Documents / FOIA release
This unclassified Department of State airgram, drafted by First Secretary of Embassy C. A. Squire in March 1968 and held in NSA files, forwards a Moskovskiy Komsomolets article of February 16, 1968 by Novosti science commentator Villen Lyustiberg. The article says flying saucers do not exist. It attributes the Mantell death to a Navy balloon and calls Adamski a fraud. It argues that Western businessmen and statesmen use saucer stories to distract the public. The embassy notes that the article contradicts earlier Soviet coverage.
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
are sorry to say, there is more harm than use in that. The Americans Lesly, and Adamski are the most outright frauds among them. Using their "good friendly relations" with strangers from other planets, the enterprising businessmen "visited" Mars, the Moon and Venus, learned from our cosmic neighbours to treat by simple and accessible methods such diseases as cancer, glaucoma, hypertension and others which afflict the human race. Their lectures, motion-pictures, books and medical practice have brought them many hundred thousand dollars out of the pockets of trusting listeners and patients already. We may trace a clearly defined regularity in the appearance of large numbers of flying saucers. And, strange as it might seem, this regularity is closely connected with earthly events. The first "oycle" of four years began in 1947. The number of saucers always grows sharply on the eve of presidential elections in the USA. This is difficult to explain. Maybe people on other planets lay bets as to who will win in the next elections -- the republicans or the democrats. Perhaps, these saucers appear in order to divert the voters' thoughts from the again non-fulfilled presidential programme and promises to make the country a "great" and "prospering" society. There is another cycle. True, it is not determined by time. Seucers flooded the earth's atmosphere in 1951, in the months when the American troops were waging a ruthless, annihilating war against the Korean People's Democratic Republic. 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 Kcssonolets, February 16. In full.)
FOIA release, from the nsa 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. 5 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.