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CIA on UFO Sightings: 'It Was Us'
mrflash818 sends word that the CIA has taken the blame for a majority of early UFO sightings. In a tweet, the agency said, "It was us," and linked to a document summarizing their use of U-2 spy planes from 1954-1974 (PDF).
"High-altitude testing of the U-2led to an unexpected side effect — a tremendous increase in reports of unidentified flying objects," the CIA wrote in the document, which it wrote in 1998. "In the mid-1950s, most commercial airliners flew at altitudes between 10,000 and 20,000 feet and [many] military aircraftoperated at altitudes below 40,000 feet. Consequently, once U-2s started flying at altitudes above 60,000 feet, air-traffic controllers began receiving increasing numbers of UFO reports." [T]he CIA cross-referenced UFO sightings to U-2 flight logs. "This enabled the investigators to eliminate the majority of the UFO reports," the CIA wrote, "although they could not reveal to the letter writers the true cause of the UFO sightings."
But it was aliens.
(BTW, what happened to the other half?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Sleestak were indigenous to earth you insensitive clod!
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Whenever the CIA admits to something, I wonder, what's the bigger lie they're trying to cover up? Or, am I just being paranoid?
Citizens of other countries might think you're being paranoid. To Americans, it's obvious that you are right.
However in this case it might not be so much of a "cover up" as it is an effort to get everyone's mind off of torture.
Last time I checked, a U2 spyplane was not really capable of hovering motionless and then accelerating to the horizon in a moment. Nor were they gigantic triangular craft.
Last time I checked, people were incredibly bad at objectively reporting what they see, and other people were incredibly bad at relating what the first people said they saw, and then other people get what they heard from the second people confused with something they saw on TV, and then yet more people read books by Erich Von Daniken
What I find weird is that the kajillion-fold increase in personal video recording devices over the past few decades seems to have scared away all the UFOs. Why, a week hardly went by in the 1980s without a flap, but now...
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Actual sightings by USAF officers include multi-mach multi-G maneuvers by UFOs, sorry kid, you must be new to this.
Have you ever tried to record an aircraft from your cell phone? It really doesn't work.
By your logic, if cell phone recording was the only way to establish something's reality, commercial aircraft don't exist either.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The SR-71 - which moved about 3x as fast as almost all military aircraft at the time - was first tested around the early 1960's. Then there was suddenly a surge of sightings of triangle-shaped ufos blazing around at mach 3 speeds, which _obviously_ couldn't have been from a military jet because no military jet went that fast.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.