{"it":{"id":"GOV-CIA","sub":"FOIA release","name":"CIA “UFOs: Fact or Fiction?” collection","place":"CIA FOIA Electronic Reading Room (Langley, Virginia, USA)","lat":38.951,"lon":-77.146,"date":"Documents from the 1940s to the early 1990s, released under FOIA (for example, a photo-analysis memo released 5 Oct 1978)","rep":"By the Agency's description, most files are cables on foreign press reports and memos on handling public questions.","off":"The CIA points readers to its 1997 article 'CIA's Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947–90'.","src":[{"t":"CIA FOIA Reading Room: UFOs: Fact or Fiction? (site blocks some automated checks)","u":"https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/collection/ufos-fact-or-fiction"},{"t":"CIA Reading Room: Photo analysis of UFO photography (release date 5 Oct 1978)","u":"https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/0000015433"},{"t":"CIA Studies in Intelligence: CIA’s Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947–1990","u":"https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/studies-in-intelligence/studies-in-intelligence-1997/cias-role-in-the-study-of-ufos-1947-1990/"},{"t":"CIA Reading Room: UFOs, Fact or Fiction? (archived)","u":"https://web.archive.org/web/2023/https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/collection/ufos-fact-or-fiction"},{"t":"Haines (1997), CIA’s Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947–90 (CIA Studies in Intelligence, PDF)","u":"https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/static/cia-role-study-UFOs.pdf"}],"tags":["FOIA","Declassified","Intelligence","USA"],"kind":"gov","sum":"The CIA keeps an online collection of its UFO papers called \"UFOs: Fact or Fiction?\". It runs from the 1940s through the early 1990s.\n\nMost of the papers are cables about unconfirmed UFO sightings reported in the foreign press, and internal memos on how the agency answered public questions about UFOs. The collection points readers to an article by the CIA historian Gerald Haines, \"CIA's Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-90\", published in 1997. Haines opens by noting that 95 percent of Americans had at least heard of UFOs.\n\nWhat is hard to explain is the secrecy around ordinary answers. Haines wrote that over half of all UFO reports from the late 1950s through the 1960s were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights, namely the U-2. He added that Air Force Blue Book investigators who knew about the flights tried to \"explain away\" those sightings with natural causes such as ice crystals and temperature inversions.\n\nThe agency's view is that most of its UFO files are routine, and its own historian says the main hidden truth was secret aircraft, not visitors. The other view starts from the same article. If the government gave false explanations once to protect its planes, people ask what else it might have covered.\n\nIf the explanations were false once, how should we read the rest of the file?","qs":["The CIA's historian said Blue Book gave false answers to protect the U-2. What else might have been covered the same way?","Most of the files are cables about foreign newspapers. Why would an intelligence agency track them?","Does admitting one cover story make an agency more or less believable?"],"yt":"Sample 20 documents and count how many are press cables versus original analysis.","rel":["REC-CSG1952","REC-ROB1953"],"hook":"The CIA's UFO files run from the 1940s to the early 1990s. Its historian found a cover story.","why":"The CIA's own historian wrote that spy-plane flights lay behind over half of 1950s and 1960s UFO reports."},"S":{},"rec":{"id":"GOV-CIA","sum":"At sixty thousand feet the sun sets late. Long after the ground below had fallen into dusk, an aircraft flying that high could still catch the last of the light on its silver skin, and to anyone looking up it would seem to burn: a bright, fiery object sliding across a darkening sky, three times higher than the airliners of the day. In the late 1950s Americans saw such things often, and they reported them. They were told they had seen ice crystals, or a temperature inversion. They had in fact seen a secret spy plane.\n\nThat small, deliberate untruth sits at the heart of a collection the Central Intelligence Agency keeps in its online reading room under the title \"UFOs: Fact or Fiction?\" The papers, released under the Freedom of Information Act, run from the 1940s to the early 1990s. One of them, a memo analysing UFO photographs, was released on 5 October 1978. By the agency's own description, most of the files are cables reporting unconfirmed sightings in the foreign press, and internal memos on how to answer the public's questions. It is not, on its face, a dramatic archive.\n\nThe collection points readers to a single article as its guide: \"CIA's Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-90,\" published in 1997 in the agency's journal Studies in Intelligence by Gerald K. Haines, historian of the National Reconnaissance Office. It was written after pressure from UFO researchers led Director of Central Intelligence R. James Woolsey to order, in late 1993, another review of every agency file on the subject. Haines opens with a statistic. An extraordinary 95 percent of Americans, he writes, had at least heard or read something about UFOs, and 57 percent believed they were real. Many, he adds, were convinced that the government, and the CIA in particular, was engaged in \"a massive conspiracy and coverup.\"\n\nHis history begins on 24 June 1947, when a private pilot named Kenneth Arnold, searching for a downed plane, saw nine disk-shaped objects near Mount Rainier in Washington, moving by his estimate at more than 1,000 miles an hour. A flood of sightings followed, from military and civilian pilots and air traffic controllers. The Air Force set up Project SIGN in 1948, then GRUDGE, which tried to calm the public by explaining sightings as balloons, aircraft, planets, meteors, optical illusions, solar reflections or large hailstones. In 1952 it launched Project BLUE BOOK, which would run through the 1950s and 1960s.\n\nThe CIA was watching, and for a time it was worried. On 19 and 20 July 1952 radar screens at Washington National Airport and Andrews Air Force Base tracked mysterious blips; on 27 July they returned. Interceptors were scrambled and found nothing, and the headlines ran across the country. Agency officials accepted the Air Force's view that most sightings could be explained, yet they concluded that \"since there is a remote possibility that they may be interplanetary aircraft, it is necessary to investigate each sighting.\" The Director, Walter Bedell Smith, judged there was only one chance in 10,000 that the phenomenon threatened the country, but that even that chance could not be taken. H. Marshall Chadwell, an assistant director, urged action because he was convinced \"that something was going on.\"\n\nThen the agency made a choice that shaped everything after. In January 1953 it convened a panel of distinguished scientists under the Caltech physicist H. P. Robertson. Meeting from 14 to 17 January, the panel recommended that the National Security Council \"debunk\" UFO reports and start a policy of public education to reassure people. Its report was classified, and any mention of CIA sponsorship was forbidden. Haines is blunt about the cost: \"This attitude would later cause the Agency major problems relating to its credibility.\"\n\nThe real secret was overhead. By August 1955 the agency was testing a high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft, the U-2, which could fly at 60,000 feet. The early U-2s were silver and reflected the sun, especially at sunrise and sunset, and from below they often looked like fiery objects. Once test flights began, commercial pilots and air traffic controllers reported a large increase in sightings. Air Force BLUE BOOK investigators who knew about the secret flights, Haines writes, \"tried to explain away such sightings by linking them to natural phenomena such as ice crystals and temperature inversions.\" By checking with the agency's U-2 project staff, they could attribute many reports to the flights, but they were careful not to reveal the true cause. Later estimates from CIA officials who worked on the U-2 and its successor, the OXCART, the aircraft known as the Blackbird, held that \"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.\"\n\nHaines does not soften what that meant. It \"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. While perhaps justified, this deception added fuel to the later conspiracy theories and the coverup controversy of the 1970s.\"\n\nThis is the oldest lesson of secrecy in its purest form. A secret is protected not only by silence but by a substitute story, and a substitute story, once discovered, poisons every true story told after it. The Air Force's share of unexplained sightings fell to 5.9 percent in 1955. The damage to trust did not fall with it.\n\nThe pressure kept building. In 1975 a small group called Ground Saucer Watch, led by William Spaulding, asked the CIA for the Robertson panel report and all its UFO records. In September 1977 it sued under the Freedom of Information Act. The search that followed turned up 355 documents of about 900 pages, including an old UFO file found under a secretary's desk. In December 1978 the agency released all but 57 of them, withholding those on national security grounds and to protect sources and methods. In May 1980 a court dismissed the suit, finding the search had been thorough and made in good faith. Haines also records that agency officials deliberately kept UFO files to a minimum, to avoid creating records that might mislead the public if released.\n\nThe agency's position is coherent. Its UFO files are mostly routine. Its interest was substantial only until the early 1950s and, Haines writes, \"limited and peripheral\" after that. Its own historian identifies the hidden truth of the era as secret aircraft, not visitors. And Haines predicted, accurately, that the issue \"probably will not go away soon,\" whatever the agency said.\n\nThe other view begins from exactly the same pages. If the government gave false explanations once, deliberately and for years, to protect its planes, then the official word \"explained\" stopped meaning what it said. Fifty-seven documents stayed closed. Files were kept thin by design. A panel of scientists recommended debunking, and its sponsor's name was kept secret. None of that proves anything was hidden beyond aircraft. All of it makes the remaining file harder to read.\n\nSo a reader opening the collection now faces the question Haines left on the table. Most of the papers are press cables and memos about public relations, and the deception he documented was real, specific and confessed. If the explanations were knowingly false once, how should anyone read the rest of the file?"},"img":null,"md":{"h":"img/m/GOV-CIA-16x9.webp","w":1600,"hh":900,"alt":"CIA “UFOs: Fact or Fiction?” collection, CIA FOIA Electronic Reading Room (Langley, Virginia, USA) — The CIA's Original Headquarters Building was designed in the mid-1950s by the New York firm Harrison and Abramovitz.…","by":"The Central Intelligence Agency","lic":"Public domain","lu":"","p":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Original_Headquarters_Building_(OHB)_-_Flickr_-_The_Central_Intelligence_Agency_(1).jpg","g":false,"ct":false,"cap":"","sec":[]},"hh":[{"v":"1947–90","h":"Span of the CIA’s own published account of its role in UFO study","s":[347]}],"hs":{"347":["CIA Studies in Intelligence: CIA’s Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947–1990","https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/studies-in-intelligence/studies-in-intelligence-1997/cias-role-in-the-study-of-ufos-1947-1990/"]}}