Twenty-three files carry the CIA prefix in this archive now. An earlier version of this piece counted 21; the two additions came with Release 05, both about one week off Puerto Rico in November 1964. Most of the CIA material consists of one policy panel, a few status memos, and foreign collection where the UFO detail rides along with something the agency cared about more. But there is now a file where the agency's own analysts looked at radar film and wrote down a number. One at a time, then.
The policy layer: the Robertson Panel and the memo before it
CIA-UAP-002 is the report of the Scientific Advisory Panel on Unidentified Flying Objects, convened by the Office of Scientific Intelligence and chaired by H. P. Robertson of Caltech. It met in January 1953. The other signatures are Luis Alvarez, Lloyd Berkner, Samuel Goudsmit and Thornton Page. The evidence list at Tab B starts with 75 case histories from 1951-1952 that ATIC picked as its best documented.
The first conclusion is that the evidence "shows no indication that these phenomena constitute a direct physical threat to national security." The second is the one people remember. The panel decided that "continued emphasis on the reporting of these phenomena" was itself a threat to "the orderly functioning of the protective organs of the body politic," citing "the clogging of channels of communication by irrelevant reports" and "the cultivation of a morbid national psychology in which skillful hostile propaganda could induce hysterical behavior and harmful distrust of duly constituted authority." So it recommended that the national security agencies "strip the Unidentified Flying Objects of the special status they have been given and the aura of mystery they have unfortunately acquired."
Durant's longer minutes, further into the same file, name the two aims of the educational program as "training" and "debunking," and carry a line that gets less attention: "the burden of proof is on the sighter, not the explainer."
The paperwork is in the file too. The 13 March 1953 cover letters to the Secretary of Defense and to Val Peterson at Federal Civil Defense say the agency "does not consider problems arising from sightings of 'flying saucers' primarily its concern."
CIA-UAP-014 shows the same reasoning a month earlier. It is an 18 December 1952 memorandum for the record by H. Marshall Chadwell, the Assistant Director for Scientific Intelligence, after a messenger back from Britain had talked with R. V. Jones. The British committee on flying saucers had concluded the observations "are not enemy aircraft and that none have been over Britain." Then the Yorkshire incident: a demonstration at an RAF field, senior RAF officials invited, and during the show a "perfect flying saucer" seen by those officials and by RAF pilots. The second page of the file lists three "potential dangers" from sightings: delayed identification weakening early warning, mass hysteria an enemy could induce with faked reports, and overloaded emergency communications.
Keeping tabs, not investigating
CIA-UAP-007, dated 17 December 1953, is the Physics and Electronics Division telling the AD/SI what the UFO project amounted to: it had been "confined to maintaining awareness of the activities of other agencies (notably the USAF) in the unidentified flying objects business and to maintenance of files." At ATIC the project was one officer, Capt. Charles A. Hardin, one airman and a secretary.
CIA-UAP-015 fits that picture: Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14 wearing a CIA "Official Record Copy" cover sheet.
CIA-UAP-004 is a 9 January 1958 Contact Division memo about Dr. Leon Davidson, who had been asking about a "space message and its transmitter." The office had told him records on the transmitter were destroyed by the originating agency. The memo admits there had been "many cooks in the kitchen" on this, that the noncommittal and evasive answer they were instructed to give was perhaps the only one possible, and that it was hardly fair to Davidson. It is the one file in the set where the agency writes down that it gave someone an evasive answer on purpose.
CIA-UAP-003 is the History Staff's account of the U-2 and OXCART programs, 1954-1974, by Gregory Pedlow and Donald Welzenbach. Its table of contents lists a section called "U-2s, UFOs, and Operation BLUE BOOK" at page 72. The extracted text on the page does not reach it, so I will not characterize it.
Baku to Tiflis, October 1955, in two versions
Two files describe strange lights seen from a train on the Baku-Tiflis line in the Soviet Union in October 1955, and they do not describe the same thing.
CIA-UAP-006 is an information report with a date of information of 4 October 1955. The source is a 41-year-old advertising executive on a train out of Baku with three other Americans. A companion came in and said, "Did you see that out there? I just saw a flying saucer." On an airfield beside the track, a searchlight was on a triangular object the size of a US jet fighter. It went up in three to seven fast spirals and climbed at about 45 degrees. The source insists "this was no ordinary take-off but a launching procedure more like a missile ejection." Then the steward pulled the blinds, on the MVD man's orders.
CIA-UAP-D020 is an OSI memorandum typed 31 October 1955 summarizing the debriefing of four people, among them Senator Richard Russell, who reported a luminescent "greenish-yellow" object from a train on the same route. It concludes the sighting can "probably be explained as steep climbing aircraft or missiles." CIA-UAP-D021, the analysis beside it, cites a dispatch of 13 October 1955, describes two lights rising vertically and passing over the train, and closes on Project "Y," the saucer-shaped aircraft work at Avro Aircraft Ltd. in Canada.
Whether the two parties were on the same train, the pages do not say, and a triangle with three lights and a greenish-yellow glow are different descriptions.
Puerto Rico, November 1964: the file with numbers in it
This is what Release 05 added. CIA-UAP-D022 is two memoranda, 1 February and 11 February 1965, between the Assistant Director for Special Activities, who ran the OXCART flights, and the Assistant Director for Scientific Intelligence. The memos carry BYEMAN and OXCART control markings.
The 1 February memo does that. The Navy had passed word that the object was identified by the commander at Ramey as a YF-12A. The OXCART office writes that it thinks it has "finally convinced" the Office of Naval Intelligence that the object was "in fact not YF-12A or similar category Lockheed Aircraft," and asks OSI to evaluate the Navy's original radar film.
The 11 February reply, signed by Donald Chamberlain as AD/SI, gives the analysis. On 19 November 1964 a Navy F-8 pilot saw an object "delta-shaped, about the size of a jet fighter" and estimated it above Mach 3. The AN/SPS-49 radar on the guided missile destroyer USS Gyatt tracked it at about 3,800 knots. Chamberlain writes that missile tests were scheduled at the Atlantic Fleet Weapons Range that period, that the range would be an attractive reconnaissance target, and that the Gyatt was within MiG-21 range of Cuba, while adding there was no evidence at hand of MiG-21 reconnaissance activity from Cuba. The finding, per the page summary: conceivably tied to foreign intelligence gathering, with domestic experimental aircraft ruled out.
CIA-UAP-D023 is the briefing note built from that for Walter Elder in the Director's office. It adds that the Gyatt held the contact for 21 minutes, and that on 24 November the range again held a high-speed, high-altitude target which pulled away from a Crusader flying at Mach .99 at 45,000 feet. This is the one CIA file where the agency's own people did the sensor analysis, and they landed on somebody else's aircraft, with the somebody not established.
Foreign collection: Hungary, the Himalayas, Harare
The rest is what sources abroad reported, filed as unevaluated information.
CIA-UAP-013 and CIA-UAP-018 share report number 00-B-93674, from a naturalized US citizen of Hungarian extraction with nieces in Budapest. A letter received in November 1955 said "the so-called flying saucers (rockets) for several weeks kept the people in a nervous state," with a speed of 12 thousand kilometers per hour estimated. CIA-UAP-009 is a 1957 report on objects over Budapest; its page carries only the summary.
CIA-UAP-016 is a 1968 report tabulating seven sightings of bright objects over south Ladakh, northeast Nepal, north Sikkim and western Bhutan between 19 February and 25 March 1968.
CIA-UAP-017 is the newest item, a report distributed 3 July 2008 that the archive flags as never before released. Its addressees start with the White House Situation Room. An object was observed over Harare International Airport on the afternoon of 2 July 2008, "possibly by both radar and optical means," disc-like with a hollow center and rotating lights underneath, which shifted colors before it climbed out of view. People aware of the incident argued over whether it was an advanced reconnaissance device of a foreign government or something extraterrestrial. Per the subject line, the result was a decision to place part of the Zimbabwean state on high alert.
The Soviet science files
CIA-UAP-010, from August 1967, is a US astrophysicist's notes from a trip through Soviet observatories. At Alma Ata the director, G. M. Idlis, had read Menzel's book and considered the matter closed, then after hearing about McDonald's study allowed it was "clearly still an open question." The general finding was that the USSR had no official treatment of the subject.
CIA-UAP-012, a 10 November 1976 Domestic Collection Division report, is mostly about Aeroflot crew fatigue. "UFO Phenomena" appears in the subject line, and the summary has a radiation biologist, Inal Georgiyevich Akoyev, explaining the flashes Aeroflot pilots see at night as phosphenes from cosmic ray particles. CIA-UAP-008, from 1972, covers a speculative Kardashev and Sakharov paper on charged mass collapsing in space, read at Yerevan in September 1971.
CIA-UAP-011 and CIA-UAP-D001 are the Sary Shagan report; the extracted text on both pages carries the same subject line and the same November 1972 to November 1973 date range. A former Soviet citizen described the weapons testing range and, in paragraph 14, a bright green circular mass seen one evening in late summer 1973 at Site 7. Within 10 to 15 seconds the circle widened, several green concentric circles formed around it, the color faded within minutes, and there was no sound. The source had no opinion on what it was.
CIA-UAP-005 is earlier and odder: a 31 July 1950 information report from Santiago passing along a German-language magazine article that argued the discs were a new aircraft using rotating cylinders or gas turbines to manage the boundary layer.
An outside opinion, filed by its subject
CIA-UAP-019 is a 1971 Australian Department of Defence paper on the UFO problem, released by the National Archives of Australia and included in the CIA set. It says an unnamed agency assisting ATIC in 1948, with rocket, nuclear and intelligence experts, "was almost certainly the CIA," studying reports "in an effort to gather design data on interplanetary spaceships." An Australian analyst's guess about the CIA, sitting in the CIA's own release without comment.
Reading the 23 together
The CIA's paper on this subject is mostly other people's sightings, one panel that found no physical threat and worried about the reporting, and status memos confirming the agency kept files rather than investigators. The Puerto Rico memoranda are the exception, and even there the analysts' best guess was foreign hardware. The CIA UAP files topic page collects all 23. The FBI UAP files topic page sits alongside it; the Bureau's material is domestic and complaint-driven where the CIA's is foreign and procedural.