CIA starts new year with a clean slate, claims responsibility for UFO sightings in 1950s

The Central Intelligence Agency joined Twitter this year and has gone viral several times with its cheeky remarks and funny comments. The UFO admission was a part of its “Best of 2014” list that highlighted some of its most read reports.

The report referenced, titled “The CIA and the U-2 Program, 1954-1974,” is from 1998 and links the agency’s involvement in the development of the U-2 spy plane to UFO sightings.

“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 report stated.

In the mid-1950s, most commercial airliners flew between 10,000 and 20,000 feet and military aircraft such as B-47s and B57s flew below 40,000 feet, the New York Post pointed out. The report said that popular consensus was that no manned flight could be possible about 60,000 feet, making the testing of the U-2s that much more foreign.

“But, if a U-2 was airborne in the vicinity of the airliner at the same time, its horizon from an altitude of 60,000 feet was considerably more distant, and, being so high in the sky, its silver wings would catch and reflect the rays of the sun and appear to the airliner pilot, 40,000 feet below, to be fiery objects,” the report said.

“Consequently, once U-2s started flying at altitudes above 60,000 feet, air-traffic controllers began receiving increasing numbers of UFO reports.”

All of these reports led to creation of Operation Blue Book, the Post said. Blue Book investigators had to check with the C.I.A. to compare supposed sightings to the U-2 flight logs.

The tweeted 1998 report found that the C.I.A. tests accounted for more than half of all UFO reports during the late 1950s and most of the 1960s.