implications regarding UFOs at the CIA.
To a rationalist like General Smith, “Strange things in the sky [have] been recorded for hundreds of years,” which is true — unidentified flying objects are at least as old as the Bible. In certain translations of the Old Testament, a reference to “Ezekiel’s wheel” describes a saucerlike vehicle streaking across the skies. During the Middle Ages, flying discs appeared in many different forms of art, such as in paintings and mosaics. In British ink prints from 1783, favored examples among ufologists, two of the king’s men stand on the terrace of Windsor Castle in London observing small saucers flying in the background; researchers have not been able to identify what they might have referenced. Smith could offer no “obvious… single explanation for a majority of the things seen” in the sky and cited foo fighters as an example, the “unexplained phenomena sighted by aircraft pilots during World War II.” These, Smith explained, were “balls of light… similar to St. Elmo’s fire.”
Like the president’s science adviser Vannevar Bush, CIA director Walter Bedell Smith was primarily concerned about the government’s ability to maintain control. Toward this end, he saw the CIA as having to take decisive action regarding citizen hysteria over UFOs. During Bedell Smith’s tenure, and according to declassified documents, it was the position of the CIA that a nefarious plan was in the Soviet pipeline. It had happened once already, at Roswell. Fortunately, in that instance the Joint Chiefs had been able to cover up the truth with a weather balloon story. But a black propaganda attack could happen again, a grand UFO hoax aimed at paralyzing the nation’s early airdefense warning system, which would then make the United States vulnerable to an actual Soviet air attack. “Mass receipt of low-grade reports which tend to overload channels of communication quite irrelevant to hostile objects might some day appear” as real, Smith ominously warned the National Security Council. The unending UFO sightings preoccupying the nation were becoming like the boy who cried wolf, the CIA director cautioned.
To work on the problem of UFO hysteria, in 1952 Bedell Smith convened a CIA group called the Psychological Strategy Board and gave them the job of putting together recommendations about “problems connected with unidentified flying objects” for the National Security Council — the highest-ranking national security policy makers in the United States. Bedell Smith’s Psychological Strategy Board panel determined that the American public was far too sensitive to “hysterical mass behavior” for the good of the nation. Furthermore, the board said, the public’s susceptibility to UFO belief was a national security threat, one that was increasing by the year. From a psychological standpoint, the public’s gullibility would likely prove “harmful to constituted authority,” meaning the central government might not hold. Any forthcoming UFO hoax by Stalin could engender the same kind of pandemonium that followed the radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds.
Bedell Smith’s CIA told the National Security Council that for this reason, the flying saucer scare needed to be discredited. According to CIA documents declassified in 1993, the Agency proposed a vast “debunking” campaign to reduce the public’s interest in flying saucers. The only way of countering what Bedell Smith was certain was the Russians’ “clever hostile propaganda” was for the CIA to take covert action of its own. The Agency suggested that an educational campaign be put in place, one that would co-opt elements of the American “mass media such as television, motion pictures, and popular articles.” The CIA also suggested getting advertising executives, business clubs, and “even the Disney Corporation [involved] to get the message across.” One plan was to present actual UFO case histories on television and then prove them wrong. “As in the case of conjuring tricks,” members of the panel suggested, “the debunking would result in reduction in public interest in flying saucers,” in the same way that those who believe in magic become disillusioned when the magician’s trick is revealed.
What action was actually taken by the CIA remains classified as of 2011, but one unforeseen problem that Bedell Smith’s CIA encountered was an American press wholly uninterested in going along with the wishes of the CIA. The media had an agenda of its own. UFO stories sold papers, and in the spring of 1952, the publishers of Life magazine were getting ready to go to press with a major scoop about UFOs. Reporters for the magazine had learned that the Air Force had been keeping top secret files on flying saucers while insisting to the public it was doing no such thing. It was a big story, likely to sell out copies of the magazine. One week before press time, the Air Force got wind of Life’s story. In a move meant to deflate the magnitude of the magazine’s revelation, the Air Force decided to reverse its five-year position of denying that it had been actively investigating flying discs and to attend, of all things, a UFO convention in Los Angeles, California.
To understand what a radical about-face this was for the Air Force requires an understanding of what the Air Force had been doing for the past five years since it had began the simultaneous and contradictory campaigns Project Sign (to investigate Air Force UFO concerns) and Project Grudge (the public relations campaign intended to convey to the nation that the Air Force had no UFO concerns). Of the 850 UFO sightings reported in the news media the first month of the UFO craze, in July of 1947, at least 150 of the sightings had concerned military intelligence officials to such a degree that they were written up and sent for analysis to officers with the Technical Intelligence Division of the Air Force at Wright Field. Six months later, in January of 1948, General Nathan Twining, head of the Air Force Technical Service Command, established Project Sign; originally called Project Saucer, it was the first in a number of covert UFO research groups created inside the Air Force. For Project Sign, the Air Force assigned hundreds of its staff to the job of collecting, going over, and analyzing details from thousands of UFO sightings, all the while denying they were doing any such thing.
In Air Force circles, behind the scenes, officials were acutely aware that “the very existence of Air Force official interest” fanned the flames of UFO hysteria, and so the public relations program Project Grudge needed to officially end. On December 27, 1949, the Air Force publicly announced that it saw no reason to continue its UFO investigations and was terminating the project. Meanwhile, the covert UFO study programs steamed ahead. In 1952, the Air Force opened up yet another, even more secret UFO organization, this one called Project Blue Book. That the Air Force clearly kept from the public what it was actually doing with UFO study would later become a major point of contention for ufologists who believed UFOs were from out of this world.
The UFOs being reported seemed to have no end. In addition to the flying disc sightings, bright, greenish- colored lights in the sky were also reported by a growing number of citizens. This was particularly concerning for the Air Force because many of these sightings were in New Mexico near sensitive military facilities such as Los Alamos, Sandia, and White Sands. Witnesses to these “green balls of light,” which had been reported since the late 1940s, included credible scientists and astronomers. These sightings were put into an Air Force category known as Green Fireballs. In 1949, the Geophysics Research Division of the Air Force initiated Project Twinkle specifically to investigate these various light-related phenomena. Observation posts were set up at Air Force bases around the country where physicists made electromagnetic-frequency measurements using Signal Corps engineering laboratory equipment. In secret, air traffic control operators across the nation were given 35-millimeter cameras called vidoons and asked by the Air Force to photograph anything unusual.
All work was performed under top secret security protocols with the caveat that under no circumstances was the public to know that the Air Force was investigating UFOs. As the files for Project Twinkle and Project Blue Book got fatter by the month, Air Force officials repeatedly told curious members of Congress that no such files existed.
For Air Force investigators, the UFO explanations trickled in. One group of scientists assigned to Holloman Air Force Base, located on the White Sands Missile Range and home to the Paperclip scientists, determined many of the sightings were observations of V-2 rocket contrails. Other sightings were determined to be shooting stars, cosmic rays, and planets visible in the sky. Another study group concluded that some responsibility fell on birds, most commonly “flocks of seagulls or geese.” But the numbers of sightings were overwhelming. By 1951, the Air Force had secretly investigated between 800 and 1,000 UFO sightings across the nation, according to a CIA Studies in Intelligence report on UFOs declassified in 1997. By 1952, that number rose to 1,900. The efforts were stunning. Datacollection officers met with hundreds of citizens, all of whom were told not to disclose that the Air Force had met with them and asked to sign inadvertent-nondisclosure forms. Classified for decades, these investigations have resulted in over thirty-seven cubic feet of case files — approximately 74,000 pages. But for every one or two hundred sightings that could be explained, there were always a few that could not be explained — certainly not by Air Force data-collection supervisors who had a very limited need-to-know. Seeds of suspicion were being sown among these Air Force investigators and in some cases among their superiors, a number of whom would later famously leave government service to go join the efforts of the ufologists on the other side of the aisle.
Ultimately, the Air Force concluded for the National Security Council that “almost all sightings stemmed from one or more of three causes: mass hysteria and hallucination; misinterpretation of known objects; or hoax.” The sightings that couldn’t be explained this way went up the chain of command, where they were interpreted by a few individuals who had been cleared with a need-to-know. In the mid1950s, this included the elite group over at the CIA working under Todos Odarenko, analysts responsible for matching the CIA’s U-2 flights with Air Force
