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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."

39 of 197 comments (clear)

  1. Oh yeah? by halivar · · Score: 5, Funny

    If I was a Sleestak alien overlord, that's exactly what I would say.

    1. Re:Oh yeah? by g0bshiTe · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Sleestak were indigenous to earth you insensitive clod!

      --
      I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
  2. I'm not saying it was aliens... by ColdWetDog · · Score: 4, Insightful

    But it was aliens.

    (BTW, what happened to the other half?

    --
    Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
    1. Re:I'm not saying it was aliens... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      Russian spy planes. What do you think the CIA was looking for?

    2. Re:I'm not saying it was aliens... by bondsbw · · Score: 5, Funny

      )

      There it is.

      --
      All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
    3. Re:I'm not saying it was aliens... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Weather Balloons - Swamp Gas - Reflections of the Sun against ice particles in clouds - The planet Venus, Mars, Jupiter - Sputnik II - The Jupiter II - The USS Enterprise - that just about covers it...

    4. Re:I'm not saying it was aliens... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny
    5. Re:I'm not saying it was aliens... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Weather Balloons - Swamp Gas - Reflections of the Sun against ice particles in clouds - The planet Venus, Mars, Jupiter - Sputnik II - The Jupiter II - The USS Enterprise - that just about covers it...

      "just about covers it" you say.. I wonder what the rest were? Especially the silent ones flying in formation with large panels on their bottoms flashing bright primary colors that I saw go right over my head at night at perhaps 50 feet off the ground in the direction of Mt. Rainier, which about 10 minutes later were followed by two Air Force jets at slow speed but higher up. Then a while later what sounded like helicopters with strong search lights flew around over the forest to the side of the house where I was staying flashing the search beams around in the trees as they also slowly followed the same path towards Rainier.

      When one of them was directly above me I felt a deep thrumming vibration throughout my body, strong enough to almost be audible, which then quickly faded as it drifted past me. There were no other sounds coming from them. This was back in the 90's.

      * Say what you will, but at the very least there is tech flying/floating around this world that no Government is yet admitting to having.

    6. Re:I'm not saying it was aliens... by AK+Marc · · Score: 2

      Say what you will, but at the very least there is tech flying/floating around this world that no Government is yet admitting to having.

      Since about 1917, that has been true every day. Though more so since the 1950's.

    7. Re:I'm not saying it was aliens... by Lord+Kano · · Score: 2

      I saw something in the early 80s. I'm not trying to ascribe them to an extraterrestrial origin but they were peculiar.

      What I saw wasn't a group of U2 planes in formation. I suppose it could have been A-12 Avenger IIs, but there's no evidence that they ever fielded airworthy aircraft. So, they're still unknown to me and thus it's accurate to call them UFOs.

      What's funny to me is that even though I didn't know it at the time, they were moving away from an area with a nuclear research facility that employs a fair number of people in the area. I was a kid, I didn't know anything about the lab or what they did there so the significance of their path didn't occur to me until I was an adult.

      LK

      --
      "Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
    8. Re: I'm not saying it was aliens... by Lord+Kano · · Score: 2

      I'd like to see the CIA claim credit for the "Flying earthenware vessel" spotted over Edo Japan in 1180 AD.

      I guess they were doing really early recon for WWII. Just to make sure the Japanese weren't hiding anything...

      LK

      --
      "Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
  3. Re:What about "The Day After Roswell" book? by ColdWetDog · · Score: 2

    Book summary from Amazon follows. U2 aircraft flying high in the sky doesn't debunk this book:

    "Backed by documents newly declassified through the Freedom of Information Act, Colonel Philip J. Corso (Ret.), a member of President Eisenhower’s National Security Council and former head of the Foreign Technology Desk in the US Army, has come forward to reveal his personal stewardship of alien artifacts from the Roswell crash. He tells us how he spearheaded the Army’s reverse-engineering project that led to today’s integrated circuit chips, fiber optics, lasers, and super-tenacity fibers, and “seeded” the Roswell alien technology to giants of American industry. Laying bare the US government’s shocking role in the Roswell incident—what was found, the cover-up, and how they used alien artifacts to change the course of twentieth-century history—The Day After Roswell is an extraordinary memoir that not only forces us to reconsider the past, but also our role in the universe."

    Oh yeah? Where is the thingy that that was supposed to replace the compact disc?

    --
    Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
  4. That's not all.. by gurps_npc · · Score: 3, Funny

    Wait till they declassify the Elvis sighting reports... It was really President JFK, disguised by plastic surgery after he secretly resigned !

    --
    excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
  5. Re:What's the real story? by kelemvor4 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  6. The "majority" is only 51%! by cornicefire · · Score: 2

    What about the other 49%? Are they real aliens? Or just NSA? Or some other TLA?

  7. Re:Skeptical by confused+one · · Score: 3, Interesting

    U2 aircraft are responsible for some. F-117 stealth fighters were responsible for quite a few too -- they were operational for over a decade before it was publically acknowledged they existed.

  8. Re:So the CIA = Aliens? by zlives · · Score: 5, Funny

    that would explain the anal probes

  9. Did these fly from Area 51? by grimJester · · Score: 2

    If so, it's pretty funny that the UFOs actually were based at Area 51 :)

  10. Where are the anal probe results? by uCallHimDrJ0NES · · Score: 3, Funny

    I am submitting a FOIA request to get that anal probe data.

    --
    Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
  11. Re:Skeptical by Penguinisto · · Score: 4, Interesting

    As someone who once worked for Project Senior Trend, the sibling post has it dead-on.

    It was much preferable for the USAF to have folks think that ET stopped by, than to let them realize that what they were really seeing were F-117s flying overhead (mind you, nearly all sorties were done at night, but things happen, and dawn/dusk is kind of an awkward time, at least visually.) In profile (side or front/rear), the jet has a saucer-like shape, and definitely something that doesn't look like an ordinary civilian or military aircraft. Funny enough, the Soviets were more than happy to foster and even encourage alien conspiracy theories, if only to keep their own population from thinking that they saw some secret military project flying overhead.

    Other notable examples of military aircraft that would cause confusion and optical illusions? The SR-71/A-12 in its early days, the B-47 flying wing, and its grandkid, the B-2 bomber.

    --
    Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
  12. Re:Skeptical by rmdingler · · Score: 2

    Indeed. Just as any random assertion posted nom de guerre is inferred to have been made by an accomplished expert in the field at hand.

    --
    Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

    Ernest Hemingway

  13. Re:What about UFOs in US Airspace? by Opportunist · · Score: 2

    Take a moment to think. Where would you conduct test flights? Over foreign soil where you not only won't have the aid of the local authorities in your "there is nothing to see here" coverup when the crate croaks and goes down prematurely but won't even get your ass expensive toy back to find out just WHY it broke apart in mid air?

    --
    We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
  14. Well... by Holistic+Missile · · Score: 3, Funny

    I guess this identification chart is now obsolete:

    http://xmb.stuffucanuse.com/xm...

    --
    When you're dead, you don't know you're dead. It only affects the people around you. Same thing when you're stupid.
  15. hmmm...no. by PopeRatzo · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This is such horseshit. Regardless of what you think of UFOs, of the hundreds of thousands of UFO sightings, many reported by military people, law enforcement and people trained to observe aircraft, hardly any of them resembled anything like a U2 spyplane.

    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.

    I don't think for a second that there are aliens from Ork involved with the UFO sightings that have been common for the last five millennia, but I doubt more than a handful were people who were seeing U2 spyplanes. Who knows fuck-all about what those UFOs really were or whether they were inside or outside the observers heads? But at the moment, I'm not prepared to believe a goddamn thing the CIA says about anything. In my opinion, they're a bigger threat to people's safety and sanity than practically any outside threat, including North Korea, Iran, Russia or Israel (who are all plenty bad),

    Now, if you want to tell me that the abductions people have been reporting for the past 40 years are the CIA, I may buy that, because they are some sadistic motherfuckers who love putting things up peoples' asses, as we have learned from recent government leaks. Yeah, anal probes, mutilations, etc, that sounds just like the CIA's speed.

    --
    You are welcome on my lawn.
    1. Re:hmmm...no. by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.
    2. Re:hmmm...no. by PopeRatzo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      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.
    3. Re:hmmm...no. by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 2

      Have you ever tried to record an aircraft from your cell phone? It really doesn't work.

      What, are planes completely invisible on cell phone cameras? Did not know that. You can still capture something. An F-117 (not a big aircraft, really) at 10000 feet would (rough calc) cover 15 pixels on my 5mp non-zoom cell phone camera - possibly enough to identify shape. Certainly it would be enough to capture position and motion relative to landmarks and other useful information that could be used to clarify a UFO sighting.

      Also I didn't specify cell phone* - I just said video recording device. 10x zoom and up is more or less a basic feature of digital cameras these days. And a cell phone should be just fine for a lot of sightings - at least, if they really happened the way they end up being described. If something is so large and close that it can be reliably described as a "gigantic triangular craft" - good description of an F-117 rather than a U-2, by the way - and not a small triangular craft close-up, then that suggests something you might easily capture on a cellphone.

      Poor video evidence is better than none - and at the very least, video taken by multiple people from multiple angles would have great corroborative power for a sighting.

      By your logic, if cell phone recording was the only way to establish something's reality...

      By your logic, all I need to do is add my own invented clause to the phrase "by your logic", and show that any point you're trying to make is also ridiculous!

      I never said cell phone recording is the only way to establish something's reality. My point was that despite the existence of cell phones, we don't seem to have any more video evidence from UFO sightings than we did 20 years ago.

      --
      systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
  16. Re:Why is a spy plane more like a UFO? by ceoyoyo · · Score: 2

    People call in to report that they saw Venus and it must be aliens.

    The credible reports come from radar and pilots who report seeing things that move "impossibly" fast and high. Or from people who report seeing things flying that don't appear on radar. During the cold war people who saw something funny in the sky would call the air force to report it because it could be a soviet bomber! So when they got the answer "nope, there's nothing there".

  17. Pay no attention... by Moof123 · · Score: 2

    Pay no attention to the torture, er I mean Enhance Interrogation Technique, er I mean EITs, yeah EIT's sounds better. Look UFO's!

    Never mind that we cruelly froze an innocent guy to death, UFO's!!!

  18. Re:Skeptical by Charliemopps · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...and don't forget the SR-71...
    F-117 and U2 were practically average looking compared to that thing. My father was in the air-force and got to see one land before they were declassified. He said his first reaction was ALIENS! But changed his after it landed like any normal aircraft.

  19. Re:It's what they want. by Mike+Van+Pelt · · Score: 2

    Tin foil. TIN. Aluminum foil is worse than useless. There's a reason actual tin foil is hard to find. (And you won't find it at Costco.)

  20. Re:Why is a spy plane more like a UFO? by X0563511 · · Score: 2

    Is it an object? Is it unidentified? Is it flying? Then it is by definition a UFO.

    That's literally all the criteria involved.

    --
    For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
  21. Re:Skeptical by Penguinisto · · Score: 2

    Then we get the 'aliens at Area 51' stories and every teenage boy on the planet knows about the base.

    They know about... that base.

    The USAF owns something like 1/3 of Nevada as test range. Area 51/Groom Lake is only a very, very small piece of it.

    --
    Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
  22. Re:It was us? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Actual sightings by USAF officers include multi-mach multi-G maneuvers by UFOs, sorry kid, you must be new to this.

  23. Re:Skeptical by Quasimodem · · Score: 2

    Well, you don't think they would deign to speak to ordinary low-income proles if they were not trying to manipulate them, do you?

  24. Re:Skeptical by Beck_Neard · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  25. Re:What about "The Day After Roswell" book? by hey! · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Yes military aircraft probably accounts for the majority of sightings, but not the ones that zip around faster than anything we have even today, stop on a dime and go another direction just as fast..

    I've seen objects like this, multiple times, but I've always been able to explain in mundane terms after watching closely -- I'm the kind of guy who keeps binoculars in the car just in case the night skies are clear. I'd *love* to see an alien spaceship, but being a habitual sky watcher things that occasional sky watcher might take as a spacecraft look like ordinary phenomena to me.

    And it's not because I only see what I'm told could be real. Decades ago I experienced something which science said was impossible: meteors shooting overhead with a rocket-like sound. The reason this is impossible is that meteors are fifty or a hundred miles up -- sound could not travel fast enough through the atmosphere. But I knew what I saw and heard, and in 2001 scientists actually observed this phenomenon, electrophonic meteors.

    --
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  26. Re:So the CIA = Aliens? by davydagger · · Score: 2

    on a serious note, the dates also line up with MK ULTRA. so sadly yes. "Alien abductions" in the 50s and 60s, assuming they where not made up, had a chance of actually being CIA performing MK ultra.

  27. Unreliability of your perception of things you see by dpbsmith · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If you look at one of those Internet compilations of Photos you really need to look at to understand, it is very impressive just how confused you can be by chance juxtapositions of visual elements.

    #18 is particularly interesting. It's not a precise juxtaposition. The shadow looks like the shadow of a flag; it's not shaped like the rug. You can understand intellectually what's happening in about five seconds. And yet it takes a real effort of will to perceive the rug is lying on the sand. Relax for an instant and it once again looks as if it is levitating.