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- LONDON - The CIA has released
a secret history of its investigations into sightings of unidentified
flying objects, revealing that there is more truth in the popular television
series The X-Files than is often believed. The highly critical report
describes often-bitter debates between real-life X-File investigators
who believed "the truth is out there" and their skeptical bosses.
It records tales of bumbling undercover agents whose activities that
the government was covering up what the agency described as "extra-terrestrial
visitations by intelligent beings." The problem was eventually passed
to the agency's physics and electronics division, where in true X-Files
style just one analyst investigated UFO phenomena. But the 1950's equivalent
of Fox Mulder was constantly undermined by his boss, described by the
CIA history as "a non-believer in UFO's," who tried but failed
to declare the project 'inactive." While the CIA investigations
eventually concluded that all the sightings could be explained, the report
concludes that "misguided" attempts to keep them secret led
to widespread belief of a government cover-up.
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- The report, written by Gerald K. Haines, the official
CIA historian, was commissioned by James Woolsey, CIA director at the
time, in 1993, in the wake of renewed claims of a CIA-led cover-up. It
calls, for the first time, on documents that the agency hid from UFO enthusiasts
who obtained thousands of more mundane files under the Freedom of Information
Act. The report, completed in 1997, was released at the request of the
British academic journal Intelligence and National Security, and is published
in its summer issue.
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- U.S. intelligence began investigating UFO sightings
in 1947, when a pilot claimed to have seen nine discs travelling at more
than 1,600 kilometers per hour in Washington state. The claim was backed
up by additional sightings, including reports from military and civilian
pilots and air traffic controllers.
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- The first investigation, Operation Saucer, was carried
out by U.S. Air Forces intelligence, which initially feared the objects
might be Soviet bombers. But some officers became convinced that UFOs
existed and, in a top-secret report, concluded many of the sightings were
"interplanetary." Air force chiefs had the report rewritten to
conclude that "although visits from outer space are deemed possible,
they are believed to be very unlikely." The CIA initially dismissed
the investigations as "midsummer madness." But an agency committee
decided they could be used by Moscow either to create mass hysteria or
to overload the air warning system, making it unable to distinguish between
UFOs and Soviet bombers. In 1955, claims by two elderly sisters that
they had contact with UFOs attracted widespread publicity. A CIA agent
describing himself as an air officer spoke to them and reported that he
appeared to have stumbled upon a scene from Arsenic and Old Lace. Analysis
of a "code" that the women believed aliens were using to make
contact with them while they listened to their favorite radio program
showed it was Morse from a U.S. radio station. But when UFO enthusiasts
heard of the "air force" officers visit, they became immediately
suspicious he was a member of the CIA trying to cover up the affair.
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- One enthusiast pursued the CIA conspiracy theory and
was visited by another CIA officer, who claimed to be in the air force
and even wore an air force uniform. The ruse failed, making the conspiracy
theorists even more suspicious. The refusal to release 57 documents on
the investigation in the 1970s, to protect sources, also fuelled the cover-up
theory, Mr. Haines concluded.
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