Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency excerpt, dated 28 June 2004, comes from the agency history The CIA and Overhead Reconnaissance: The U-2 and OXCART Programs. It says that U-2 flights above 60,000 feet caused a sharp rise in UFO reports, mostly from airline pilots who saw sunlight glinting off the planes' silver wings. According to the text, Air Force Operation BLUE BOOK investigators compared these reports with CIA U-2 flight logs. The history concludes that U-2 and OXCART flights accounted for more than half of all UFO reports in the late 1950s and most of the 1960s.
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Not only did the airline pilots report their sightings to air-traffic controllers, but they and ground-based observers also wrote letters to the Air Force unit at Wright Air Development Command in Dayton charged with investigating such phenomena. This, in turn, led to the Air Force's Operation BLUE BOOK. Based at Wright-Patterson, the operation collected all reports of UFO sightings. Air Force investigators then attempted to explain such sightings by linking them to natural phenomena. BLUE BOOK investigators regularly called on the Agency's Project Staff in Washington to check reported UFO sightings against U-2 flight logs. This enabled the investigators to eliminate the majority of the UFO reports, although they could not reveal to the letter writers the true cause of the UFO sightings. U-2 and later OXCART flights accounted for more than one-half of all UFO reports during the late 1950s and most of the 1960s. $ ^{49} $
## HIRING U-2 PILOTS
In authorizing the U-2 project, President Eisenhower told DCI Dulles that he wanted the pilots of these planes to be non-US citizens. It was his belief that, should a U-2 come down in hostile territory, it would be much easier for the United States to deny any responsibility for the activity if the pilot was not an American.
The initial effort to find U-2 pilots was assigned to the Directorate of Plans Air/Maritime Division (AMD). The DDP had excellent contacts with
which had a number of pilots trained by the US Air Force. AMD operatives, therefore, contacted and asked that discreet inquiries be made to see if any US-trained fliers were interested in a high-paying covert project. Seven pilots were selected and brought to the United States for training. Meanwhile, AMD hired an expatriate Polish flier residing in England, and he also came to the United States for training.
In theory the use of foreign pilots seemed quite logical; in practice it did not work out. The Pole could barely speak English and could only fly light aircraft. Language was also a barrier for the
although several were good fliers. Because Lieutenant Colonel Geary had taken a class of cadets through flying school at Randolph AFB in 1950, he got the job of training the
25X1 Secret
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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. 2 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.