A resurfaced document suggests the CIA was preparing for a potential alien invasion amid mass sightings across the nation, many of which were in Washington DC.
A section in the report titled ‘US Official Attitude to UFOs’ says unexplained sightings were more than 20 times the normal rate in the summer of 1952.
Some Air Force members believed they were ‘interplanetary spaceships about to make closer contact,’ leading the CIA to persuade the military to use Project Blue Book to manage the situation.
Project Blue Book, which ended in 1969, was developed to investigate reports of aerial phenomena and determine if they posed a threat to national security.
‘To prepare the public for [the possibility of contact], 41 previously classified reports were released for publication between August 1952 and February 1953,’ the document states.
The CIA then moved to abandon the investigation in the eyes of the American people, using Project Blue Book ‘as a means of public ‘debunking’ UFOs.’
The group attributed most sightings to misidentified natural phenomena like weather balloons, aircraft lights or atmospheric conditions, and used TV shows and newspapers to spread the word.
‘By erecting a facade of ridicule, the US hoped to allay public alarm, reduce the possibility of the Soviet taking advantage of the UFO mass sightings for either psychological warfare or actual warfare purposes,’ reads the document.
The report states that the cover-up also allowed Project Blue Book to develop aircraft ‘that emulated UFO performances,’ such as anti-gravity which creates a force to counteract gravity and lets objects float or move without being pulled.
The document claims the CIA and US Air Force worked to ‘debunk’ mass UFO sightings in 1952, manny of which came from Washington DC
Some Air Force members believed they were ‘interplanetary spaceships about to make closer contact,’ leading the CIA to persuade the military to use Project Blue Book to manage the situation. Pictured is a photo taken in Passoria, New Jersey in July 1952
The document, ‘Scientific Intelligence – General – Unidentified Flying Objects,’ discussed how the US and Australia collaborated to investigate strange sightings.
It was recently shared on X by user ‘Disclosure Party’ who wrote: ‘Documents from the National Archives of Australia indicate the U.S. was intentionally withholding information about UFOs from the public in 1953.’
The first page explains that ‘the early analyses of UFO reports by the US Air Force (USAF) intelligence indicated that real phenomena were being reported which had flight characteristics so far in advance of US aircraft that only extraterrestrial origin be envisaged.’
A scientific panel chaired by Howard P Robertson met in mid-January to formulate ‘future action on the UFO problem,’ following the release of the 41 reports.
The meeting included the showing of two then-classified films of UFOs and early results of the 3,200 reports that were shared with the public.
The panel suggested education programs to debunk UFO sightings and teach the public how to identify certain phenomena.
That included using articles, TV shows and movies to spread the word, the History Channel reported. The panel even contemplating asking the Walt Disney Corporation to pitch in.
‘Such a program should tend to reduce the current gullibility of the public and…their susceptibility to clever hostile propaganda,’ the panel concluded.
Project Blue Book, which ended in 1969, was developed to investigate reports of aerial phenomena and determine if they posed a threat to national security
On February 16, 1953, the CIA made it appear the investigation had been abandoned, allowing the agency to study of the cases in secret.
Seven months later, the agency gutted the Project Blue Book team to just 10 qualified personnel operating at a top-secret level and then down to just a single officer, sergeant, secretary and part-time consultant.
To control public awareness about the project, the CIA threatened would-be whistleblowers with up to 10 years in jail and a $10,000 fine.
But the document states when service personnel resigned or retired, ‘it was possible to reveal USAF attitudes [toward UFOs] or opinions even if actual data was still restricted.
The report names Major D Fournet, who was a Project Blue Book officer at the Pentagon until 1952 and Former CIA director Admiral Hillenkoetter, along with ‘many intelligences officers associated with the UFO problems, as ‘publicly stating that the US government knew UFOs were extraterrestrial but was withholding the fact from the public.’
Those statements led to a revised penalty for would-be whistleblowers, making the offense federally illegal under the Espionage Act.
The move meant individuals who exposed the work faced up to 20 years in prison and $10,00 in fines.
Pictured is a card detailing a sighting in 1956 that was investigated by Project Blue Book
The report states that the cover-up also allowed Project Blue Book to develop aircraft ‘that emulated UFO performances. That included the failed Canadian Avros saucer
Project Blue Book continued its work, analyzing thousands of reports to weed out what were misidentified objects or extraterrestrial craft.
‘Consultants statistically tested the unknown object population to determine the likelihood that it was similar to the population of identified objects and found that the probability was less than one in ten thousand trillion trillion to one against unknown being the same as knowns,’ reads the document.
By 1957, the team claimed only 14 out of 1,006 sightings remained unidentified.
However, the CIA was also said to use government funding to continue UFO data collection to fund other projects like the Canadian Avros saucer.
The Avrocar was the result of a Canadian effort to develop a supersonic, vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) fighter-bomber, and the CIA opted to design it to appear like a ‘flying saucer.’
In 1952, the Canadian government provided initial funding but dropped the project when it became too expensive. Avro offered the project to the US government, and the U.S. Army and U.S. Air Force took it over in 1958.
The document continues to say that the US government then allocated more funding to investigate gravity and a means of controlling it.
‘Despite the fact science had not attained a level of competence to deal with either gravity or anti-gravity problems,’ according to the report.
‘It is significant at this time the current theories on UFO propulsion were a mixture of gravity control and electro-magnetic propulsion.’
