Documents / FOIA release

Nothing But the Facts on UFOs or Which Novosti Writer Do You Read? (with 2 Articles Attached)

Central Intelligence Agency · 1968-04-09 · 8 pages · text by GLM-OCR

This Central Intelligence Agency memo, dated 9 April 1968, forwards two articles from the Soviet news agency Novosti (APN) that take opposite views on UFOs. Felix Zigel's February 1968 Soviet Life article treats UFOs seriously and cites Soviet sightings and the Tunguska explosion. Villen Lyustiberg's article dismisses them as a myth and claims the U.S. publicizes them to divert attention. The memo notes the irony of such disagreement appearing in Soviet media.

  • p. 4 …It was sent for analysis to the Pentagon and disappeared there. Nothing but a saucer put…

Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.

an injured man and most crashed before the eyes of witnesses. But "heaving spit out" several pieces of metal, it levelled out its course and flew off. Delivered to the police, the metal proved to be ordinary tin.

An abandoned silvery disc was found in the deep rock-coal seams in Norwegian coal mines on Spitzbergen. It was pierced and marked by micrometeor impacts and bore all traces of having performed a long space voyage. It was sent for analysis to the Pentagon and disappeared there.

Nothing but a saucer put out of commission a high-voltage power transmission line in 1965 and thus plunged several large American cities into darkness for six hours.

But the most thrilling masterpiece of this sort was probably the "Interview w. a Man from Venus" published at the close of 1967 by the West German Stern magazine. This materialized blue-eyed "superman", a version of Nietzsche's "blong beast", proved to be a secret service agent of the Pentagon. He was 190 cm tall, spoke excellent English (it was English indeed!) and could breathe freely in our atmosphere without any devices. His modest fibre suitcase contained an unusual silvery suit, flexible like silk and so hard that a diamond drill broke off it.

The man from Venus said that he could walk freely in such a suit over the surface of the hottest stars, ignoring all powerful gravitational fields.

Maybe these "facts" will do?

## How Can They Be Studied?

It is easier to ask this question, than to answer it. These flying saucers -- they are like Our Lady: they appear to those who believe in them. And they persistently fail to show themselves to air observation posts, meteorologists and astronomers, i.e. precisely to those who can give us accurate information and trustworthy descriptions of a flying object.

Experiments that do not repeat themselves, or the chance appearance of a phenomenon always either handicap the possibility of investigation considerably or exclude it altogether.

Nowhere in the world is there EVEN ONE trustworthy stereoscopic photograph making it possible to trace from two points simultaneously the outlines of a solid flying object clearly. All photographs that exist have been made with single-lens cameras and always leave a margin for doubt.

A series of such photographs amazingly resembles a straw hat with a black silk ribbon, thrown into the air. Others undoubtedly prove to be internegatives obtained from two combined slides, for instance, that of a landscape and that of a strangely designed craft drawn on white paper. Modern photographing techniques allow photographs to be produced which no expert will ever prove to be counterfeit. They are real. But they do not show strangers from space; they show quite ordinary earthly objects unexpectedly foreshortened -- pots, pans, plastic toys, and the like.

Are there photographs which evoke no doubts whatsoever? Yes, there are. They always show shining objects of a circular or oval shape with vague outlines. Most

Cases discussed

About this file

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. 8 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.