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Official reports, hearing transcripts, case files and releases: the paper behind the cases. 2,872 documents, 2,610 mirrored with their text, 53,529 pages indexed, so a search reads inside them and lands on the page.
New in the library The PURSUE files The Department of War's UAP release, mirrored in full: the videos, recordings and images, each beside its case file.Documents1,073 records · page 12
This is a CIA translation, dated 1 October 1980, of an article by Jin Tao titled "Sightings of Flying Saucers in China" from the Harbin magazine Kexue Shidai (Scientific Age), No 5. The article prints excerpts from letters that readers sent in during 1979. The writers describe glowing, rotating discs, wheels and globes seen across China between 1943 and 1979, including sightings in Shaanxi, Gansu, Jiangxi and Beijing. The magazine says it cannot yet explain the sightings but will keep collecting clues.
This Central Intelligence Agency records retirement request, dated 17 October 1980, comes from the Office of Legislative Counsel. It retires 16mm microfilm copies of documents the CIA reviewed in response to House Select Committee on Assassinations inquiries into the deaths of President Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Attached 1983 memos record that a District Court ordered the agency to process this segregated HSCA collection in the Allen v. Department of Defense FOIA suit. File review worksheets list the HSCA requests and reports.
This Foreign Broadcast Information Service China Report on science and technology, JPRS 77236, dated 26 January 1981 and released through the CIA, translates Chinese technical articles. Its lead item, from the journal Ziran Zazhi (Sep 1980), surveys almost 100 Chinese UFO eyewitness accounts. It sorts them into disk or globe, huge long, and spiral nebula types, and details sightings from 1965 to 1979. The authors judge the reports substantially reliable and call for objective scientific study. They also link some Chinese reports to foreign events. The remaining items cover electronics and computing.
This Central Intelligence Agency file holds an internal Office of Scientific Intelligence memo and a proposed reply from CIA General Counsel Lawrence R. Houston to Representative Joseph E. Karth. The reply answers a constituent's claims that the CIA created the flying saucer furor and was withholding parts of the January 1953 Scientific Advisory Panel report. It calls these claims entirely unfounded. It states that the CIA studied the national security threat with the Air Force in 1953, has taken part in no saucer activities since, and refers all correspondence to the Air Force.
This Central Intelligence Agency File Review Worksheet, dated 24 November 1981 and released in full in 1999 under the CIA Historical Review Program, is a records inventory. It lists files from House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) requests handled through the Office of Legislative Counsel from late 1977 through 1978, along with HSCA reports and individual files on subjects such as Oswald, Nosenko, Castro, Trafficante, Garrison and the 1967 IG report. It does not mention UFOs.
This Joint Committee Print, dated December 8, 1982, gathers studies that the Central Intelligence Agency's Directorate of Intelligence prepared for the Joint Economic Committee of the US Congress. It gives estimates of Soviet gross national product for 1950 to 1980, with indexes of industrial production, agricultural production and consumption, and explains the methods and data behind them. The foreword says official Soviet statistics inflate growth and that the CIA measures offer a more accurate picture. The document contains no UFO material.
This Central Intelligence Agency Directorate of Intelligence reference aid, ALA 83-10064, is dated June 1983. It lists major international and domestic events affecting Cuba between 1 January and 31 December 1982, arranged alphabetically by country, plus sections on the Nonaligned Movement and the Palestine Liberation Movement. Entries include Cuban troops in Angola, Cuban support for Argentina in the Falklands dispute, and trade and cooperation agreements with many nations. It does not discuss UFOs.
This Central Intelligence Agency report, dated 3 February 1984, reviews how Soviet leaders, well-connected commentators and routine media treated President Reagan from November 1980 onward. It finds that Moscow twice softened its line: once after the 1980 election and again when Andropov came to power. After the Korean airliner was shot down, Soviet treatment of Reagan became the most abusive in years. Attached excerpts include a Yakovlev article claiming Reagan believes in flying saucers.
This Central Intelligence Agency report, dated 1 June 1984 and marked unclassified for official use only, reviews how Soviet leaders and media treated President Reagan from November 1980 through May 1984. It finds that Moscow twice moderated its rhetoric to test prospects for better relations, and that attacks became the most abusive in two decades after the South Korean airliner shootdown. The report compiles authoritative Soviet statements and midlevel and routine media commentary as a baseline for analysts.
This CIA-held translation of a TRUD article dated 30 January 1985 reports a sighting by the crew of Aeroflot Tu-134 Flight 8352, flying from Tbilisi to Tallin. About 120 kilometers from Minsk, the crew saw a luminous object that cast beams of light and became a green cloud that escorted the aircraft to Tallin. Minsk and Tallin controllers and a Leningrad crew are cited as confirming it. N. A. Zheltukhin of the Commission on Aerodynamic Phenomena concludes that the crew encountered a UFO.
This letter comes from Karl H. Weber, Deputy Director of Scientific Intelligence at the Central Intelligence Agency, to Colonel Gerald B. Jorgensen of the Air Force Office of Information. It answers a 1955 request to declassify the "Report of the Scientific Panel on Unidentified Flying Objects." The Office of Scientific Intelligence says the original report cannot be downgraded but agrees to release an edited version that leaves out personnel and organization names. It asks that the CIA's sponsorship of the panel get no further publicity.
This Central Intelligence Agency document is a 1987 listing of Freedom of Information Act requests, released in 2021. Each entry gives the requester's name, the subject and the request date. Subjects range widely, covering MIAs, Libya, Afghanistan, Angola, the Cuban missile crisis, the Bay of Pigs, Studies in Intelligence and requests for records on the requester. A few entries ask for UFO material, among them a 1979 report on UFO sightings and general UFO files.
This Foreign Broadcast Information Service item from FBIS Key West, dated 2 September 1987 and distributed through JCS Washington to military, intelligence and NASA addressees, relays a CANA news report from Bridgetown, Barbados. Scores of Barbadians reported seeing four to 18 slow-moving balls of light with long illuminated tails crossing the sky north to south for about 10 minutes. A LIAT pilot reported that objects passed his aircraft at high speed. Meteorological officials could not explain the objects, and similar sightings were reported in Grenada, St Lucia and Martinique.
This is a Foreign Broadcast Information Service cable dated 20 April 1988, released by the CIA in 1997. It carries a Xinhua report from Beijing about a UFO that passengers on airliner No. 2606 saw on 18 March near Hami, Xinjiang. They described a glowing, basketball-sized object that flew alongside the plane, split in two and had a green ring of light. Scientists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Atmospheric Physics concluded that it was a high-frequency discharge plasma fireball.
This Foreign Broadcast Information Service cable was relayed through the Joint Chiefs of Staff on 20 April 1988, and the Central Intelligence Agency released it in August 1997. It carries a Xinhua English-language report on a UFO that passengers aboard airliner No. 2606, flying from Beijing to Urumqi, saw near Hami, Xinjiang, on 18 March. Scientists at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences concluded that the object was a plasma fireball spinning at high speed in the atmosphere.
This Central Intelligence Agency JPRS translation reproduces an interview published in the Soviet journal Sotsiologicheskiye Issledovaniya, signed to press on 8 July 1988. In it, deputy chief editor Gennadiy Batygin talks with Innokentiy, a teacher at the Leningrad seminary. The conversation takes place during the millennium of the Christianization of Russia. They discuss religion under glasnost and perestroyka, ideological prohibitions, the shortage of Bibles, preservation of church monuments and the position of believers in Soviet society. The document contains no UFO material.
This Central Intelligence Agency translation, dated 1 August 1988, collects Chinese articles on theory and policy. Its main item is a 1979 Shanghai forum speech by Wang Ruoshui, which argues that Marxist theory has to be tested and developed in practice, and that Marxism and Mao Zedong Thought should be open to criticism. The collection also covers how urban population is defined, a Fudan University seminar on the crisis in Marxist philosophy, and political security for theorists. Unidentified flying objects come up only as a passing example of a concept.
This CIA-held JPRS report (JPRS-USP-89-007) is an English translation of an interview with academician Roald Sagdeyev. The interview ran in the Soviet magazine PRIRODA in January 1989. Sagdeyev talks about space research achievements, the Interbol project, and the Phobos mission to Mars, including the loss of contact with Phobos 1 in September 1988. He also covers competing designs for Mars 94, manned flight to Mars and democratizing Soviet science. He mentions UFOs only once, recalling a Gosplan lecture where every audience question was about flying saucers.
This Central Intelligence Agency document, dated 3 February 1989, contains translated foreign press reports on telecommunications and space programs, marked for official use only. It covers Italian modem deregulation and Videotel expansion, Telettra rural telephone systems for the USSR, Spain's planned direct television and communications satellite system for 1992 with four manufacturers bidding, Britain's Skynet 4 military satellites and the alleged Zircon spy project, and the UK online database market. It contains no UFO material.
This Central Intelligence Agency translation, dated 2 March 1989, reproduces a Soviet article from the Tallinn newspaper MOLODEZH ESTONII reporting a sociological poll by the Higher Komsomol School. The poll questioned 420 young intellectuals and students in Moscow and Leningrad, along with Hare Krishna believers, about their attitudes toward religion. About 40 percent knew religious literature, and 80 percent were interested in mysterious phenomena such as UFOs and telepathy. The release also includes the end of an article on atheistic education in Vologodskaya Oblast.
This Central Intelligence Agency JPRS report, dated 1 May 1989, is an English translation of an essay by academician Boris Raushenbakh from the Moscow journal Kommunist. The essay argues that people need both rational scientific knowledge and metaphorical, emotional knowledge, and that these connect to morality and religious feeling. It also criticizes crude atheist propaganda and calls for restoring moral principles. The only mention of UFOs is a passing remark that some people turn to belief in flying saucers.
This is a 1990 JPRS report distributed by the Central Intelligence Agency. It translates the English summaries of major articles from the Soviet journal Narody Azii i Afriki, No 4, July to August 1989. The topics include small business policy in Asia, non-capitalist development in Central Asia, the Truman Doctrine and Turkey, pre-Islamic Turkic religions and al-Mawardi. One article, by A.D. Dikaryov, looks at how Chinese UFO enthusiasts search ancient Chinese sources for historical evidence of UFOs.
This is a JPRS translation, released by the Central Intelligence Agency, of the table of contents for the Soviet journal Narody Azii i Afriki, No 4, July to August 1989, published in Moscow by Nauka. It lists articles on small business in Asia, socialist orientation in Africa, the Truman Doctrine, Islamic studies and Oriental philosophy. Under the heading "This Mysterious East" it includes an article by A.D. Dikaryov titled "Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO) in Ancient China."
This FBIS translation, dated 17 August 1989, carries a Bulgarian news item that ran in Sofia's RABOTNICHESKO DELO on 11 August 1989. The paper said a recent report of a UFO landing near Moscow turned out to be the burning of a large amount of dry grass. It then warned that Bulgarian farms slow to collect straw might burn it in their fields, which is banned. The item lists straw collection figures by oblast and describes the ecological damage that stubble burning causes.
This is a Foreign Broadcast Information Service message relayed through the Joint Staff in Washington on 13 September 1989. It is an unclassified cable from FBIS Okinawa that carries a Xinhua English report. The report says a UFO was seen over Urumqi, capital of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, at 11:13 PM on 6 September. A worker named Tong Yuwei watched a dark cloud light up and a saucer-shaped object hover for a minute, rotating in red and yellow light, then drop away to the southwest. Observers also heard a sound louder than a car engine.
This Central Intelligence Agency FBIS translation compilation, dated 17 August 1989 and approved for release in August 1991, contains Bulgarian press items from RABOTNICHESKO DELO. One unattributed 11 August 1989 report, titled "Ban on 'Flying Saucers Made of Straw'," says a UFO reported to have landed near Moscow was explained by the burning of dry grass. It warns Bulgarian farmers against burning uncollected straw because of its ecological damage. Other items cover pan-Turkism, new committees and economic decrees.
This is a Central Intelligence Agency translated record dated 16 September 1989, carrying a Stroitelnaya Gazeta article headlined "Scientist Discusses Possible UFO Landing Near Surgut." The extracted text holds only catalog metadata: document and serial numbers, the source newspaper, and a note that the copy came from a cover to cover library serial held by the Department of External Affairs in Ottawa, Canada. The article's text itself is not included, so neither the scientist's remarks nor any conclusions appear.
This Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) record, dated 28 September 1989, translates a report that the Argentine agency Noticias Argentinas released the same day. It says residents found a 400 kg experimental sounding rocket on 25 September. The rocket lay partly buried in a salt flat between Quilino and Cruz del Eje in Cordoba Province, and Air Force sentries guarded the site. Residents also reported strange events since late 1988, including UFOs, helicopters and ground vehicles. The rocket was believed to belong to the Air Force.
This CIA release, approved in August 1991, is a Soviet media monitoring report from November 1989. It summarizes a Moscow Television recording of a 15 November news conference in which Leonid Abalkin, deputy chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers, discussed an all-union conference on radical economic reform. He covered market transition, republican financial autonomy, ruble convertibility and rationing. It then covers the 20 November Supreme Soviet session. UFOs appear only once, in Abalkin's remark that such reports circulate in difficult times.
This is an unclassified FBIS London cable dated 12 October 1989 and relayed through the Joint Staff. It carries a TASS English-language review of the Soviet central press for that day. Most of the review covers Gorbachev's meeting with Polish leader Mieczyslaw Rakowski, parliamentary budget debates, railway sabotage affecting Armenia and Georgia, and the KGB's role against organised crime. It also notes a Komsomolskaya Pravda front-page dispatch from Voronezh, based on eyewitnesses, about a UFO seen in the city on 27 September.
This Central Intelligence Agency release, dated 21 November 1989, reproduces translated Soviet television reports on economic reform. Most of it covers a 15 November Moscow news conference by Leonid Abalkin, deputy chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers, on the conference on radical economic reform, including ruble convertibility, rationing and parallel currency. It also covers the 20 November Supreme Soviet session on republican financial autonomy. UFOs come up only once, when Abalkin says that UFO reports tend to spread in times like these.
This Central Intelligence Agency file is a 1991 JPRS translation, report JPRS-USP-91-005. It carries the annotation and text of a Soviet brochure on the space program, written by one of the first cosmonauts. The brochure reviews what manned and unmanned spaceflight have achieved and calls the American lunar program a costly dead end pursued for prestige. It then proposes future tasks, including environmental monitoring satellites, orbiting factories, an international monitoring system, Mars sample return, radio telescopes and space robots.
This Central Intelligence Agency release, dated 1990-01-04 and approved for release in August 1991, reproduces English summaries of articles from the Soviet journal Narody Azii i Afriki, No 4, July to August 1989. Most of them cover economics, socialism and history in Asia and Africa. One summary covers an article by A.D. Dikaryov on unidentified flying objects in ancient China. It describes Chinese UFO societies and the journal Feidie Tansuo, and it looks at efforts to find historical evidence of UFOs in ancient Chinese sources.
This Central Intelligence Agency intelligence report was disseminated on 10 January 1990 and covers information dated September 1989. It describes the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR, including its size, research areas, funding and interest in cooperating with the United States. It notes that the Academy has several organizations that follow the subject of unidentified flying objects and that some scientists consider it a serious problem. The report also covers the Antonov Aircraft Design Bureau and the Kiev Aircraft Factory's shift to making consumer goods.
This Central Intelligence Agency record is a program summary of the Mandarin-language broadcast from Moscow International Service at 0700 GMT on 21 February 1991. It gives short headlines for about 19 items, among them ethnic harmony in Georgia, planned coal miners' strikes and a coming visit by Gorbachev to Japan. One item says that policyholders of an insurance company in Chita can file claims if they are attacked by a UFO. The summary gives no further details about that report.
This is an unclassified FBIS London editorial report from April 1990, relayed by the Joint Staff and released by the CIA in August 1997. It summarizes a Moscow Television broadcast of 16 April announcing the Soviet Union's first state organization for studying UFOs, the All-Union Inter-Industrial Ufological Scientific Coordination Center of the USSR Academy of Sciences. The broadcast said the ufological commission received 10 to 15 sighting reports daily last year, and the center's head, Azhazha, said Soviet sightings are reported every day.
This is an unclassified FBIS London cable of 15 April 1990, relayed by the Joint Staff and released by the CIA in August 1997. It translates a TASS report citing the newspaper Rabochaya Tribuna on nightly UFO sightings 47 km along the Yaroslavl highway outside Moscow since 12 March. Witnesses described shining spheres and discs, pineapple-like objects, triangular shapes and basin-shaped craft that moved silently and could stop suddenly. The report says several hundred local people saw the objects.
This Foreign Broadcast Information Service item, relayed by the Joint Staff in May 1990 and released by the Central Intelligence Agency in June 1994, translates a Moscow Domestic Service report of 21 May 1990. It says scientists from China and the Soviet Far East held their first joint meeting of ufologists in Dalnegorsk. There they planned to investigate known incidents and to exchange video and photographs of new ones. The report notes at least 10 UFOs recorded in the area over four years, which specialists linked to the region's mineral wealth.
This Central Intelligence Agency JPRS translation reproduces a 12 April 1990 SELSKAYA ZHIZN interview with Yuriy Kiyenko, chairman of the Soviet State Commission for Cosmos and Resurs satellite launches. Kiyenko defends the economic value of remote-sensing satellites, citing findings on the Aral Sea, desertification in Kalmykia, and resource prospecting. He says the launches do no harm to the ozone layer and names the Northern Cosmodrome as the launch site. Asked about satellite fragments that people take for UFOs, he says Soviet equipment is designed so that any debris falls in unpopulated areas.
This Central Intelligence Agency record, released in February 2010, is a translation of a Moscow Television Service broadcast of 26 April 1990. It covers Mikhail Gorbachev's meeting with workers at the Uralmash production association in Sverdlovsk on 25 April. Gorbachev and plant officials talk about economic reform, taxation, housing, wages, how the working class relates to the party, and privileges for officials. Gorbachev also criticizes Boris Yeltsin. The text contains no UFO material.
This is a Central Intelligence Agency record dated 26 April 1990. It carries a TASS International Service account, sent from Sverdlovsk in several parts, of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev's visit to the Urals. The text covers his meeting with Uralmash workers and managers about economic reform, housing, market transition, unemployment and party unity. It also describes his visits to a supermarket, war veterans, a defense conversion exhibition and the Urals Scientific Center. It contains no UFO material.
This is a Central Intelligence Agency JPRS Report (JPRS-UPA-90-053) dated 1 May 1990. It contains a translation of an article by Lev Tsvetkov, chief specialist in the USSR Council of Ministers Information Department, from the Moscow journal ZHURNALIST. Tsvetkov criticizes one-sided Soviet press coverage of price increases and trade union protests. He urges journalists to cover the move to market relations within the context of the government's economic recovery program. It mentions a UFO only in passing.
This Central Intelligence Agency release is an FBIS translation of a Moscow Domestic Service broadcast of 21 May 1990, relayed through Joint Staff channels on 23 May 1990. It reports from Vladivostok that scientists from the PRC and the Soviet Far East have begun a joint study of UFOs. At their first meeting, held in Dalnegorsk, they planned how to investigate known incidents and agreed to exchange video and photographs. The broadcast says Dalnegorsk was chosen because at least 10 UFOs were recorded there in four years.
This is a CIA-held JPRS translation of an editor's column by Col V. Anuchin, editor in chief of the Soviet magazine AVIATSIYA I KOSMONAVTIKA. It appeared in issue No 6 of June 1990. Anuchin says the magazine is at a turning point and asks readers for suggestions. He promises coverage of Air Force training reform, flight safety, a pilot's legal right to make mistakes, and the protection of aviation personnel. He adds that the magazine will be a source of information on the space program, unidentified flying objects and puzzling phenomena.
This unclassified CIA (FBIS) record summarizes a Johannesburg Afrikaans-language television newscast broadcast on 20 July 1990. Most items cover South African politics, including the meeting between State President F.W. de Klerk and Nelson Mandela at the Union Buildings, along with economic news, strikes, refugees and foreign events. One two-minute item reported strange land imprints found in the south of England that were believed to have been caused by UFOs. The record contains no further detail on that item.
This JPRS translation, dated 1 August 1990, is an article from the Soviet journal Kommunist by Leonid Grishchuk of the Shternberg State Astronomy Institute. In it he argues that basic science needs state support. He notes that lecture audiences ask a lot about flying saucers and space aliens. He goes on to review cosmology, including galaxy structure, cosmic expansion, relic radiation, Fridman's models and inflationary theory. He closes by saying the question of non-Earth civilizations is a topic for another author.
This Central Intelligence Agency JPRS report, dated 1 August 1990, translates an OGONEK interview by Vanda Beletskaya with Academician Anatoliy Petrovich Aleksandrov, former president of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Aleksandrov blames the Chernobyl accident on an ill-considered experiment prepared by Donenergo that violated operating instructions. He also describes earlier nuclear plant defects, Legasov's suicide, and his dealings with Beria and Kapitsa. He argues for continued atomic power engineering and a law on nuclear power.
This Central Intelligence Agency JPRS report, dated 1 August 1990, translates an interview with cosmonaut Maj. Gen. Aleksey Leonov from the Soviet journal Aviatsiya i Kosmonavtika. Leonov describes the Soviet manned lunar program, its L-1 and N-1 failures and crew training, and criticizes Soviet secrecy and economic policy. Asked whether Apollo 11 astronauts saw extraterrestrials, he says UFO watchers took a remark out of context, since "they" meant Earth.
This Central Intelligence Agency JPRS report, dated 1 August 1990, translates an interview with Major General of Aviation Aleksey Leonov published in the Moscow journal Aviatsiya i Kosmonavtika. Leonov describes the Soviet manned lunar program, how the cosmonauts trained for it, and the test failures that ended it. He also criticizes Soviet secrecy and argues that the Buran shuttle is needed. Asked about UFO claims, he says Aldrin's remark 'they're watching us' referred to Earth, not extraterrestrials.