saunders of the university, William Price, and the Air Force scientist Thomas Rachford. They were shown NPIC's photogrammetric and photographic analysis capabilities, and discussion was allowed up to the Secret level.^[1] NPIC set ground rules for the visit:^[1]

• Any work it did would not be identified as CIA work, and Lundahl told Condon to make no reference to the CIA.
• NPIC would prepare no written comments or reports and would not analyze material with the aim of reaching a conclusion.
• Its staff would do only technical, photogrammetric work, such as measuring objects in photographs, using equipment not generally available elsewhere.

The group then went on to the Pentagon to meet Giller.^[1]

In May 1967 the same group returned to NPIC to hear an analysis of UFO photographs from Zanesville, Ohio, which showed the sighting to be a hoax. The committee was impressed. Condon remarked that for the first time a scientific analysis of a UFO would stand up to scrutiny.^[1] The committee's final report went to the Air Force in November 1968 and was released in January 1969. Condon concluded that further extensive study of UFOs probably could not be justified by any expectation of advancing science, and recommended against a government program to investigate UFO reports.^[6]

Many years later, on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, the computer scientist Jacques Vallée described a conversation with Lundahl. It concerned a piece of strange metal said to have been shot off a UFO during a 1952 sighting over Washington, D.C.^[1]

The briefing claim

Cameron, writing about presidents and UFOs, reports rumors that Lundahl briefed presidents on UFOs as well as on reconnaissance imagery, and that he took a personal interest in the subject.^[2] The testimony this article draws on cites the claim to the proceedings of the 2nd Annual UFO Crash Retrieval Conference, page 98.

The documented record is narrower. Lundahl's presidential briefings that are on record were about reconnaissance photographs, and his biography names Eisenhower and Kennedy. This article's earlier version also named President Lyndon Johnson; the sources consulted here do not confirm that.^[1] His recorded UFO involvement is the technical help NPIC gave the Condon study, on terms meant to keep the CIA's role hidden and to avoid any written conclusion.^[1] No document has been published showing that Lundahl briefed any president on UFOs. The claim rests on Cameron's reporting of rumors and on the conference account.^[1][2]

People and topics

• Grant Cameron — Canadian researcher of UFOs and U.S. presidents.
• Central Intelligence Agency — The U.S. foreign intelligence agency, which has followed UFO reports since the 1940s.
• Arthur Lundahl — Director of the CIA's National Photographic Interpretation Center from 1953 to 1973.
• Unidentified anomalous phenomena — The U.S. government's current term for unidentified objects in the air, in space and underwater.
• National Photographic Interpretation Center — The CIA-run center that analysed spy-plane and satellite images.
• Dwight D. Eisenhower — 34th U.S. president, named in the MJ-12 briefing document.
• John F. Kennedy — 35th U.S. president, named in disputed MJ-12 memos.
• Unidentified flying object — An object in the sky that can't be identified; the older term for UAP.
• Frank Rand — Aide who described an informal UFO study for President Lyndon Johnson.
• Lyndon Johnson — 36th U.S. president, said to have requested an informal UFO study.
• Condon Report — Condon Report

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Further reading

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia articles “Arthur C. Lundahl”, “Robertson Panel”, “Dino Brugioni”, “National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency”, “Condon Committee”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.