NorCal Dave
Senior Member.
This subject came up on other threads as part of a larger discussion concerning misinformation and coverups with regard to the US government and UFOs. Unfortunately, it got jumbled up in 1 or 2 other threads and was somewhat off topic. It was an interesting discussion, and one I would like to start a thread on in the future, unless someone else does first.
One of the arguments was that the CIA's use of classified spy planes accounted for over 1/2 of the reported UFO sightings in the '50s and '60s and in turn forced the USAF into lying or giving out misinformation to cover for these classified planes. Whether or not the USAF was untruthful of duplicitous is for another thread, but as for the claim of over 1/2 the UFOs being CIA planes, I thought I'd look into it.
Just for background, aviation buffs can skip over, for the time period we're talking about, mid 20th century, there are 2-3 CIA spy planes.
There is the Lockheed U2 Dragon Lady developed as Project Aquitaine in the mid '50s with the goal of overflying the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Though designed and built at the Lockheed "Skunk Works" in Burbank CA, it needed a secret place to be assembled and tested which lead to the creation of Groom Lake/Area 51 in Nevada.
It can be thought of as big jet powered glider with very high-tech for the time cameras. It could fly at ~410mph and an altitude of 80,000' which was believed to be beyond the range of Soviet radar and even if partially detected, beyond the range of the Sovit Surface to Air Missiles (SAMs) and interceptors allowing it to violate Soviet air space and take pictures. Pretty brazen when one looks back at it.
Several U2s made a number of overflights of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the late '50s until one piloted by Gary Powers was shot down in 1960. Modernized versions of the U2 are still used today, over 65 years after they were first flown.
The shoot down in 1960 prompted the CIA to look for an even higher and much faster flying aircraft with a smaller radar cross section. Known as Project Oxcart it resulted in the Lockheed A12 which was also built by the Skunk Works and tested at Area 51. The A12 was capable of Mach 3.3 at an altitude of 85,000'. First flown in 1962, they stopped flying in 1966 and were decommissioned in 1968 to be replaced with the similar but slightly larger version was known as the SR71 Blackbird and is what most people are familiar with today.
The SR71 Blackbird was officially retired in 1998.
Originally shared by @tobigtofool, was this paywalled NYT article from 1997. Luckly @deirdre found a Wayback version for us:
https://web.archive.org/web/2023060...mits-government-lied-about-ufo-sightings.html
The story is by William Broad and gives some background to CIA spy flights:
https://www.cia.gov/static/cia-role-study-UFOs.pdf
It reads less like a study and more like a history of the CIA's relation to UFOs, which makes sense giving what it was written for. As noted above, it appeared in Studies in Intelligence, a CIA periodical since 1955, with this as a giving mission statement:
In the study the author makes 2 claims relevant here, first that UFO sighting went up with the introduction of the U2 (this is from a PDF that does not copy well, I tried to clean it up after pasting but some things may look wonky):
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/DOC_0000190094.pdf
This is a non-copiable pdf, so screen shots are needed. I'll just post the complete relevant passages in full, which the Haines article seems to quote almost verbatim:
Though a bit hard to read, the main claim is footnoted 49 which is at the bottom of the page:
So, if we take the 2 primary sources for this claim, we have John Parongoski and James Cunningham saying the U2 and the Oxcart/A12/SR71 accounted for over 1/2 of all UFO sightings in the US in the late '50s and '60s. In the case of Parongoski, this seems to be a recollection offered over the phone in 1994, or 30+ years after the fact.
In all these claims, no numbers are ever giving or reported, though some numbers are available. According to Project Blue Book, between 1947 and 1969 there were 12,618 sightings that they worked on:
Breaking it down by years is a little tough, but the claim is that sightings increased once the U2 started flying. If Bluebook handled 12,618 sightings in a 22 year period, that's an average of ~573 sightings a year. The U2 started flying in 1955 and the A12/Oxcart started flying in 1962:
Just going with the average of 573 sightings per year we would get 8022 sightings between '55 and '69. If we are to go with the increase in sightings claimed after the U2 started flying that could be up to 10,000 sightings I suppose. But sticking with the 8022 figures, that would put "over 1/2 of the sightings" somewhere north of 4011.
The Wiki page for the A12 says there were a total of 18 aircraft built and they made 2,850 test flights, presumably between 1964 and their retirement in 1966:
So, using the average of 573 sightings per year for the 2+ year period of '64-'66 that would be 1146 total sightings 1/2 of which is back to 573 and there were 2,850 test flights of the A12. So, only a 1/4 of those test flight could account for 1/2 of the UFO sightings, at least for that 2-year period. And that assumes pilots can actually "see" an A12. They were often at 80,000'+ and cruised at Mach 3.
Now does that extrapolate out to more than 4000 sightings between '55 and '69? I don't know.
By the late '50s the U2 was not completely unknown. It had been staged in the UK, Turkey, West Germany and Tiwan, in secret, but it's a big black glider like plane and hard to hide. Its cover story was that it was a weather research plane, something Israeli pilots thought when they intercepted one in 1959 (bold by me):
It's just the fact that it was spy plane that was concealed.
The numbers suggest that the central claim is plausible, but no numbers are giving to support it. Giving that the main source is ultimately 2 guys telling some CIA writers that this is what they thought in the '90s, I think a bit of hyperbole might be involved. It's very likely that the U2 and A12/SR71 accounted for a number of UFO sightings during their development, testing, training, and deployment. But after the 1960 shootdown, the U2 already known as a weather research plane, was outed. Pilots were increasingly aware that the US had high flying capabilities. As far as accounting for over 4000 sightings in a 15 year period, I'm not so sure, but maybe?
One of the arguments was that the CIA's use of classified spy planes accounted for over 1/2 of the reported UFO sightings in the '50s and '60s and in turn forced the USAF into lying or giving out misinformation to cover for these classified planes. Whether or not the USAF was untruthful of duplicitous is for another thread, but as for the claim of over 1/2 the UFOs being CIA planes, I thought I'd look into it.
Just for background, aviation buffs can skip over, for the time period we're talking about, mid 20th century, there are 2-3 CIA spy planes.
There is the Lockheed U2 Dragon Lady developed as Project Aquitaine in the mid '50s with the goal of overflying the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Though designed and built at the Lockheed "Skunk Works" in Burbank CA, it needed a secret place to be assembled and tested which lead to the creation of Groom Lake/Area 51 in Nevada.
It can be thought of as big jet powered glider with very high-tech for the time cameras. It could fly at ~410mph and an altitude of 80,000' which was believed to be beyond the range of Soviet radar and even if partially detected, beyond the range of the Sovit Surface to Air Missiles (SAMs) and interceptors allowing it to violate Soviet air space and take pictures. Pretty brazen when one looks back at it.
Several U2s made a number of overflights of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the late '50s until one piloted by Gary Powers was shot down in 1960. Modernized versions of the U2 are still used today, over 65 years after they were first flown.
The shoot down in 1960 prompted the CIA to look for an even higher and much faster flying aircraft with a smaller radar cross section. Known as Project Oxcart it resulted in the Lockheed A12 which was also built by the Skunk Works and tested at Area 51. The A12 was capable of Mach 3.3 at an altitude of 85,000'. First flown in 1962, they stopped flying in 1966 and were decommissioned in 1968 to be replaced with the similar but slightly larger version was known as the SR71 Blackbird and is what most people are familiar with today.
The SR71 Blackbird was officially retired in 1998.
Originally shared by @tobigtofool, was this paywalled NYT article from 1997. Luckly @deirdre found a Wayback version for us:
https://web.archive.org/web/2023060...mits-government-lied-about-ufo-sightings.html
The story is by William Broad and gives some background to CIA spy flights:
The relevant quote then follows:While commercial airliners int he 1950's flew at altitudes of up to 30,000 feet, the U-2 soared to more than 60,000 feet and the SR-71 to more than 80,000 feet, or 15 miles, nearly the edge of space.
Rather than acknowledgeing the existence of the top-secret flights or saying nothing about them publicly, the Air Force decided to put out false cover stories, the C.I.A. study says. For instance, unusual observations that were actually spy flights were attributed to atmospheric phenomena like ice crystals and temperature inversions.
And is attributed to a CIA study by Gerald Haines:''Over half of all U.F.O. reports from the late 1950's through the 1960's were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights'' over the United States, the C.I.A. study says. ''This led the Air Force to make misleading and deceptive statements to the public in order to allay public fears and to protect an extraordinarily sensitive national security project.''
The link in the Wayback article is long broken and only takes one to the CIA homepage. However, with a bit of searching I tracked down the original study:The study, ''C.I.A.'s Role in the Study of U.F.O.'s. 1947-90,'' was written by Gerald K. Haines and appears in Studies of Intelligence, a secret Central Intelligence Agency journal. Five years ago, the agency began releasing unclassified versions of the journal yearly. The 1997 edition, with the study on unidentified objects, is at http://www.odci. ogv/csi/studies/97unclas/ on the World Wide Web.
https://www.cia.gov/static/cia-role-study-UFOs.pdf
It reads less like a study and more like a history of the CIA's relation to UFOs, which makes sense giving what it was written for. As noted above, it appeared in Studies in Intelligence, a CIA periodical since 1955, with this as a giving mission statement:
https://www.cia.gov/static/dce5fdfdd711572e69c678bae6c19abb/Studies-67-2-Extracts-June2023.pdfThe mission of Studies in Intelligence is to stimulate within the Intelligence Community the constructive discussion of important issues of the day, to expand knowledge of lessons learned from past experiences, to increase understanding of the history of the profession, and to provide readers with considered reviews of public media concerning intelligence. The journal is administered by the Center for the Study of Intelligence, which includes the CIA’s History Staff, Lessons Learned and Emerging Trends Programs, and the CIA Museum.
In the study the author makes 2 claims relevant here, first that UFO sighting went up with the introduction of the U2 (this is from a PDF that does not copy well, I tried to clean it up after pasting but some things may look wonky):
Secondly, the already quoted claim of over 1/2 the sightings being caused by spy planes:In November 1954, CIA had entered into the world of high technology with its U-2 overhead reconnaissance project. Working with Lockheeds Advanced Development facility in Burbank, California, known as the Skunk Works, and Kelly Johnson, an eminent aeronautical engineer, the Agency by August 1955 was testing ahigh-altitude experimental aircraft the U-2. It could fly at 60,000 feet; in the mid-1950s, most commercial airliners flew between 10,000 feet and 20,000 feet. Consequently, once the U-2 started test flights, commercial pilots and air traffic controllers began reporting a large increase in UFO sightings.44
So, this is the source of the quote in the NYT article, and it appeared in other places I found including a MUFON article about it. But what is Haines source for the claims? The above quotes are footnoted 44, and 45 which leads to:According to later estimates from CIA officials who worked on the U2 project and the OXCART (SR-71, or Blackbird) project, over half of all UFO reports from the late 1950s through the I960s were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights (namely the U-2) over the UnitedStates.45
44. See Gregory W. Pedlow and DonaldE. Welzenbach, The Central Intelligence Agency and Overhead Reconnaissance. The U-2 and OXCART Programs, 1954-1974(Washington, DC: CIA History Staff,1992), pp. 72-73.
This leads to yet another CIA publication from 1992 which I tracked down here:45. See Pedlow and Welzenbach, Overhead Reconnaissance, pp. 72-73. This also was confirmed in a telephone interview between the author and John Parongosky, 26 July 1994. Parongosky oversaw the day-to-day affairs of the OXCART program.
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/DOC_0000190094.pdf
This is a non-copiable pdf, so screen shots are needed. I'll just post the complete relevant passages in full, which the Haines article seems to quote almost verbatim:
Though a bit hard to read, the main claim is footnoted 49 which is at the bottom of the page:
So, if we take the 2 primary sources for this claim, we have John Parongoski and James Cunningham saying the U2 and the Oxcart/A12/SR71 accounted for over 1/2 of all UFO sightings in the US in the late '50s and '60s. In the case of Parongoski, this seems to be a recollection offered over the phone in 1994, or 30+ years after the fact.
Also note that in the Haines article the U2 is credited with the majority of UFO sightings:This also was confirmed in a telephone interview between the author and John Parongosky, 26 July 1994. Parongosky oversaw the day-to-day affairs of the OXCART program.
But Parongoski worked on the later Oxcart program, how much operational info did he have about the U2 project to make this assertion?...accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights (namely the U-2) over the UnitedStates.
In all these claims, no numbers are ever giving or reported, though some numbers are available. According to Project Blue Book, between 1947 and 1969 there were 12,618 sightings that they worked on:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Blue_BookFrom 1947 to 1969, the Air Force investigated Unidentified Flying Objects under Project Blue Book. The project, headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, was terminated on December 17, 1969. Of a total of 12,618 sightings reported to Project Blue Book, 701 remained "unidentified."
Breaking it down by years is a little tough, but the claim is that sightings increased once the U2 started flying. If Bluebook handled 12,618 sightings in a 22 year period, that's an average of ~573 sightings a year. The U2 started flying in 1955 and the A12/Oxcart started flying in 1962:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_U-2Article 341 was the original U-2 prototype, and it never received a USAF serial.[63] The first flight took place at Groom Lake on 1 August 1955, during what was intended to be only a high-speed taxi test
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_A-12After development and production at the Skunk Works, in Burbank, California, the first A-12 was transferred to Groom Lake test facility (Area 51).[14] On 25 April 1962 it was taken on its first (unofficial and unannounced) flight with Lockheed test pilot Louis Schalk at the controls
Just going with the average of 573 sightings per year we would get 8022 sightings between '55 and '69. If we are to go with the increase in sightings claimed after the U2 started flying that could be up to 10,000 sightings I suppose. But sticking with the 8022 figures, that would put "over 1/2 of the sightings" somewhere north of 4011.
The Wiki page for the A12 says there were a total of 18 aircraft built and they made 2,850 test flights, presumably between 1964 and their retirement in 1966:
The source for that is a paywalled LAT article from the Arts and Entertainment section by Annie Jacobsen. As I've noted in other threads, Jacobsen's book on the history of Area 51 is considered fairly accurate when discussing the U2 and A12 programs, before it goes off the rails and suggests ex-Nazis helped Stalin create/breed hideous dwarf humans to pilot small flying saucers. So, I guess will go with 2,850 for now:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_A-12
So, using the average of 573 sightings per year for the 2+ year period of '64-'66 that would be 1146 total sightings 1/2 of which is back to 573 and there were 2,850 test flights of the A12. So, only a 1/4 of those test flight could account for 1/2 of the UFO sightings, at least for that 2-year period. And that assumes pilots can actually "see" an A12. They were often at 80,000'+ and cruised at Mach 3.
Now does that extrapolate out to more than 4000 sightings between '55 and '69? I don't know.
By the late '50s the U2 was not completely unknown. It had been staged in the UK, Turkey, West Germany and Tiwan, in secret, but it's a big black glider like plane and hard to hide. Its cover story was that it was a weather research plane, something Israeli pilots thought when they intercepted one in 1959 (bold by me):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_U-2On 11 March 1959, two Israeli Super Mystère fighters were directed to intercept a U-2 detected over Israel by Israeli ground-based radar. Although the aircraft were unable to make an intercept, the formation leader, Major Yosef Alon, managed to get a good look at the aircraft. He subsequently identified it out of a book as a U-2, registered as a weather reconnaissance aircraft to the US Weather Service. On 22 July 1959, after an overflight was detected, an Israeli Air Force Vautour jet was deployed to photograph the mysterious aircraft. The Vautour came within visual range and the U-2 was successfully photographed. In spite of this, it was not until the 1960 shootdown of a U-2 over the Soviet Union and its subsequent public exposure as a spy plane that the Israeli government understood the identity of the mystery aircraft.[81][82][70]
It's just the fact that it was spy plane that was concealed.
The numbers suggest that the central claim is plausible, but no numbers are giving to support it. Giving that the main source is ultimately 2 guys telling some CIA writers that this is what they thought in the '90s, I think a bit of hyperbole might be involved. It's very likely that the U2 and A12/SR71 accounted for a number of UFO sightings during their development, testing, training, and deployment. But after the 1960 shootdown, the U2 already known as a weather research plane, was outed. Pilots were increasingly aware that the US had high flying capabilities. As far as accounting for over 4000 sightings in a 15 year period, I'm not so sure, but maybe?
