UFOs: The Untold Story (NSA-held copy)

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

deputy director, agrees with Gersten. entire exercise, Marchetti wrote recently in a magazine article, "has the same aroma of the agency's previous messy efforts to hide its involvement in drugs and mind-control operations, both prime examples of a successful intelligence cover-up."

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The first sighting to be labeled a "flying saucer" by the press occurred on June 24, 1947, when an Idaho businessman flying his plane near Mount Rainier observed nine disc-shaped objects making undulating motions "like a saucer skipping over water." As early as World War II, Allied bomber pilots had told of "balls of light" that followed their flights over Japan and Germany. A U.S. Eighth Army investigation concluded that they were the product of "mass hallucination."

These and other incidents were reported in a 1973 book by David Michael Jacobs, "The UFO Controversy in America," which until the recent release of Government documents was the most comprehensive reconstruction of the Government's U.F.O. involvement.

When Scandinavians reported cigar-shaped objects in 1946, U.S. Army intelligence suspected that the Russians had developed a secret weapon with the help of German scientists from Peenemünde. The C.I.A., then known as the Central Intelligence Group, secretly began keeping tabs on the subject.

When the unknown objects returned to the skies, this time over the United States in the summer of 1947, the Army Air Force set out to determine what the objects were. Within weeks, Brig. Gen. George F. Schulgen of Army Air Corps Intelligence requested the F.B.I.'s assistance "in locating and questioning the individuals who first sighted the so-called flying discs..." Undoubtedly swayed by flaring cold-war tensions, Schulgen feared that "the first reported sightings might have been by individuals of Communist sympathies with the view to causing hysteria and fear of a secret Russian weapon." J. Edgar Hoover agreed to cooperate but insisted that the bureau have "full access to discs recovered."

The Air Force's behind-the-scenes interest contrasted sharply with its public stance that the objects were products of misidentifications and an imaginative populace. A security lid was imposed on the subject in July 1947, hiding a potentially "embarrassing situation" the following month, when both the Air Force and the F.B.I. began suspecting they might actu-

secret weapons. High level reassurances were objeed that this was not so.

By the end of the summer, the F.B.I. had "failed to reveal any indication of subversive individuals being involved in any of the reported sightings." A RESTRICTED Army letter that found its way to Hoover's desk said that the bureau's services actually had been enlisted to relieve the Air Forces "of the task of tracking down all the many instances which turned out to be ashcan covers, toilet seats and whatnot." Incensed, Hoover moved quickly to discontinue the bureau's U.F.O. investigations.

In September of that year, the Commanding General of the Army Air Force received a letter from the Army Chief of Staff Lieut. Gen. Nathan F. Twining, saying that "the phenomenon reported is of something real and not visionary or fictitious," that the objects appeared to be disc-shaped, "as large as man-made aircraft," and "controlled either manually, automatically or remotely." At Twining's request, project "Sign" was established.

"Sign" failed to find any evidence that the objects were Soviet secret weapons and before long submitted an unofficial "Estimate of the Situation," classified TOP SECRET, which indicated that U.F.O.'s were of interplanetary origin. The estimate eventually reached Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Hoyt S. Vandenberg, who rejected it for lack of proof. "Sign's" inconclusive final report remained classified for the next 12 years.

After "Sign," the Air Force continued to collect U.F.O. data under the code name "Grudge." This six-month project found no evidence of foreign scientific development and therefore no direct threat to national security. It did, however, stress that the reported sightings could be dangerous. "There are indications that the planned release of related psychological propaganda would cause a form of mass hysteria," the report stated. "Employment of these methods by or against an enemy would yield similar results . . . governmental agencies interested in psychological warfare should be informed of the results of this study."

A press release following the termination of "Grudge" allowed the public to believe that the Air Force was no longer interested in U.F.O.'s. But the Air Force continued to collect reports through normal intelligence channels until a dramatic sighting of a U.F.O. at the Army Signal Corps radar center in Fort Monmouth, N.J., in 1951 led to the reacti-