the A-12 Oxcart flying from Groom Lake was repeatedly mistaken for a UFO. Not since the U-2 had been flying from there were so many UFO reports being dumped on CIA analysts’ desks. The first instance happened only four days after Oxcart’s first official flight, on April 30, 1962. It was a little before 10:00 a.m., and a NASA X-15 rocket plane was making a test flight in the air corridor that ran from Dryden Flight Research Center, in California, to Ely, Nevada, during the same period of time when an A12 was making a test flight in the vicinity at a different altitude. From inside the X-15 rocket plane, test pilot Joe Walker snapped photographs, a task that was part of his mission flight. The X-15 was not a classified program and NASA often released publicity photographs taken during flights, as they did with Walker’s photographs that day. But NASA had not scrutinized the photos closely before their public release, and officials missed the fact that a tiny “UFO” appeared in the corner of one of Walker’s pictures. In reality, it was the Oxcart, but the press identified it as a UFO. A popular theory among ufologists about why aliens would want to visit Earth in the first place has to do with Earthlings’ sudden advance of technologies beginning with the atomic bomb. For this group, it follows that the X-15 —the first manned vehicle to get to the edge of space (the highest X15 flight was 354,200 feet — almost 67 miles above sea level) would be particularly interesting to beings from outer space.
Two weeks after the incident, the CIA’s new director, John McCone, received a secret, priority Teletype on the matter stating that “on 30 April, A-12 was in air at altitude of 30,000 feet from 0948-106 local with concurrent X-15 Test” and that “publicity releases mention unidentified objects on film taken on X-15 flight.” This message, which was not declassified until 2007, illustrates the kind of UFO-related reports that inundated the CIA at this time. In total, 2,850 Oxcart flights would be flown out of Area 51 over a period of six years. Exactly how many of these flights generated UFO reports is not known, but the ones that prompted UFO sightings created the same kinds of problems for the CIA as they had in the previous decade with the U-2, only with elements that were seemingly more inexplicable. With Oxcart, commercial airline pilots flying over Nevada or California would look up and see the shiny, reflective bottom of the Oxcart whizzing by high overhead at triple-sonic speeds and think, UFO. How could they not? When the Oxcart flew at 2,300 miles per hour, it was going approximately five times faster than a commercial airplane — aircraft speeds that were unheard-of in those days. Most Oxcart sightings came right after sunset, when the lower atmosphere was shadowed in dusk. Seventeen miles higher up, the sun was still shining brightly on the Oxcart. The spy plane’s broad titanium wings coupled with its triangle-shaped rear fuselage — reflecting the sun’s rays higher in the sky than aircraft were known to fly — could understandably cause alarm.
The way the CIA dealt with this new crop of sightings was similar to how it handled the U-2s’. Colonel Hugh “Slip” Slater, Area 51’s base commander during this time, explains “commercial pilots would report sightings to the FAA. The flights would be met in California, or wherever they landed, by FBI agents who would make passengers sign inadvertent disclosure forms.” End of story, or so the CIA hoped. Instead, interest in UFOs only continued to grow. The public again put pressure on Congress to find out if the federal government was involved in covering up UFOs. When individual congressmen asked the CIA if it was involved in UFOs, the Agency would always say no.
On May 10, 1966, the most trusted man in America, Walter Cronkite, hosted a CBS news special report called UFO: Friend, Foe or Fantasy? To an audience of millions of Americans, Cronkite announced that the CIA was part of a government cover-up regarding UFOs. The CIA had been actively analyzing UFO data despite repeatedly denying to Congress that it was doing so, Cronkite said. He was absolutely correct. The Agency had been tracking UFO sightings around the world since the 1950s and actively lying about its interest in them. The CIA could not reveal the classified details of the U-2 program — the existence of which had been outed by the Gary Powers shoot-down but the greater extent of which would remain classified until 1998—nor could it reveal anything related to the Oxcart program and those sightings. That remained top secret until 2007. In Cronkite’s exposй, the CIA looked like liars.
It got worse for the Agency. The Cronkite program also reopened a twelve-year-old can of UFO worms known as the Robertson Panel report of 1953. Dr. Robertson appeared on a CBS Reports program and disclosed that the UFO inquiry bearing his name had in fact been sponsored by the CIA beginning in 1952, despite repeated denials by officials. The House Armed Services Committee held hearings on UFOs in July of 1966, which resulted in the Air Force laying blame for the cover-up on the CIA. “The Air Force… approached the Agency for declassification,” testified secretary of the Air Force Harold Brown. Brown stated that while there was no evidence that “strangers from outer space” had been visiting Earth, it was time for the CIA to come clean on its secret studies regarding UFOs.
According to CIA historian Gerald Haines, “The Agency again refused to budge. Karl H. Weber, Deputy Director of OSI [Office of Scientific Intelligence], wrote the Air Force that ‘we are most anxious that further publicity not be given to the information that the panel was sponsored by the CIA.’” Weber’s words, said Haines, were “shortsighted and ill considered” because the Air Force in turn gave that information to a journalist named John Lear, the science editor of the Saturday Review. Lear’s September 1966 article “The Disputed CIA Document on UFO’s” put yet another spotlight on the CIA’s ongoing cover-up of UFOs. Lear, unsympathetic to the idea of extraterrestrials, demanded the release of the report. The CIA held firm that its information was classified, and the full, unsanitized facts regarding the Agency’s role in unidentified flying objects remains classified as of 2011.
The public was outraged by the layers of obfuscation. The year 1966 was the height of the Vietnam War, and the federal government’s ability to tell the truth was under fire. Pressure on Congress to make more information known did not let up. And so once again, as it had been in the late 1940s, the Air Force was officially “put in charge” of investigating individual UFO claims. The point of having the Air Force in charge, said Congress, was to oversee the untrustworthy CIA. One of the great ironies at work in this was that only a handful of Air Force generals were cleared for knowledge about Oxcart flights blazing in and out of Area 51, which meant that to most Air Force investigators, Oxcart sightings were in fact unidentified flying objects. Further feeding public discord, several key Air Force officials who had previously been involved in investigating UFOs now believed the Air Force was also engaged in covering up UFOs. Several of these men left government service to write books about UFOs and help the public persuade Congress to do more.
For more than two hundred years, since the invention of the hot-air balloon, people all over the world have been terrified of unidentified flying objects because their very existence makes man feel vulnerable from an attack from above. The War of the Worlds radio-broadcast phenomenon was far from the first such incident. The first pictorially recorded panic over a UFO event occurred in August of 1783, shortly after two French brothers named Joseph and Etienne Montgolfier secured patronage from the king of France to design and fly a hot-air balloon — the eighteenth-century version of a modern-day defense contract. During one of the Montgolfiers’ early flight tests, a balloon got caught in a thunderstorm and crashed in a small French village called Gonesse. The peasants that inhabited the town thought the balloon was a monster attacking them from the sky. A pen-and-ink drawing from that time shows men with pitchforks and scythes ripping the crashed balloon to shreds. Townsfolk in the background can be seen running away, flailing their arms above their heads in fear. From this story, it is easy to see that with any new form of flight comes the archetypal fear of an attack from above. In the more than two hundred years since, these fears have taken dramatic twists and turns.
Twenty years into the American jet age, in the mid-1960s, fears of unidentified flying objects continued to shape cultural thinking and spawn industries. By then, millions of Americans correctly believed that various factions inside the U.S. government were actively engaged in a cover-up regarding UFOs. Many citizens believed the government was trying to cover up the existence of extraterrestrial beings; people did not consider the fact that by overfocusing on Martians, they would pay less attention to other UFO realities, namely, that these were sightings of radical aircraft made by men. By the late 1960s, the two government agencies at the forefront of citizens’ wrath — the CIA and the Air Force — had been using cover and deception as tools to keep classified programs out of the public eye. Cover conceals the truth, and deception conveys false information. From cover stories about airplane crashes to deception campaigns about covert UFO study programs, both organizations had created complex webs of lies. How exactly a deception campaign works on ordinary people is best exemplified by this factual, dawn-of-the- jet-age U.S. Army Air Corps tale.
In 1942, when the jet engine was first being developed, the Army Air Corps desired to keep the radical new form of flight a secret until the military was ready to unveil the technology on its own terms. Before the jet engine, airplanes flew by propellers, and before 1942, for most people it was a totally foreign concept for an airplane to fly without the blades of a propeller spinning around. With the jet engine, in order to maintain silence on this technological breakthrough, the Army Air Corps entered into a rather benign strategic deception campaign involving
