Comments and Suggestions of UFO Panel, 10. “Potential related dangers. c. Subjectivity of public to mass hysteria and greater vulnerability to possible enemy psychological warfare.”
15. “hysterical mass behavior”: Haines, “CIA’s Role,” 72.
16. the publishers of Life magazine: H. B. Darrach and Robert Ginna, “Have We Visitors from Space?” Life magazine, April 7, 1952.
17. originally called Project Saucer: Haines, “CIA’s Role,” 67–68.
18. Green Fireballs: Project Twinkle, Final Report, November 27, 1951.
19. curious members of Congress: Interview with Stanton Friedman.
20. Air Force concluded for the National Security Council: U.S. Air Force Air Materiel Command, “Unidentified Aerial Objects; Project SIGN.”
21. UFO convention in Los Angeles: “Minutes of the Meeting of Civilian Saucer Investigations.”
22. Dr. Riedel had been working on Hitler’s bacteria bomb: Neufeld, Von Braun, 206.
23. There were rumors of “problems”: Ibid., 216-22.
24. “going to execute a planned ‘hoax’”: CIA Office Memorandum to Assistant for Operations, OSI, From Chief Contact Division, CO,
Date: 9 February 1953, Subject California Committee for Saucer Investigations.
25. set off alarms in its upper echelons: Special National Intelligence Estimate 100-2-57, No. 19, “Soviet Capabilities for Deception,” Submitted by the Director of Central Intelligence, 16 pages. Based on recommendations made by the Technical Capabilities Panel, chaired by Dr. Killian, the recommendation read: “We need to examine intelligence data more broadly, or to invent some new technique, for the discovery of hoaxes.”
26. trailing a colleague of Riedel named George P. Sutton: Curiously, the CIA document referenced above names George Sutton as a Riedel colleague and ufologist. Was he a plant? Was he turned? Did he reform on his own? According to the Smithsonian Papers, National Air and Space Museum, Archives Division, MRC 322, Washington, DC, 20560, in the G. Paul Sutton collection: “George Paul Sutton (1920-) was an aerospace engineer and manager. He received degrees from Los Angeles City College (AA, 1940) and the California Institute of Technology (BS, 1942; MS [ME], 1943) before going to work as a development engineer for the Rocketdyne Division of North American Aviation. He remained at Rocketdyne into the late 1960s, while also sitting as Hunsaker Professor of Aeronautical Engineering at MIT (1958-59) and serving as Chief Scientist, Advanced Research Projects Agency [ARPA] and Division Director, Institute of Defense Analysis for the Department of Defense (1959-60). Following his work at Rocketdyne he joined the technical staff at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.”
27. Agency should handle reports of UFOs: Odarenko, Office Memorandum, August 8, 1955.
28. Allen Dulles as an arrogant public servant: Letter from Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles to Congressman Gordon Scherer, October 4, 1955, ER-7-4372A.
Interviews: Colonel Slater, Hervey Stockman, Ken Collins, Frank Murray, Tony Bevacqua, Colonel Pizzo, Edward Lovick, Ray Goudey
1. protocols that are also top secret: Correspondence with Cargill Hall. The Federation of American Scientists provides a nonclassified Central Intelligence Directive from 1995 at
http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/dcid1-19.
2. bemoaned the president’s science advisers: Welzenbach, “Science and Technology,” 16.
3. Sage Control: Interview with Colonel Slater.
4. “It was like something out of fiction”: Interview with Hervey Stockman. Also sourced in this section with Stockman are passages from his compelling oral history, a project that was spearheaded by his son Peter Stockman and the results of which are “Conversations with Colonel Hervey S. Stockman,” edited by Ann Paden and Earl Haney (not published).
5. The identities of the pilots were equally concealed: Interviews with Ken Collins, Frank Murray, Tony Bevacqua, and Hervey Stockman.
6. NII-88: Brzezinski, Red Moon Rising, 22–23, 26–30, 39–44, 98, 102; Harford, Korolev, 77–80, 93, 95, 117. Also called Scientific Research Institute-88, which included the former NII-1, per Stalin on May 13, 1946.
7. Stalin declared Sergei Korolev’s name a state secret: Harford, Korolev, 1.
8. multibillion-dollar espionage platforms: Ibid., 93. Harford quotes Gyorgi Vetrov, Korolev’s Russian biographer, as saying about NII-88’s radical transformation: “Hardly anyone suspected that the plant was destined to become a production base for such complicated and
demanding technologies as rockets and space vehicles for traveling to other plants.”
9. Russia’s version of America’s Paperclip scientists: Ibid., 75. In addition to the Army intelligence CIC memos that I cited earlier regarding Fritz Wendel, Harford wrote “perhaps as many as 5,000 skilled Germans… were literally kidnapped and shipped with their families, by trains, freight cars and trucks to workplaces outside of Moscow.”
10. Operation Dragon Return: Goodman, Spying on the Nuclear Bear, 177.
11. “cannot cope with contingencies”: Brzezinski, Red Moon Rising, 81.
12. LeMay scrambled nearly a thousand B-47 bombers: Ibid., 25. The entirety of these Arctic overflights is still classified. Missions are written about in Burrows, By Any Means Necessary, 208-15, and in Bamford, Body of Secrets, 35–36. The National Security Agency cosponsored many of the ELINT missions. In Secret Empire, Philip Taubman wrote, “At least 252 air crewmen were shot down on spy flights between 1950 and 1970, most directed against the Soviet Union. It is certain that 90 of these men survived, for they were either rescued by American forces or their capture but the Soviet Union or another country was confirmed. But the fate of 138 men is unknown,” 47.
13. top secret missions as part of Operation Home Run: Interview with Colonel Sam Pizzo.
14. “Soviet leaders may have become convinced”: CIA Staff, “Analysis of the Soviet Union 1947–1999,” 27.
15. President Eisenhower was gravely concerned: Top Secret Memorandum of Conference with the President, July 8, 1959. With Dulles and Bissell present at the meeting, USAF Brigadier General A. J. Goodpaster observed, “There remains in the President’s mind the question of whether we were getting to the point where we must
decide if we are trying to prepare to fight a war, or trying to prevent one.” Office of the Staff Secretary, Subject Series, Alphabetical Subseries, Box 15, Intelligence Matters.
16. Richard Bissell promised the president: Oral history interview with Richard M. Bissell Jr. by Theodore A. Wilson and Richard D. McKinzie, East Hartford, Connecticut, July 9, 1971.
17. Alexander Orlov related: Orlov, “The U-2 Program,” 5-14. 18. “We will shoot down uninvited guests”: Ibid., 7.
19. he would be even more enraged: Ibid.; Brzezinski, Red Moon Rising, 124-35.
20. CIA men armed with machine guns: Interview with Hervey Stockman.
21. Eisenhower’s cows: P. Taubman, Secret Empire, 167.
22. Stockman approached Russia’s submarine city: Stockman also recalled in our interview, “This was good solid proof that what so many had thought to be over there, that there was this huge, dominant, strategic bomber force for the Soviet Union, [proved] not to be there.”
23. Herbert Miller wrote a triumphant memo: Declassified in 2000, the memo is called Top Secret Memorandum for: Project Director, Subject: Suggestions re the Intelligence Value of Aquatone, July 17, 1956. Three more U-2 flights followed Hervey Stockman’s. On July 10, 1956, the Soviet Union filed a note of protest. Later that same day, Eisenhower ordered Bissell to stop all overflights until further notice. Miller’s memo summarizes the intelligence value of the U-2 flights for the president and argues that the danger of stopping them was far greater than of continuing them.
24. Khrushchev told his son, Sergei: W. Taubman, Khrushchev, 443.
25. “lost enthusiasm” for the CIA’s aerial espionage program: Pedlow and Welzenbach, Central Intelligence Agency, 110. Further,
the president noted that if Russia were to make these kinds of incursions over U.S. airspace, “The reaction would be drastic.” Also from Andrew J. Goodpaster, memorandum on the record, July 19, 1956. The president expressed concern that if the public found out about the overflights, they would be shocked. “Soviet protests would be one thing, any loss of confidence by our own people would be quite another.”
