Documents / FOIA release
This 1968 Central Intelligence Agency memo passes along two Soviet articles distributed by the Novosti press agency (APN) that take opposite positions on UFOs. In the February 1968 issue of Soviet Life, Felix Zigel sets out Soviet sightings, argues that the Tunguska body may have been an artificial craft, and calls for scientific study. The other article, by Villen Lyustiberg, says UFOs are a myth that the US uses as propaganda. The memo finds it ironic that Soviet media published both views.
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
The next invasion of saucers was in 1965-1966, when 35 American advisers in South Vietnam were quickly replaced by half-a-million-strong army equipped with the latest arms and intending to rout the National-Liberation Front within two weeks and when the President of the United States of America, without declaring war and in violation the constitution of his own country, gave the order that the peaceful population of North Vietnam be subjected to brutal bombings. In short, when newspaper circulation drops, when readers get tired of economics and politics and when they are to be diverted from "irrelevant" questions, the Western businessmen resort to three reliable, "always fresh" sensations: Flying Saucers, the Sea Serpent (sometimes it is substituted by the Loch Ness Lake monster), and the Snow Man. It is much nicer to read about mysterious craft from Venus than to think of the future, of the wage freeze, of growing prices or unemployment. Statesmen in imperialist countries resort to this "information" quite deliberately. For them the flying saucers are not a myth, but a well-camouflaged means for misinforming the people. And nothing but that. (Moskovsky Komsomolets, February 16. In ful THE END
FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 11 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.