UFOs: The Untold Story (NSA-held copy)

Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.

Numerous daily updates kept the Joint Chiefs of Staff informed of these incursions by U.F.O.'s in the fall of 1975. Representatives of the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency well as a handful of other government desks received copies of the National Military Command Center's reports on the incidents. One report said that an unidentified object demonstrated a clear intent in the weapons storage area." Though Air Force records show that the C.I.A. was notified several times of these penetrations over nuclear missile and bomber bases, the agency has acknowledged only one such notification. Subsequent investigations by the Air Force into the sightings at Loring Air Force Base, Maine, where the remarkable series events began, did not reveal cause for the sightings.

## Q

Despite official pronouncements for decades that F.O.'s were nothing more an misidentified aerial objs and as such were no use for alarm, recently declassified U.F.O. records from C.I.A., the F.B.I. and other federal agencies indicate at, ever since U.F.O.'s made their appearance in our skies the 1940's, the phenomenon is aroused much serious bead-the-scenes concern in official circles. Details of the intelligence community's project of U.F.O.'s have emerged over the past few years with the release of long-withheld Government records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. Though these papers fail to resolve the U.F.O. enigma, they do manage to dispel many popular notions about the U.F.O. controversy, as well as give substance to a number of others.

Official records now available appear to put to rest doubts that the Government knew more about U.F.O.'s than it has claimed over the past 32 years. From the start, it has been convinced that most U.F.O. sightings could be explained in terms of misidentified balloons, cloud formations, airplanes, ball lightning, meteors and other natural phenomena.

But the papers also show that the Government remains perplexed about the nagging residue of unexplained U.F.O. sightings, which amount to approximately 10 percent of all U.F.O. sightings reported. Do they pose a threat to national security? Are they just a funny-looking cover for an airborne Soviet presence? Even the possibility that these unknowns could be evidence of extraterrestrial visitations has been given serious attention in Government circles.

While official interest in U.F.O.'s has long been thought to be strictly the concern of the Air Force, the bulk of whose records has been open to public view for nearly a decade, the recently released papers on U.F.O.'s indicate otherwise. The Departments of the Army, Navy, State and Defense, and the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the F.B.I., the C.I.A. and even the Atomic Energy Commission produced U.F.O. records over the years. Many of these agencies still do, and many of their documents remain classified. But it is the C.I.A. that appears to have played the key role in the controversy, and may even be responsible for the Government's conduct in U.F.O. investigations throughout the years.

U.F.O.'s have been the province of the nation's intelligence community ever since the beginning of the cold war, when the notion took hold that some flying saucers might actually represent a secret, technologically advanced, foreign weapons system. "Every time we were concerned," recalls Herbert Scoville Jr., a former chief of the C.I.A.'s Office of Scientific Intelligence, "it was because we wanted to know: Did the Russians do it?"

As the cold war gave rise to the fears of the McCarthy era.

even into the surveillance of sever private U.F.O. organizations (as many of their members have long insisted) and to the scrutiny of dozens of individuals suspected of subversive U.F.O. activities.

Perhaps most telling of all, the Government documents on U.F.O.'s reveal that despite official denials to the contrary, Federal agencies continue to monitor the phenomenon to this day.

The monumental task of unearthing the newest batch of records on U.F.O.'s from a bureaucracy that has for years denied their existence can be traced to the efforts of a handful of inquisitive individuals who, armed with the Freedom of Information Act, set off in the mid-70's on a paper chase of U.S. Government documents on U.F.O.'s. They include Bruce S. Maccabee, a Silver Spring, Md., physicist working for the Navy, who has managed to obtain the release of more than 1,200 pages of documents on U.F.O.'s from the F.B.I.; W. Todd Zachel of Prairie du Sac, Wis.; Robert Todd of Ardmore, Pa.; Larry W. Bryant of Arlington, Va.; and Brad C. Sparks, a student in astrophysics at Berkeley whose five-year pursuit of the C.I.A.'s U.F.O. file eventually provided the foundation for a ground-breaking Freedom of Information lawsuit filed by Ground Saucer Watch (G.S.W.), an Arizona-based U.F.O. organization.

At the request of G.S.W. director William H. Spaulding, Peter Gersten, an attorney in the New York firm of Rothblatt, Rothblatt & Seijas, filed a civil action against the C.I.A. in December 1977 demanding all U.F.O. records in the agency's possession. The suit seemed to have achieved its goal when late last year the agency released about 400 documents—nearly 900 pages of memos, reports and correspondence that attest to the agency's long involvement in U.F.O. matters. But the civil action has not seen its final day in court.

By Gersten's account, the agency has arbitrarily withheld documents, made deletions without merit, and failed to conduct a proper search for U.F.O. materials. The agency's current actions, he says, perpetuate its 30-year policy of deliberate deception and dishonesty about U.F.O.'s. "What has been released to us seems to have been rather carefully selected," says Gersten. "We suspect that the agency is withholding at least 200 more documents than the 57 they have admitted they are keeping from us to protect intelligence sources." Victor Marchetti, a former executive