Declassified UFO Reports from the CIA

The FBI has known to have various documents related to the unexplained phenomena, as files were made public via Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) requests and made available on the agency’s online, the “Vault.”

It turns out that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) too has had a keen interest in UFOs from all around the world.

At the CIA’s online “Electronic Reading Room,” more than 240 documents relating to UFOs are made available to the public, spanning more than 50 years. These documents are compilations of first-hand accounts from field agents and summaries of press coverage of mysterious events.

Most documents talk about flying saucers which took place in the context of Cold War technological-arms race. However wide-ranged the materials are, there is no specific mention of extraterrestrials, or crashed alien spaceships.

Here are some highlights from CIA’s investigations into the worldwide UFO phenomenon.

On July 1, 1952, an inter-agency communication from then-director of the CIA, Walter Bedell Smith to an unnamed director of the “Psychological Strategy Board,” proposed a discussion on the utilization of the UFO phenomenon for psychological warfare purposes.

A letter of request dated January 6, 1956, was sent from Belgian Congo to the U.S. government, requesting a short, compact 60x telescope to be used in their new UFO observation group.

Another letter dated April 17, 1956, was sent from a niece of a name-redacted CIA contact, illustrating how the flying saucer phenomenon affects the people in Budapest, Hungary. It further describes how far could flyers go in an hour.

A report dated October 27, 1958, narrates an event happened on July 10, 1958. A bright light in the air which was trailed by a long tail of black smoke was allegedly witnessed by an English traveler along the way from Leningrad to Moscow, Russia, and was told by his Russian guide that it might be a flying saucer.

A memo dated December 16, 1960, was from a Chief in the Detroit Office in Michigan, and narrates an experience on December 14, 1960. The memo starts politely, if the United States Air Force (USAF) is still interested in UFOs. A person has allegedly seen an object that looked like a meteor but extremely large and shaped almost like a disc with greenish light, which burned out before it got to the ground near the Detroit River.

Another memo dated February 17, 1967, presents an analysis of a UFO captured in a photograph supplied by the Aerial Phenomena Office at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. Though the office cannot guarantee the authenticity of the alleged UFO picture, it cannot as well say that the photography is a hoax.

Publicly-available files generally have been skewed away from actual investigations and towards compilations of reports on strange phenomenon since the document dump get into the 1970s.