Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base

Chapter Four: The Seeds of a Conspiracy

As soon as the U-2s started flying out of Area 51, reports of UFO sightings by commercial airline pilots and air traffic controllers began to inundate CIA headquarters. Later painted black to blend in with the sky, the U-2s at that time were silver, which meant their long, shiny wings reflected light down from the upper atmosphere in a way that led citizens all over California, Nevada, and Utah to think the planes were UFOs. The altitude of the U-2 alone was enough to bewilder people. Commercial airplanes flew at between ten thousand and twenty thousand feet in the mid-1950s, whereas the U-2 flew at around seventy thousand feet. Then there was the radical shape of the airplane to consider. Its wings were nearly twice as long as the fuselage, which made the U-2 look like a fiery flying cross.

In 1955 the UFO phenomenon sweeping America was seven years old. The modern-day UFO craze officially began on June 24, 1947, when a search-and-rescue pilot named Kenneth Arnold spotted nine flying discs speeding over Washington State while he was out searching for a downed airplane. Approximately two weeks later, the crash at Roswell occurred. By the end of the month, more than 850 UFO sightings had been reported in the news media. Rumors of flying saucers were sweeping the nation, and public anxiety was mounting; Americans demanded answers from the military.

According to a CIA study on UFOs, declassified in 1997, the Air Force had originally been running two programs. One was covert, initially called Project Saucer and later called Project Sign; another was an overt Air Force public relations campaign called Project Grudge. The point of Project Grudge was to “persuade the public that UFOs constituted nothing unusual or extraordinary,” and to do this, Air Force officials went on TV and radio dismissing UFO reports.

Sightings were attributed to planets, meteors, even “large hailstones,” Air Force officials said, categorically denying that UFOs were anything nefarious or out of this world. But their efforts did very little to appease the public. With the nuclear arms race in full swing, the idea that the world could come to an end in nuclear holocaust had tipped the psychological scales for many Americans, giving way to public discussion about Armageddon and the End of Times. In 1951, Hollywood released the film The Day the Earth Stood Still, about aliens preparing to destroy Earth. Two years later, The War of the Worlds was made into a movie and won an Academy Award. Even the famous psychiatrist Carl Jung got into the act, publishing a book that said UFOs were individual mirrors of a collective anxiety the world was having about nuclear annihilation. Sightings continued and so did intense interest by both the Air Force and the CIA.

At Area 51, the reality that the U-2 was repeatedly being mistaken for a UFO was not something analysts welcomed, but it was something they were forced to address. The general feeling at the Agency was that CIA officers had more important things to do than handle the public hysteria about strange objects in the sky. Dealing with UFO reports, the CIA felt, was more appropriately suited for pencil pushers over at the Air Force. According to declassified documents, the CIA did open up a clandestine UFO data-collecting department, albeit begrudgingly. Seeing as the CIA could easily clear its own analysts to handle information on the U-2, this made sense. This attitude, that CIA officers were above plebeian affairs such as UFO sightings, was endemic at the Agency and trickled down from the top. CIA director Allen Dulles was an elitist at heart, an old-school spy brought up in the Office of Strategic Services, the World War II espionage division of the Army. Dulles preferred gentlemen spy craft and disliked technology in general, which was why he’d delegated control of the U-2 spy plane to Richard Bissell in the first place. As for the UFO problems, Dulles assigned that job to a former OSS colleague named Todos M. Odarenko. The UFO division was placed inside the physics office, which Odarenko ran. Almost immediately Odarenko “sought to have his division relieved of the responsibility for monitoring UFO reports,” according to a CIA monograph declassified in 1997. And yet the significance of UFOs to the CIA could not have had a higher national security concern.

The case file regarding unidentified flying objects that Allen Dulles had inherited from the Agency’s previous director, General Walter Bedell Smith, was, and remains, one of the most top secret files in CIA history. Because it has yet to be declassified, there is no way of knowing how much information Bedell Smith shared with his successor. But Bedell Smith himself would more likely than not have had a need-to-know about the Army intelligence’s blackest programs, and that would have included the flying disc retrieved at Roswell. When the crash occurred, in July of 1947, Bedell Smith was the ambassador to the Soviet Union. During the search for the Horten brothers under the program known as Operation Harass, Bedell Smith was serving as commander of the First Army at Governors Island, New York — a locale from which Project Paperclip scientists were monitored, evaluated, and assigned research and engineeering jobs. And when the crash remains left Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio to be shipped out to the desert in Nevada, Bedell Smith was the director of the CIA. The degree of need-to-know access he had regarding secret parallel programs set up there remains one of the great riddles of Area 51.

Walter Bedell Smith served as director of Central Intelligence from 1950 to 1953, and there were few men more trusted by President Harry Truman and five-star general of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower. Years earlier, when General Eisenhower had been serving as Supreme Allied Commander of Europe during World War II, Bedell Smith was his chief of staff. A handful of Smith’s closest colleagues affectionately called him Beetle, but most men were intimidated by the person privately referred to as Eisenhower’s “hatchet man.” So forceful was Bedell Smith that when George S. Patton needed discipline, the task fell on Bedell Smith’s shoulders. When the Nazis surrendered to the Allied Forces, it was Bedell Smith who was in charge of writing up acceptable terms.

From the earliest days of the Cold War, General Walter Bedell Smith fought the Russians from America’s innermost circle of power. He had served as President Truman’s ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1946 to 1948, a position that uniquely qualified him to be the second director of the CIA. Intelligence on the Soviet Union was the CIA’s primary concern in the early days of the Cold War, and there was nothing the U.S. government knew regarding what the Russians were up to that Bedell Smith did not have access to. The conundrum for Smith when he took over the role of director of Central Intelligence on August 21, 1950, was that very few people at the CIA had a need-toknow what the general now knew regarding unidentified flying objects. The record that has been declassified thus far suggests that Bedell Smith demanded that all his employees accept what his personal experiences with the Russians and “UFOs” had taught him: the Communists were evil, and this idea that UFOs were coming from other planets was nothing but the fantasy of panicked, paranoid minds. General Smith summarily rejected the idea that UFOs were anything out of this world and he spearheaded CIA policy accordingly. “Preposterous,” he wrote in a memo in 1952. Unlike Dulles, Bedell Smith personally oversaw the national security implications regarding UFOs at the CIA.

To a rationalist like General Smith, “Strange things in the sky [have] been recorded for hundreds of years,” which is true — unidentified flying objects are at least as old as the Bible. In certain translations of the Old Testament, a reference to “Ezekiel’s wheel” describes a saucerlike vehicle streaking across the skies. During the Middle Ages, flying discs appeared in many different forms of art, such as in paintings and mosaics. In British ink prints from 1783, favored examples among ufologists, two of the king’s men stand on the terrace of Windsor Castle in London observing small saucers flying in the background; researchers have not been able to identify what they might have referenced. Smith could offer no “obvious… single explanation for a majority of the things seen” in the sky and cited foo fighters as an example, the “unexplained phenomena sighted by aircraft pilots during World War II.” These, Smith explained, were “balls of light… similar to St. Elmo’s fire.”

Like the president’s science adviser Vannevar Bush, CIA director Walter Bedell Smith was primarily concerned about the government’s ability to maintain control. Toward this end, he saw the CIA as having to take decisive action regarding citizen hysteria over UFOs. During Bedell Smith’s tenure, and according to declassified documents, it was the position of the CIA that a nefarious plan was in the Soviet pipeline. It had happened once already, at Roswell. Fortunately, in that instance the Joint Chiefs had been able to cover up the truth with a weather balloon story. But a black propaganda attack could happen again, a grand UFO hoax aimed at paralyzing the nation’s early airdefense warning system, which would then make the United States vulnerable to an actual Soviet air attack. “Mass receipt of low-grade reports which tend to overload channels of communication quite irrelevant to hostile objects might some day appear” as real, Smith ominously warned the National Security Council. The unending UFO sightings preoccupying the nation were becoming like the boy who cried wolf, the CIA director cautioned.

To work on the problem of UFO hysteria, in 1952 Bedell Smith convened a CIA group called the Psychological Strategy Board and gave them the job of putting together recommendations about “problems connected with unidentified flying objects” for the National Security Council — the highest-ranking national security policy makers in the United States. Bedell Smith’s Psychological Strategy Board panel determined that the American public was far too sensitive to “hysterical mass behavior” for the good of the nation. Furthermore, the board said, the public’s susceptibility to UFO belief was a national security threat, one that was increasing by the year. From a psychological standpoint, the public’s gullibility would likely prove “harmful to constituted authority,” meaning the central government might not hold. Any forthcoming UFO hoax by Stalin could engender the same kind of pandemonium that followed the radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds.

Bedell Smith’s CIA told the National Security Council that for this reason, the flying saucer scare needed to be discredited. According to CIA documents declassified in 1993, the Agency proposed a vast “debunking” campaign to reduce the public’s interest in flying saucers. The only way of countering what Bedell Smith was certain was the Russians’ “clever hostile propaganda” was for the CIA to take covert action of its own. The Agency suggested that an educational campaign be put in place, one that would co-opt elements of the American “mass media such as television, motion pictures, and popular articles.” The CIA also suggested getting advertising executives, business clubs, and “even the Disney Corporation [involved] to get the message across.” One plan was to present actual UFO case histories on television and then prove them wrong. “As in the case of conjuring tricks,” members of the panel suggested, “the debunking would result in reduction in public interest in flying saucers,” in the same way that those who believe in magic become disillusioned when the magician’s trick is revealed.

What action was actually taken by the CIA remains classified as of 2011, but one unforeseen problem that Bedell Smith’s CIA encountered was an American press wholly uninterested in going along with the wishes of the CIA. The media had an agenda of its own. UFO stories sold papers, and in the spring of 1952, the publishers of Life magazine were getting ready to go to press with a major scoop about UFOs. Reporters for the magazine had learned that the Air Force had been keeping top secret files on flying saucers while insisting to the public it was doing no such thing. It was a big story, likely to sell out copies of the magazine. One week before press time, the Air Force got wind of Life’s story. In a move meant to deflate the magnitude of the magazine’s revelation, the Air Force decided to reverse its five-year position of denying that it had been actively investigating flying discs and to attend, of all things, a UFO convention in Los Angeles, California.

To understand what a radical about-face this was for the Air Force requires an understanding of what the Air Force had been doing for the past five years since it had began the simultaneous and contradictory campaigns Project Sign (to investigate Air Force UFO concerns) and Project Grudge (the public relations campaign intended to convey to the nation that the Air Force had no UFO concerns). Of the 850 UFO sightings reported in the news media the first month of the UFO craze, in July of 1947, at least 150 of the sightings had concerned military intelligence officials to such a degree that they were written up and sent for analysis to officers with the Technical Intelligence Division of the Air Force at Wright Field. Six months later, in January of 1948, General Nathan Twining, head of the Air Force Technical Service Command, established Project Sign; originally called Project Saucer, it was the first in a number of covert UFO research groups created inside the Air Force. For Project Sign, the Air Force assigned hundreds of its staff to the job of collecting, going over, and analyzing details from thousands of UFO sightings, all the while denying they were doing any such thing.

In Air Force circles, behind the scenes, officials were acutely aware that “the very existence of Air Force official interest” fanned the flames of UFO hysteria, and so the public relations program Project Grudge needed to officially end. On December 27, 1949, the Air Force publicly announced that it saw no reason to continue its UFO investigations and was terminating the project. Meanwhile, the covert UFO study programs steamed ahead. In 1952, the Air Force opened up yet another, even more secret UFO organization, this one called Project Blue Book. That the Air Force clearly kept from the public what it was actually doing with UFO study would later become a major point of contention for ufologists who believed UFOs were from out of this world.

The UFOs being reported seemed to have no end. In addition to the flying disc sightings, bright, greenish-colored lights in the sky were also reported by a growing number of citizens. This was particularly concerning for the Air Force because many of these sightings were in New Mexico near sensitive military facilities such as Los Alamos, Sandia, and White Sands. Witnesses to these “green balls of light,” which had been reported since the late 1940s, included credible scientists and astronomers. These sightings were put into an Air Force category known as Green Fireballs. In 1949, the Geophysics Research Division of the Air Force initiated Project Twinkle specifically to investigate these various light-related phenomena. Observation posts were set up at Air Force bases around the country where physicists made electromagnetic-frequency measurements using Signal Corps engineering laboratory equipment. In secret, air traffic control operators across the nation were given 35-millimeter cameras called vidoons and asked by the Air Force to photograph anything unusual.

All work was performed under top secret security protocols with the caveat that under no circumstances was the public to know that the Air Force was investigating UFOs. As the files for Project Twinkle and Project Blue Book got fatter by the month, Air Force officials repeatedly told curious members of Congress that no such files existed.

For Air Force investigators, the UFO explanations trickled in. One group of scientists assigned to Holloman Air Force Base, located on the White Sands Missile Range and home to the Paperclip scientists, determined many of the sightings were observations of V-2 rocket contrails. Other sightings were determined to be shooting stars, cosmic rays, and planets visible in the sky. Another study group concluded that some responsibility fell on birds, most commonly “flocks of seagulls or geese.” But the numbers of sightings were overwhelming. By 1951, the Air Force had secretly investigated between 800 and 1,000 UFO sightings across the nation, according to a CIA Studies in Intelligence report on UFOs declassified in 1997. By 1952, that number rose to 1,900. The efforts were stunning. Datacollection officers met with hundreds of citizens, all of whom were told not to disclose that the Air Force had met with them and asked to sign inadvertent-nondisclosure forms. Classified for decades, these investigations have resulted in over thirty-seven cubic feet of case files — approximately 74,000 pages. But for every one or two hundred sightings that could be explained, there were always a few that could not be explained — certainly not by Air Force data-collection supervisors who had a very limited need-to-know. Seeds of suspicion were being sown among these Air Force investigators and in some cases among their superiors, a number of whom would later famously leave government service to go join the efforts of the ufologists on the other side of the aisle.

Ultimately, the Air Force concluded for the National Security Council that “almost all sightings stemmed from one or more of three causes: mass hysteria and hallucination; misinterpretation of known objects; or hoax.” The sightings that couldn’t be explained this way went up the chain of command, where they were interpreted by a few individuals who had been cleared with a need-to-know. In the mid1950s, this included the elite group over at the CIA working under Todos Odarenko, analysts responsible for matching the CIA’s U-2 flights with Air Force unknowns. But no matter how many sightings were explained as benign, there was still the unexplained mother of all unidentified flying objects — the nefarious crashed craft from Roswell. Everything about that flying disc had to remain hidden from absolutely everyone but a select few. If Americans found out about it, or about what the government had been doing in response, there would be outrage.

CIA analysts and Air Force personnel working together on the UFO problem, one concern was made clear: the public was not to learn about the government’s obsession with UFOs. These orders came from the top. Why exactly this was the case, the rank and file did not have a need-to-know. Underlings simply followed orders, which was why two Air Force officials from Project Blue Book, Colonel Kirkland and Lieutenant E. J. Ruppelt, were sent to sit on a panel at a UFO convention in California, side by side with men who were convinced UFOs were from outer space. These men, some of the nation’s leading ufologists, were part of a group called the Civilian Saucer Investigations Organization of Los Angeles.

On April 2, 1952, just one week before the Life magazine UFO story hit the newsstands, Kirkland and Ruppelt sat in a conference hall at the Mayfair Hotel with the leading UFO hunters of the day. It was a huge media event, with people from Time, Life, the Los Angeles Mirror, and Columbia Pictures in attendance. The Air Force officials placated the ufologists by saying that they too were concerned about UFOs and offering to “bring them into the loop.” In return, the Air Force said, they would “throw” Civilian Saucer Investigations certain “cases that might be of interest” to the organization for their review. When the scientists pressed for security clearances so they could access top secret data, the Air Force began to squirm. “I see no reason at all why we can’t work together,” Colonel Kirkland said, deflecting the question. “I think it would be very foolish if we didn’t.” Ruppelt offered up an Air Force perk: CSI members could call the military collect.

On April 7, 1952, Life magazine published its cover story titled “There Is a Case for Interplanetary Saucers.” The sixteen-page feature article began with the exclusive Air Force reveal. Above the byline, it read “The Air Force is now ready to concede that many saucer and fireball sightings still defy explanation; here LIFE offers some scientific evidence that there is a real case for interplanetary saucers.” The article made its case well, with the takeaway being that UFOs really could be from out of this world. But there was a second reason the Air Force participated in the UFO convention. The CIA’s Psychological Strategy Board had urged the National Security Council to “monitor private UFO groups [such] as the Civilian Flying Saucer Investigators in Los Angeles,” and because of this, the Air Force officers had been placed at the UFO convention in Los Angeles through backdoor recommendations at the CIA.

The CIA was particularly interested in one specific individual on the Civilian Saucer Investigations panel, and that was a German Paperclip scientist named Dr. Walther Riedel. Seated front and center at the UFO conference at the Mayfair Hotel, Dr. Riedel was a study in contradiction. When Riedel smiled, a close look revealed that he had fake front teeth — his own had been knocked out in 1945 at the Stettin Gestapo prison in Germany. Riedel had been a prisoner there for several weeks with fellow Peenemьnde rocket scientist Wernher Von Braun, and during the war, Riedel had served as the chief of Hitler’s V2 missile-design office. The American soldiers guarding Riedel at the Stettin Gestapo prison roughed him up after Army intelligence agents passed along information stating that in addition to designing the V-2, Dr. Riedel had been working on Hitler’s bacteria bomb. It was in the harsh interrogation that followed that Riedel lost his front teeth.

At the end of the war, Riedel, like Wernher Von Braun, desperately wanted to be hired by the U.S. military so he could work on rocket programs in the United States. Germany no longer had a military, let alone a rocket research program, which meant Riedel was out of a job. The Russians were known to hate the Germans; they treated their pillaged scientists like slave laborers. An offer from the Americans was the best game in town, even if their soldiers had broken your teeth first.

In January of 1947, Dr. Riedel became a Paperclip. His past work in chemical rockets and bacteria bombs was whitewashed in the name of science. The caveat for Riedel’s prosperous new life, as opposed to his possible prosecution at Nuremberg, was that he would comply with what the U.S. military asked of him. But Riedel’s rogue UFO-promoting behavior only a few years later illustrates that in certain situations, the Paperclips had the upper hand. Here was Riedel at the saucer convention, stirring up UFO hysteria. He participated in the Life magazine article and was quoted saying that he was “completely convinced that [UFOs] have an out-of-world basis.” If that did not engender what CIA director Bedell Smith called hysterical thinking, what would? Riedel was not just any old rocket scientist going on the record with America’s most popular magazine. When asked about his profession, he told Life magazine that he was “engaged in secret work for the U.S.”

What is publicly known about Dr. Riedel’s American career is that he had begun at Fort Bliss, in Texas, as part of the V-2 rocket team, but after only a few years he was mysteriously traded by the government to work as an engineer for North American Aviation. There were rumors of “problems” with other Paperclip scientists at White Sands Missile Range. Once Riedel was in the private sector, he had a considerably longer leash, given that the government was not signing his paycheck anymore. Clearly he was valuable to North American Aviation: the company made him director of rocket-engine research. But from the moment he left government service, Riedel was a serious thorn in the CIA’s side. A year after the UFO conference, the CIA was still keeping close tabs on Dr. Riedel. In early 1953, the Agency trailed Riedel to one of his lectures in Los Angeles. There, they were shocked to learn that the Paperclip scientist and his UFO-minded colleagues were “going to execute a planned ‘hoax’ over the Los Angeles area in order to test the reaction and reliability of the public in general to unusual aerial phenomena.” Mention of a planned hoax went up the chain of command at the CIA and set off alarms in its upper echelons. In a secret memo dated February 9, 1953, declassified in 1993, the CIA’s director of the Office of Scientific Intelligence expressed outrage over the company Riedel now kept. But because he was no longer a Paperclip, there was little the CIA could do except follow his moves and those of the men he associated with.

The CIA had also been trailing a colleague of Riedel named George P. Sutton, a fellow North American Aviation rocket scientist and ufologist. When Sutton gave a lecture entitled “Rockets Behind the Iron Curtain,” the CIA was shocked to learn that the flying saucer group seemed to know more about UFO sightings inside the Soviet Union than the entire team of CIA agents who had been tasked with monitoring that same information.

Ever since Bedell Smith had taken office in 1950, he’d expressed frustration over how little information the CIA was able to get on UFO reports inside Russia. Joseph Stalin, it appeared, kept all information about UFOs out of the press. Between 1947 and 1952, CIA analysts monitoring the Soviet press found only one single mention of UFOs, in an editorial column that briefly referred to UFOs in the United States. So how did Riedel’s group know more about Soviet UFO reports than the CIA knew?

Sufficiently concerned, the CIA instructed Riedel’s Paperclip handlers to get him in line. His handler “suggested politely and perhaps indirectly to Dr. Riedel that he disassociate himself from official membership on CSI.” But the obstinate scientist refused to cease and desist. What the consequences were for Riedel remains unclear. Whether or not Riedel and his fellow ufologist pulled off their hoax and how he and his colleagues were able to so freely gather information about Soviet UFOs and Soviet rockets behind the Iron Curtain is secreted away in Riedel’s Project Paperclip file, most of which remains classified, even after more than fifty years.

By 1957, according to the CIA monograph “CIA’s Role in the Study of UFOs,” the U-2s accounted for more than half of all UFO sightings reported in the continental United States. Odarenko had been unsuccessful in his bid to be “relieved” of his UFO responsibilities and instead got to work creating CIA policy regarding UFOs. He sent a secret memo to the director of the Office of Scientific Intelligence outlining how he believed the Agency should handle reports of UFOs:

Keep current files on UFOs: “maintain current knowledge of sightings of unidentified flying objects.”

Deny that the CIA kept current files about UFOs by stating that “the project [was] inactive.”

Divide the explainable UFOs, meaning the U-2 flights, from the inexplicable UFOs: “segregate references to recognizable and explainable phenomena from those which come under the definition of ‘unidentified flying objects.’”

The Agency’s concerted effort to conceal from Congress and the public its interest in UFOs would, in coming decades, open up a Pandora’s box and cause credibility issues for the CIA. “The concealment of CIA interest [in UFOs] contributed greatly to later charges of a CIA conspiracy and cover-up,” wrote Gerald K. Haines, the historian for the National Reconnaissance Office and someone who is often introduced as the CIA’s expert on the matter. But to get the UFO monkey off his back, Allen Dulles began a “psychological warfare” campaign of his own. When letters came in from concerned citizens about the sightings, the CIA’s policy was to ignore them. When letters came in from UFO groups, the CIA’s policy was to monitor the individuals in the group. When letters came in from congressmen or senators, such as the one from Ohio congressman Gordon Scherer in September of 1955, the CIA’s policy was to have Director Dulles write a polite note explaining that UFOs were a law enforcement problem and the CIA was specifically barred from enforcing the law. The notes certainly portray Allen Dulles as an arrogant public servant, but they are prized by UFO collectors, who say they prove the CIA’s sinister coverup of extraterrestrial UFOs. Regardless of alleged CIA policy, the public’s fascination with UFOs proved more formidable than the CIA had ever bargained for; average citizens simply could not get enough information about mysterious objects streaking across the skies. And the more information they were given, the more they wanted to know and the more questions they asked. It didn’t take long for the public to become convinced that the CIA was covering something up, which, of course, it was.