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CIA About UFOs of the 1950s and '60s:
'It Was Us'
By Leonard David
Space.com
1-14-15
"One thing this CIA UFO claim has accomplished:
It has united UFO skeptics and proponents in proclaiming it untrue"
Many of the unidentified flying objects (UFOs) spotted by people in the middle of the last century were actually high-flying spy planes, officials from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency say.
On Dec. 29, CIA officials said the following via Twitter: "#1 most read on our #Bestof2014list: Reports of unusual activity in the skies in the '50s? It was us. "Attached to the tweet was a PDF of "The CIA and the U-2 Program, 1954-1974," a report about the United States' manned U-2 spy plane written by agency historians and published in 1998.
That document notes that "high-altitude testing of the U-2 soon led to an unexpected side effect — a tremendous increase in reports of unidentified flying objects (UFOs)." . . .
. . . The CIA tweet has sparked its own UFO flap: Several analysts dispute the CIA assertion that U-2 flights really caused upward of half of UFO sightings.
"One thing this CIA UFO claim has accomplished: It has united UFO skeptics and proponents in proclaiming it untrue," Robert Sheaffer, author and well-known UFO cynic, wrote in a blog post last week. "We might agree on little else, except that this claim is nonsense."
Sheaffer explains that the Project Blue Book files are now public records, allowing anyone to verify when and where sightings were reported.
"The bottom line is: There is absolutely no correlation between the times and places of UFO reports and U-2 flights," he wrote. . . .
