Documents / FOIA release
This CIA-released file, dated 2014-06-12, preserves an Evening Gazette newspaper article by Bulkley Griffin. It reports that House Leader John W. McCormack suggested House hearings on Unidentified Flying Objects. McCormack said he believed some UFOs are real and that the Air Force had not released all its information. He noted objects seen on visual and radar at once. The article also says Vice Admiral R. H. Hillenkoetter called for an urgent Congressional investigation.
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Date: FER16 1951 # McCormack Asks By BULKLEY GRIFFIN Chief of The Evening Gazette Washington Bureau WASHINGTON House Leader John W. McCormack has suggested the holding of House hearings on the Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs). McCormack made it clear that he believes some of these strange objects are real, and that he has never been satisfied that they are the product of imagination, that they are all familiar objects mistakenly identified. maintained that all the sightings are explainable as familiar objects, such as stars, meteors, balloons and airplanes, that have been mistaken for something extraordinary. "I feel that the Air Force has not been giving out all the information it has on Unidentified Flying Objects," the Massachusetts congressman commented today. High Stage of Development "These UFOs," said McCormack, speaking of the minority of sightings that can't satisfactorily be explained away, "must be in a very high stage of development and of perfection. Whether they come from some other planet we don't know. We can't say they come from another planet till we find life on another planet. On the evidence we have, you can't pinpoint their source, where they come from." that some UFOs have been seen visually and on radar at the same moment and at the same spot. "You can't put it down to atmospheric phenomena," he tersely remarked. The Air Force has generally maintained that radar sightings have been due to an atmospheric phenomenon, the so-called temperature inversion, which involves a layer of warm air over a cold layer, resulting in bending and distorting the radar return. "The House leader concluded some, in our minds, that there "It might be well for the House were some objects flying around Committee on Science and Astro nautics to hold further hearings, In the light of the state either executive session or open hearings, to bring the matter up to date." McCormack explained that of our Central Intelligence Agency, which is understood to have Committee on Space - McCor maintained constant touch with mack chairmaned this committee the UFO situation, last summer out of which came the National asked for a Congressional investigation of the UFOs. Vice Admiral R. H. Hillenkoetter, who headed our top secret agency in the earlier years of the Unidentified Flying Objects, termed such an investigation to be "urgent." He also gave it as his judgment that the Air Force is withholding information on the matter. Aeronautics and Space Administration legislation and which was the predecessor of the present House Science and Astronautics Committee held executive, or closed, hearings on the Unidentified Flying Objects. Some Unexplainable We could not get much information at that time although it was pretty well established by
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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. 1 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.