As most of us know by now, the CIA has indeed kept tabs on the UFO problem in the past, particularly during the 1950s and 60s. This is common knowledge for most these days, particularly thanks to the PR staff at the CIA, and what might be viewed as a “cooperative promotional effort” on their part in advance of the recent X-Files reboot. Namely, the CIA featured a number of their previously declassified UFO files on a page at their website, leading many media outlets to proclaim that the the CIA had “just released its UFO files.”
Not so fast. The files in question had actually been released back in 1978, as their website states. “The CIA declassified hundreds of documents in 1978 detailing the Agency’s investigations into Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs),” the statement reads. “The documents date primarily from the late 1940s and 1950s.” That, of course, didn’t keep the press from jumping and running with a host of cheerfully misleading headlines about the sudden release of the CIA’s “real X-Files”.
Many historians would actually assert that the closest thing to “real” X-Files would actually have been the US Air Force’s Project Blue Book, which oversaw the official collection of UFO reports by government until 1968. Despite being a “legitimate” government UFO study, Blue Book left a lot to be desired, resulting in dissatisfaction from many involved, including the project’s former science advisor, J. Allen Hynek. In fact, Hynek’s dissatisfaction with Blue Book’s handling of UFO reports led him to believe that some other organization may have been receiving and studying a number of UFO reports, altogether bypassing the Air Force and its operations. “There were many times during my twenty years as a scientific consultant to Blue Book,” Hynek wrote in 1977, “that I also wondered whether the very best reports were being kept from Blue Book.”
In likelihood, there were a number of different agencies that were keeping tabs on the UFO subject, and as we have already established, the CIA had indeed been one. More specifically, the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI) and its Office of Current Intelligence (OCI) became the departments that oversaw the CIA’s secret UFO inquiry. At the urging of Weapons and Equipment Division head Edward Tauss, the CIA’s UFO study group was advised to keep its interest in UFOs under wraps, “in view of [the public’s] probable alarmist tendencies.” In other words, it was believed that the CIA’s role in UFO research, if made public, might result in legitimization of the phenomenon, and thus actually encourage belief in it.
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