Documents / Official release
This is a Secret History Staff monograph by Gregory W. Pedlow and Donald E. Welzenbach of the Central Intelligence Agency, published in 1992. It gives a history of the CIA's manned overhead reconnaissance program from 1954 to 1974, covering the development and operation of the U-2 and the A-12 OXCART aircraft. It covers overflights of the Soviet Union, the 1960 downing of Francis Gary Powers, and later operations. One section is titled "U-2s, UFOs, and Operation BLUE BOOK."
From the source:Release of 2026-06-12 This CIA History Staff document chronicles the complete history of the U-2 and OXCART (A-12) high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft programs from 1954 to 1974, detailing their development, operations over the Soviet Union and other targets worldwide, the famous downing of Francis Gary Powers in 1960, organizational reforms following that incident, and the eventual transfer of operations from CIA to Air Force control. A more redacted version of this document has been available on CIA's public website.
“US Navy”15 pages
322 Seeret NOFOflN Chapter 7 SeePet technical means of collection. As soon as the U-2 began flying over the Soviet Union, its photographs became the most important source of intelligence available. The flood of information that the U-2 missions gathered led to a major expansion of the Agency's photointerpretation capabilities, which finally resulted in the creation of the National Photographic Interpretation Center to serve the entire intelligence community. The U-2's tremendous success as an intelligence-gathering sys tem led the Agency to search for follow-on systems that could con tinue to obtain highly reliable information in large quantities. Thus, the CIA sponsored the development of the world's most advanced aircraft-the OXCART-and also pioneered research into photo satellites. Less than a decade after the U-2 program began, the Agency's new emphasis on technical means of collection had brought about the creation of a new science-oriented directorate, which would ultimately rival in manpower and budget the Agency's other three directorates combined. The negative aspect of this new emphasis on technology is exploding costs. The Agency's first strategic reconnaissance aircraft, the U-2, cost less than $1 million apiece. With the U-2's successor, the OXCART, each aircraft cost more than $20 million, and the cost explosion has continued with each new generation of reconnaissance satellites. Perhaps the greatest significance of the CIA's entry into the world of overhead reconnaissance in December 1954 was the new na tional policy that it signaled. Although US military aircraft had fre quently violated Soviet airspace in the decade after World War II, such shallow-penetration overflights, concentrating primarily on or der-of-battle data, had been authorized and controlled by US field commanders, not by the President. In the autumn of 1954, however, President Dwight D. Eisenhower-determined to avoid another Pearl Harbor-authorized the construction of a new aircraft designed solely to fly over the Soviet Union and gather strategic intelligence. Peacetime reconnaissance flights over the territory of a potential en emy power thus became national policy. Moreover, to reduce the dan ger of conflict, the President entrusted this mission not to the armed forces, but to a civilian agency-the CIA. From that time forward, overhead reconnaissance has been one of the CIA's most important missions.
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Official release, from the pursue collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 406 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.