Documents / FOIA release
This CIA release, approved for release on 2 April 2001, reproduces a magazine article by astronomer J. Allen Hynek called "The UFO Gap." Hynek warns that the Soviet Union may be quietly studying UFOs while the United States lags behind. He recounts his work as a consultant to Project Blue Book, criticizes the Air Force's handling of cases, and proposes rating reports for strangeness and witness credibility. He also calls for rapid-response camera teams and a 24-hour UFO-1000 reporting center.
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
america's leading ufologist just back from an international astronomers' conference behind the iron curtain warns that a new soviet investigative approach could cost us the race to solve the flying-saucer riddle article By J. ALLEN HYNEK "RUSSIANS SOLVE UFO MYSTERY." For years, I have opened The New York Times with the fear skittering around the back of my mind that I might find that quote. In my occasional dreams, the story under the headline explains that the Russians have found some previously unthought-of, unstartling explanation for unidentified flying objects; or, worse, that they have made first contact with an alien civilization conducting reconnaissance missions to our planet. Either story would shake America so hard that the launching of Sputnik in 1957 would appear in retrospect as important as a Russian announcement of a particularly large wheat crop. The possibility of a Russian breakthrough on the UFO problem is unlikely, if we believe official Russian statements that the problem does not exist. At last August's XIII General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union in Prague, one of the Russian delegates answered my query about Soviet UFO study with a derisive laugh and the rather absurd comment, "If flying saucers really exist, why aren't they buzzing over Prague right now?" The same man, a senior Soviet astronomer, declined to attend a meeting I had organized to discuss the UFO problem, saying that since the UFOs did not exist, there was nothing to discuss. One of his colleagues slipped and said that Russian scientists were not permitted to discuss unidentified flying objects. Although we have reports of UFO sightings and phenomena from some 70 countries, the Soviet Union and the other socialist countries have not contributed UFO reports. Judging by past Soviet behavior, this curious silence on a subject of increasing importance to science and government means only one thing; and, indeed, there are some clues to actual Soviet study of the problem. A Russian astronomer admitted in Prague to an American scientist that he believed a problem existed. Another American scientist recently received a note from the secretary of an official Soviet organization for the study of unidentified flying objects. And the Russians announced at Prague that they would participate in a future international conference on interstellar communication. Even more significant was the recent publication of the first article in a Russian magazine by a Soviet scientist discussing the strong possibility of the existence of unidentified flying objects. That article, in the youth magazine Cmena, stated that the Soviet Union is preparing a book-length study called Inhabited Cosmos, the chief editor of which will be the vice-president of the U. S. S. R. Academy of Sciences, and that a chapter to be written by Felix U. Zigel (author of the Cmena article) will consider the UFO problem. Zigel's article concludes: "There exists almost universally a definite type of phenomenon known as the phenomenon of the UFOs. The nature of this phenomenon is as yet not resolved and none of the existing hypotheses can claim a final solution to the problem. In such a situation, the correct approach appears to be to
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. 9 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.