In April 1952, the most popular magazine in America, LIFE, in a very popular issue featuring Marilyn Monroe on the cover, published an article called “Have We Visitors from Space?” In it, the authors asserted that, having spoken to senior Air Force officials, they could confidently declare that the flying saucers frequently witnessed since 1947 were neither a visionary phenomenon nor a natural phenomenon, nor were they balloons or manmade aircraft designed by Americans or Russians, leaving extra-terrestrial visitors as the only reasonable conclusion. This article surprised Captain Edward Ruppelt, who had been tasked to run the Air Force’s follow-up UFO investigation after the dissolution of Project Grudge, Project Blue Book. The Air Force had directed Ruppelt to keep something of a lid on UFO theories by identifying mundane explanations for as many reports as possible and not advertising those that proved more difficult to explain away. Therefore, it did not make much sense that the Air Force would then encourage the biggest magazine in America to fuel a resurgence in flying saucer mania, as the Life article certainly did, precipitating an inundation of UFO reports with which Ruppelt and Blue Book had to contend. But perhaps it wasn’t the Air Force at all, for it was well known that Henry Luce, the magazine magnate who pulled the strings at LIFE, was a close friend of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen Dulles, the first director of the CIA. So maybe there was some inter-office chicanery underway about which Ruppelt was uninformed. Suspicions of being out of the loop were confirmed in July that year when, amid the deluge of UFO sightings he was dealing with, Ruppelt, in Washington, DC, on business, picked up the newspaper and discovered that, a couple days earlier, there had been a dramatic UFO incident over the nation’s capital! According to the papers, on July 19th and 20th, numerous objects appeared on air traffic controller radar , none of which were following established flight paths, and some of which appeared to be capable of making radical maneuvers unlike normal aircraft. Some of these radar pips even coincided with visual sightings of what appeared to be fireballs with trailing tails, some of which were taken to be meteors, but which were described by others to hover and change direction. By the time jets had been scrambled to defend the capital from what appeared to be an incursion into our sovereign airspace, the objects were nowhere to be found. Ruppelt writes that he was flabbergasted that no one had bothered to inform him, the head of the Air Force’s UFO investigation project, and as reporters contacted him for comment, he had nothing to offer, prompting further headlines like “Air Force Won’t Talk.” Determined to do his job, Ruppelt requisitioned a staff car to head out and interview radarmen and witnesses, but he was given the runaround, told a car wasn’t available and further informed that he could not expense a rental. Instead, he was directed to take the bus, but Ruppelt was unfamiliar with DC public transit and was left with the option of paying for a cab out of his per diem, which after lodging and meals had run dry. So, foiled in his efforts to investigate further, he ended up departing for Ohio and Blue Book’s headquarters at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. A few days later, the UFO flyovers began again, with commercial airline pilots and flight attendants, control tower personnel and U.S. Airmen witnessing lights in the sky that corresponded with strange radar blips. Interestingly, witness reports were accompanied by contradictory reports from others on the same aircraft or in the same towers who hadn’t seen a thing. The official Air Force explanation was twofold. The radar blips were simply misidentifications caused by strange weather, as there had been temperature inversions over DC that July. As for the visual sightings, like the Foo fighters before them, they had been stars and city lights that had been misidentified due to aviator’s vertigo. And the sighting from the ground? Well, those were just shooting stars, of course. Many scorned this explanation, which relied on a confluence of numerous errors and was buttressed by the idea that the situation had snowballed due to mass hysteria. Captain Ruppelt, however, disbelieved the Air Force explanation for another reason. According to his memoirs, a few days prior to the Washington flyovers, he had spoken to a scientist from an agency that he refused to identify. This contact supposedly warned him of the forthcoming incident, predicting, “you're going to have the granddaddy of all UFO sightings. The sighting will occur in Washington or New York…probably Washington.”

Shortly before I released part one of this series, the unclassified version of the Pentagon’s UFO report finally dropped, and it was very much what was expected. In fact, it was strikingly similar to General Nathan Twining’s memo of September 1947, when Twining conceded the existence of UFOs, suggested some may actually be natural phenomena like meteors but that others appear to display maneuvering capabilities and to be evasive, and suggested they may be a high security American aircraft, or that an adversary like the Soviet Union had developed an extraordinarily advanced propulsion technology. Here we are 74 years later, and not much has changed, except the fact that we’re getting it released to the public directly from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. In this preliminary report, which it should be noted is only the unclassified version of a report with presumably far more granular detail presented to Congress, five “explanatory categories” are given: “airborne clutter,” such as the “large deflated balloon” that is cited multiple times as an explanation for a certain sighting; “natural atmospheric phenomena,” like the old meteor explanation; “US…developmental programs”; “foreign adversary systems”; and to really stoke the ET hypothesis, an “other” category that might attribute UFO sightings to anything, including aliens. And there appears to be no shortage of these sightings; focusing only on reports from military aviators between 2004 and 2021, they number them 144, stating that 80 of these “registered across multiple sensors”, including radar, infrared, and weapon seekers. 18 of these appeared to display “unusual movement patterns or flight characteristics,” though they caution that “[t]hese observations could be the result of sensor errors, spoofing, or observer misperception.” The headlines regarding this report have been somewhat misleading, focusing on the fact that it doesn’t rule out an alien origin for the objects, which is technically true but only in that the report did not even explicitly address the possibility, and stating that it asserts they are not American craft, which is not true at all. US government or domestic private industry development programs is one of their explanatory categories, and expanding on this, it states they were unable to confirm this but still explicitly says “UAP observations could be attributable” to such American programs (emphasis added). So what’s happening here? Is the government really so helpless to audit its own programs that in almost 75 years it’s been unable to find out whether one of its own agencies or aerospace companies is secretly flying super-advanced craft? Or is it withholding, or more than that, making deceptive statements by claiming ignorance and inability to confirm the existence of such projects? There does seem to be at least one confirmable lie in the report. In September 1951, a sighting by both radar operators and pilots of an unidentified object over Fort Monmouth Army Base led to the creation of Project Blue Book… and to an Air Force directive, JANAP 146(B), ordering all members of the armed forces to report UFO sightings to the nearest military base, to the Air Defense Command, and to the Secretary of Defense, and further making the leak of these sightings to the press punishable by a $10,000 fine and up to a decade in prison. Yet the recent report claims, “No standardized reporting mechanism existed until the Navy established one in March 2019” and that the “Air Force subsequently adopted that mechanism in November 2020.” Maybe I’m misreading, and the former reporting protocol had fallen out of use or was never as structured and official as what they recently established, but this sure does seem disingenuous, as if the US government only recently heard about UFOs and didn’t start really looking into them until a couple years ago, when history shows us they have been looking closely at sightings since the very beginning.

The Pentagon UFO report, which can be read here.

Just as this new UFO report suggests, whether sincerely or not, that China or Russia may have developed the unusual craft that have been sighted over the last 16 years, so too in 1952, after the Washington UFO flyovers, Cold War fears led suspicions to naturally fall on the Soviets. The idea that enemy aircraft may have just managed to penetrate air defenses and approach within striking range of the White House immediately led to the CIA launching its own UFO investigation the month after the Washington sightings. Available records of their secret meetings at Wright Patterson Air Force Base with Air Technical Intelligence Center officials indicate they first looked into the possibility that the objects over Washington had been a secret American project, but being themselves privy to some of the most advanced spy planes being developed, like the U-2, they believed the craft were not American. If the Air Force had been developing this above top-secret tech, why would they have taken the risk of flying them over the capital, knowing their own jets would be scrambled to confront them and possibly shoot them out of the sky? The problem was, it didn’t make a lot of sense for Russians to fly such valuable toys right over our capital either. It would have been a risky move, and even if the intelligence such an operation might provide was worth the possibility of losing advanced technology to an adversary who would immediately reverse engineer it, the flight paths of the objects over Washington that July didn’t make any sense as a reconnaissance mission. One suggestion was they had been Russian balloons sent simply to gather info on what kind of Air Force response enemy aircraft could expect, but balloons could not explain the speed and evasive maneuvers reported by some witnesses and radar men. Finally, the CIA’s investigation came to the conclusion that a driving purpose for risking such a flyover with experimental advanced aircraft was to wage psychological warfare. They pointed out how curious it was that Russian media had never once mentioned UFO sightings, not even to mock the American saucer flaps, and suggested that the entire phenomenon might be engineered simply to foster a general panic and mass hysteria, such that, in the case of a genuine attack, air response would be slowed and confused, wary of false alarms.

For this theory to be true, that the Russians had sent UFOs in order to gauge our defenses and/or stoke UFO mania for their own purposes, then they would have needed advanced aerospace technology capable of great speed and maneuverability… or would they? One theory that emerged several years later suggested that the Washington flap was caused by electronic countermeasures, not actual craft. Electronic countermeasures, or ECM, had been used since 1945, in the form of reflective aluminum chaff released to confuse enemy radar with false readings, and progressed from there to actual radar jamming technology. The notion that ECM had resulted in false readings over Washington in July 1952 was spearheaded by Leon Davidson, a figure whose background strengthens his credibility. While completing his doctorate in engineering at Columbia University, he’d been hand-picked to work on the Manhattan Project, and afterward he’d served as a supervising engineer at Los Alamos labs. As Davidson explained in his 1959 essay on the topic, the US Air Force had had the capability of altering enemy radar returns since 1950, through the use of a device that captured, modified, and amplified radar impulses, sending them back to show inaccurate heading, range, and speed. He describes widespread military use of technology that manufactures so-called “galloping ghosts,” or radar blips that don’t correspond with actual aircraft. Just a couple years before Davidson wrote his essay, Aviation Research and Development magazine published a story about just this sort of ECM technology entering the public aviation industry, being sold and used for the training of radar operators. And it has since been declassified that in the early 1960s, under Project Palladium, American pilots purposely penetrated the perimeters of Russian airspace to gather data, much as some believed the Russians had done over the capital in 1952, and they made strategic use of this radar-manipulating ECM technology in the process. Interestingly, the newly released UFO report drops some hints that this may remain a viable explanation for UAP when it concedes that some of the unusual flight characteristics of UAP might be attributable to “spoofing” or “signature management.” But unlike the CIA, Leon Davidson did not attribute these galloping ghosts to Russia. Rather, Davidson concluded, “Since 1951, the CIA has caused or sponsored saucer sightings for its own purposes… [through the] military use of ECM on a classified basis unknown to the radar observers who were involved” (emphasis added).

But why? Why would the CIA want to create UFO sightings? Even if they were withholding information about such operations during their 1952 meetings with ATIC and wanted to deflect suspicion for such a psychological operation onto the Russians, their reasoning seems sound. What purpose would it serve to create a mass hysteria that might weaken our capability to respond to an actual threat? Interestingly, after their investigation, the CIA organized a secret panel of scientists to further weigh in on the topic. This meeting, called the “Robertson Panel” after its presiding expert, the Pentagon’s director of the Weapons Systems Evaluations Group, Dr. Howard Percy Robertson, was composed of astronomers, radar experts, rocket scientists, and nuclear physicists. While they concluded that UFOs were nothing but visual misperceptions and sensor anomalies, they recognized the threat of a UFO panic and recommended training military personnel to recognize phenomena often mistaken for UFOs. Furthermore, they recommended a campaign to debunk as many sightings as possible, a task that fell to Ruppelt’s Project Blue Book. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly for our study, they advised that civilian organizations of UFO enthusiasts be closely monitored, as they had the potential to irresponsibly influence public thought on UFOs and could be used “for subversive purposes.” This final recommendation, however, seems to have been anticipated, and a suggestion had been made that perhaps one way to monitor UFO groups was to fake UFO sightings and scrutinize the resulting eyewitness accounts and public reactions. Days before the Robertson Panel, Captain Ruppelt received a memo from a Dr. Howard Cross, a scientist working at a private research institute that had been tasked with analyzing UFO data, under the codename Project Stork. Cook proposed a “controlled experiment” in which “different types of aerial activity should be secretly and purposely scheduled” in order to monitor the “steady flow of reports from ordinary civilian observers, in addition to those by military and other official observers,” who would likewise be kept in the dark about the operation. This sounds an awful lot like what Leon Davidson would years later accuse the CIA of perpetrating, and it seems to hint at a motive for doing so, a psychological operation, or PSYOP, with American citizen, both civilian and enlisted, as its subjects.

This leads to the inevitable question of whether the CIA actually would engage in a psychological experiments on U.S. citizens. Anyone with a cursory knowledge of the history of CIA exploits must be aware that not only are they quite capable of such operations, they’ve been caught conducting them! On the same day that President Truman had made the Air Force a separate branch of the armed forces—the day that Kenneth Arnold’s Army Air Force Intelligence contacts Brown and Davidson had died in a fiery plane crash carrying material supposedly ejected from a UFO—he also turned the wartime intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services, into the Central Intelligence Agency, thereby consolidating all military intelligence arms into one organization. After that, this powerful government agency operated with carte blanche and no meaningful oversight. Some indication of its strange and illegal practices became public knowledge in the 1970s, when during an investigation of their practices, Congress demanded information on their Project MK-ULTRA. This topic is itself a rabbit hole deserving of its own episode or series, but in short, after the agency attempted to destroy documentation of the project, Congress nevertheless learned that under MK-ULTRA, the CIA conducted extensive mind control experiments using hypnosis and psychoactive narcotics. With what we know the CIA was capable of in MK-ULTRA, faking some UFO flights and encouraging UFOlogists to believe outrageous stories, perhaps in order to gauge how utterly public opinion can be manipulated, certainly no longer seems beyond the pale. And once spoofing radar and using balloons or experimental aircraft to prompt UFO reports became boring, who’s to say they wouldn’t have taken this further and engaged in truly invasive psychological operations on UFO witnesses?

Take UFO nut George Adamski as a possible subject for such an operation. In 1952, Adamski, a Californian restaurant proprietor who used to hold forth on mysticism and UFOs in informal lectures at his café, claimed to have been taken aboard a spacecraft in the desert, learning that UFOs were piloted by peace-loving ETs from Venus. In retrospect, Adamski appears to be a hoaxer with a penchant for incorporating the politics of his associates into his contact stories. For example, he was involved with treasonous Nazi sympathizer William Pelley, and in a curious coincidence, his Venusians are described as blond Nordic-looking fellows whose shoes leave the swastika symbol in their footprints. But as my principal source Mirage Men by Mark Pilkinton points out, Adamski’s contact story appeared and was widely circulated only months after the Washington flyovers, just when records show the CIA was thinking about how to defuse UFO panic. Suddenly Adamski comes along saying don’t worry, the ETs are friendly and neutral, and his story becomes so widely known that he was fielding meetings with royalty and the Pope. Leon Davidson believed that Adamski was a CIA tool, and Adamski’s later stories seem to betray what might have really happened to him in the desert. As Adamski described his subsequent encounters, his Venusian friends picked him up and drove him out to the desert in black Pontiacs, where they served him mysterious beverages and showed him images on a screen. These descriptions sound an awful lot like Adamski, the impressionable friend of a convicted seditionist, may have been an early subject of CIA drugging and brainwashing a year before MK-ULTRA’s official sanctioning.

George Adamski with a famous photo he took of a UFO…which turned out to be a lamp.

One further possible example may serve to illustrate the feasibility that the CIA could have gone much further than just faking UFO sightings in their creation of the UFO myth. In 1958, a few years before the first widely publicized alien abduction story told by Betty and Barney Hill in the U.S., a Brazilian farmer named Villas Boas disclosed to a UFO investigator that in October the previous year, he had been abducted by a UFO. He and his brother had seen a mysterious flying red light over their fields, and later, when he was working the soil alone at night to avoid the heat, it had returned, shaped like an egg, with something spinning at great speed atop it, fluorescent red light emitting from all over the craft. He tried to flee, but men in unusual clothing that sound suspiciously like protective suits, complete with fabric head coverings and stiff gloves, sprang out and seized him, carrying him within, where they stripped him, wiped some kind of fluid over him with sponges, gassed him with some kind of fog, and then forced him to have sex with a beautiful woman. After being deposited back on the field, Boas returned home, where his sister noticed severe bruising around his chin. He vomited a yellow fluid and afterward suffered a days-long illness consisting of lesions, body aches, and eye irritation. It would be very easy to dismiss this as a tall tale told to a UFOlogist, perhaps even with some coaxing, but 20 years later, in 1978, a former CIA operative, Bosco Nedelcovic, who had served the agency in Latin America from 1956 to 1963, revealed to another UFOlogist that he had been a part of a Project Mirage that had purposely faked UFO encounters all over the world. Nedelcovic confirms the Villas Boas abduction from the abductors’ point of view, explaining that they had made Boas the subject of a hallucinogenic drug test as part of an experiment in psychological warfare. By Nedelcovic’s telling, the craft was a helicopter fitted with unusual lights and other equipment, which accords well with Boas’s description. Detecting Boas alone in his field with heat-sensors, they sprayed him with an aerosol drug and descended, accidentally striking his chin against the helicopter deck as they hauled him aboard to conduct some other, undisclosed experiments on him. This story, while entirely uncorroborated and unconfirmed, does cause one to wonder how widespread the CIA’s MK-ULTRA operations ranged, and how entangled they might have been in UFO disinformation.

On further consideration of all this, of course, it’s rather easy to discount everything. The Washington flyovers were a combination of weather causing radar errors and meteors being mistaken for aircraft. There is no irrefutable evidence that the CIA ever used ECM to manufacture UFO sightings, or that their MK-ULTRA operations were ever applied toward convincing people they had been abducted by aliens. Adamski was a loony, or a liar, or both. Villas Boas had been terribly ill and hallucinated his entire ordeal. Nedelcovic had given a UFOlogist exactly what he wanted, a humdinger of a government cover-up story for which there is no proof. At the same time, though, these don’t seem impossible. Might the US government or an adversary undertake to purposely create UFO reports? Yes. One example of this strategy was a proposed approach to toppling the Gaddafi regime in Libya in the 1980s, when the US considered manipulating radar to create aircraft sightings in order to sow paranoia and plant the idea that US forces were commencing an invasion. Would the CIA really go so far as to drug and brainwash people into believing they’d been abducted by UFOs just as an experiment in psychological warfare, or for some other purpose? MK-ULTRA shows us they were absolutely capable of the drugging and brainwashing. And other American military PSYOPs cement the willingness of the US government to leverage superstition and fantasy to achieve their ends. In the early 1950s, the Air Force projected a recording from a plane hidden in the clouds above the Philippines, convincing villagers that the voice of god was threatening to curse them if they aided communist insurgents. In a further operation against these same insurgents, they made them believe that their territories were haunted by an aswang, a kind of vampire legend, by planting corpses that they’d left puncture marks on and drained of blood. So, this UFO conspiracy theory, when one analyzes it closely, starts to seem plausible, and far easier to believe than the theory that extra-terrestrials have regularly visited our world for decades, having somehow still not learned whatever it was they were trying to learn, and that it is this the government is hiding from us. But for the theory that the UFO myth is actually the product of longstanding PSYOPs and disinformation operations to be believable, what it needs is some kind of evidence, perhaps in the form of a confession by a former government disinformation agent. Well… as you’ll hear in the conclusion of this series, such confessions exist. It only remains to be decided whether they can be trusted.

Images of Villas Boas and the story he told. Note the protective suits of his abductors, and the resemblance of the vehicle to a helicopter (with the revolving “cupola” atop it).

UFO Disinfo: Part Two - The Washington Flyovers and the CIA

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