unknowns. But no matter how many sightings were explained as benign, there was still the unexplained mother of all unidentified flying objects — the nefarious crashed craft from Roswell. Everything about that flying disc had to remain hidden from absolutely everyone but a select few. If Americans found out about it, or about what the government had been doing in response, there would be outrage.
CIA analysts and Air Force personnel working together on the UFO problem, one concern was made clear: the public was not to learn about the government’s obsession with UFOs. These orders came from the top. Why exactly this was the case, the rank and file did not have a need-to-know. Underlings simply followed orders, which was why two Air Force officials from Project Blue Book, Colonel Kirkland and Lieutenant E. J. Ruppelt, were sent to sit on a panel at a UFO convention in California, side by side with men who were convinced UFOs were from outer space. These men, some of the nation’s leading ufologists, were part of a group called the Civilian Saucer Investigations Organization of Los Angeles.
On April 2, 1952, just one week before the Life magazine UFO story hit the newsstands, Kirkland and Ruppelt sat in a conference hall at the Mayfair Hotel with the leading UFO hunters of the day. It was a huge media event, with people from Time, Life, the Los Angeles Mirror, and Columbia Pictures in attendance. The Air Force officials placated the ufologists by saying that they too were concerned about UFOs and offering to “bring them into the loop.” In return, the Air Force said, they would “throw” Civilian Saucer Investigations certain “cases that might be of interest” to the organization for their review. When the scientists pressed for security clearances so they could access top secret data, the Air Force began to squirm. “I see no reason at all why we can’t work together,” Colonel Kirkland said, deflecting the question. “I think it would be very foolish if we didn’t.” Ruppelt offered up an Air Force perk: CSI members could call the military collect.
On April 7, 1952, Life magazine published its cover story titled “There Is a Case for Interplanetary Saucers.” The sixteen-page feature article began with the exclusive Air Force reveal. Above the byline, it read “The Air Force is now ready to concede that many saucer and fireball sightings still defy explanation; here LIFE offers some scientific evidence that there is a real case for interplanetary saucers.” The article made its case well, with the takeaway being that UFOs really could be from out of this world. But there was a second reason the Air Force participated in the UFO convention. The CIA’s Psychological Strategy Board had urged the National Security Council to “monitor private UFO groups [such] as the Civilian Flying Saucer Investigators in Los Angeles,” and because of this, the Air Force officers had been placed at the UFO convention in Los Angeles through backdoor recommendations at the CIA.
The CIA was particularly interested in one specific individual on the Civilian Saucer Investigations panel, and that was a German Paperclip scientist named Dr. Walther Riedel. Seated front and center at the UFO conference at the Mayfair Hotel, Dr. Riedel was a study in contradiction. When Riedel smiled, a close look revealed that he had fake front teeth — his own had been knocked out in 1945 at the Stettin Gestapo prison in Germany. Riedel had been a prisoner there for several weeks with fellow Peenemьnde rocket scientist Wernher Von Braun, and during the war, Riedel had served as the chief of Hitler’s V2 missile-design office. The American soldiers guarding Riedel at the Stettin Gestapo prison roughed him up after Army intelligence agents passed along information stating that in addition to designing the V-2, Dr. Riedel had been working on Hitler’s bacteria bomb. It was in the harsh interrogation that followed that Riedel lost his front teeth.
At the end of the war, Riedel, like Wernher Von Braun, desperately wanted to be hired by the U.S. military so he could work on rocket programs in the United States. Germany no longer had a military, let alone a rocket research program, which meant Riedel was out of a job. The Russians were known to hate the Germans; they treated their pillaged scientists like slave laborers. An offer from the Americans was the best game in town, even if their soldiers had broken your teeth first.
In January of 1947, Dr. Riedel became a Paperclip. His past work in chemical rockets and bacteria bombs was whitewashed in the name of science. The caveat for Riedel’s prosperous new life, as opposed to his possible prosecution at Nuremberg, was that he would comply with what the U.S. military asked of him. But Riedel’s rogue UFO-promoting behavior only a few years later illustrates that in certain situations, the Paperclips had the upper hand. Here was Riedel at the saucer convention, stirring up UFO hysteria. He participated in the Life magazine article and was quoted saying that he was “completely convinced that [UFOs] have an out-of-world basis.” If that did not engender what CIA director Bedell Smith called hysterical thinking, what would? Riedel was not just any old rocket scientist going on the record with America’s most popular magazine. When asked about his profession, he told Life magazine that he was “engaged in secret work for the U.S.”
What is publicly known about Dr. Riedel’s American career is that he had begun at Fort Bliss, in Texas, as part of the V-2 rocket team, but after only a few years he was mysteriously traded by the government to work as an engineer for North American Aviation. There were rumors of “problems” with other Paperclip scientists at White Sands Missile Range. Once Riedel was in the private sector, he had a considerably longer leash, given that the government was not signing his paycheck anymore. Clearly he was valuable to North American Aviation: the company made him director of rocket-engine research. But from the moment he left government service, Riedel was a serious thorn in the CIA’s side. A year after the UFO conference, the CIA was still keeping close tabs on Dr. Riedel. In early 1953, the Agency trailed Riedel to one of his lectures in Los Angeles. There, they were shocked to learn that the Paperclip scientist and his UFO-minded colleagues were “going to execute a planned ‘hoax’ over the Los Angeles area in order to test the reaction and reliability of the public in general to unusual aerial phenomena.” Mention of a planned hoax went up the chain of command at the CIA and set off alarms in its upper echelons. In a secret memo dated February 9, 1953, declassified in 1993, the CIA’s director of the Office of Scientific Intelligence expressed outrage over the company Riedel now kept. But because he was no longer a Paperclip, there was little the CIA could do except follow his moves and those of the men he associated with.
The CIA had also been trailing a colleague of Riedel named George P. Sutton, a fellow North American Aviation rocket scientist and ufologist. When Sutton gave a lecture entitled “Rockets Behind the Iron Curtain,” the CIA was shocked to learn that the flying saucer group seemed to know more about UFO sightings inside the Soviet Union than the entire team of CIA agents who had been tasked with monitoring that same information.
Ever since Bedell Smith had taken office in 1950, he’d expressed frustration over how little information the CIA was able to get on UFO reports inside Russia. Joseph Stalin, it appeared, kept all information about UFOs out of the press. Between 1947 and 1952, CIA analysts monitoring the Soviet press found only one single mention of UFOs, in an editorial column that briefly referred to UFOs in the United States. So how did Riedel’s group know more about Soviet UFO reports than the CIA knew?
Sufficiently concerned, the CIA instructed Riedel’s Paperclip handlers to get him in line. His handler “suggested politely and perhaps indirectly to Dr. Riedel that he disassociate himself from official membership on CSI.” But the obstinate scientist refused to cease and desist. What the consequences were for Riedel remains unclear. Whether or not Riedel and his fellow ufologist pulled off their hoax and how he and his colleagues were able to so freely gather information about Soviet UFOs and Soviet rockets behind the Iron Curtain is secreted away in Riedel’s Project Paperclip file, most of which remains classified, even after more than fifty years.
By 1957, according to the CIA monograph “CIA’s Role in the Study of UFOs,” the U-2s accounted for more than half of all UFO sightings reported in the continental United States. Odarenko had been unsuccessful in his bid to be “relieved” of his UFO responsibilities and instead got to work creating CIA policy regarding UFOs. He sent a secret memo to the director of the Office of Scientific Intelligence outlining how he believed the Agency should handle reports of UFOs:
Keep current files on UFOs: “maintain current knowledge of sightings of unidentified flying objects.”
Deny that the CIA kept current files about UFOs by stating that “the project [was] inactive.”
Divide the explainable UFOs, meaning the U-2 flights, from the inexplicable UFOs: “segregate references to recognizable and explainable phenomena from those which come under the definition of ‘unidentified flying objects.’”
The Agency’s concerted effort to conceal from Congress and the public its interest in UFOs would, in coming decades, open up a Pandora’s box and cause credibility issues for the CIA. “The concealment of CIA interest [in UFOs] contributed greatly to later charges of a CIA conspiracy and cover-up,” wrote Gerald K. Haines, the historian for the National Reconnaissance Office and someone who is often introduced as the CIA’s expert on the matter. But to get the UFO monkey off his back, Allen Dulles began a “psychological warfare” campaign of his own. When letters came in from concerned citizens about the sightings, the CIA’s policy was to ignore them. When letters came in from UFO groups, the CIA’s policy was to monitor the individuals in the group. When letters came in from congressmen or senators, such as the one from Ohio congressman Gordon Scherer in September of 1955, the CIA’s
